Making Better Choices: How to Improve Ethical Choice Systems in Games

1 p.m | Friday, October 29

MUC 215 | Morris University Center

While many games want to force the player to make hard decisions, they oftentimes only do this by creating characters and situations which are tragedies. There is no good choice to make, so make the choice that aligns with the character you like the most or the choice that gives the best rewards. This situation stems from games assuming the same ethical framework, utilitarianism. I'm going to give a critique of these design decisions, outlining the way in which they fail to provide robust ethical dilemmas, and thus fail to truly challenge players morally. I will then be outlining alternative design systems that would allow for more robust moral systems in games and describe how spending time thinking about how we design our choice systems has implications for the ways in which video games can challenge us as human beings and not just players.