Ethics and Video Games Podcast

There are over 50 million players over the age of 50 in the USA alone and those numbers will only continue to grow for an activity that’s too often viewed as “kids’ stuff”.  How and when do older players engage with online gaming communities?  Do designers need to be concerned about monetizing techniques that might take advantage of vulnerable older adults?  What can societies do to help older games access games that would be fun and beneficial for them?  How can games themselves be more inclusive for older players? 

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Bob De Schutter (MFA, PhD) is an award-winn...

Games are particularly fertile grounds for extremist recruitment.  Why is that?  What’s special about games and gaming culture that might make them attractive spaces for recruitment?  How does extremist recruitment work in games?  What is being done about it right now?  And what can be done to help prevent the spread of extremism through games?

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Rachel Kowert, Ph.D is a research psychologist and the Research Director of Take This. She is a world-renowned researcher on the uses and effects of digital games, including their impact on physical, social, and psychological well-being. An award-w...

When game companies simulate cultures in their games they usually focus on the tropes that their intended audiences have about those cultures and then design their game around those tropes.  Is there anything wrong with that?  If so, what? What can game designers do to present cultures – present and past – more respectfully?

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Andrei Zanescu is a newly minted Doctor of Communication at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada. His research focuses on resonance and its uses for (re)producing culture, in blockbuster games both digital and analog, as well as the overlap between blockbuster films and gam...

Gaming and game development work differently for the developed global north than the developing global south.  What are those differences?  How does the global south play and pay differently?  Why is it so hard to start a game development company in the global south?  How can the gaming world better take these things into consideration in order to be more inclusive to  the global south?

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Aditya Deshbandhu is Lecturer of Communications, Digital Media Sociology at the University of Exeter. A researcher of video game studies, new media, and the digital divide, Aditya examines how people...

In a couple of recent episodes guests have mentioned concerns about battle passes.  So, in this episode we decided to explore how they work, how they differ from traditional  subscription models or microtransactions, why they’re so popular today with game companies, and whether they raise any serious ethical concerns.

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Daniel Joseph is a Senior Lecturer of Digital Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University where he researches internet infrastructure, platforms, apps, and games. He’s also written for a number of publications, including Briarpatch Magazine, Motherboard, and Real Life Magazine.  Follow Daniel on Twitter at @DanjoKaz...

What can college esport teams do to blunt harassment against female players and make esports more inclusive?  Are they in a unique position to help solve these problems in esports?  We chat with representatives from Kean University about their attempts to make their own esport teams more inclusive to women.

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Theresa Lee is a returning student in her 40’s, who majors in Environmental science and Drones, and is the captain of the Hearthstone team. 

Joseph Sarnoski is Kean University's eSports program director. In addition to gaming, Joe is a professor of Environmental and S...

How can ads for video games and for stuff in games be deceptive or manipulative?  What do  they need to consider when targeting kids?  What sort of guidance do they get from governments or their own industry groups?  We chat with Dr. Celia Pontin, former UK advertising regulator specializing in video games.

In this episode we explore some of the ethical issues related to kinks in video games – mostly adult ones.  How can games allow us to explore kinks?  What are some ethical pitfalls designers should consider?  How do issues like representation and consent fit in? 

We’ve rarely discussed the specific category of adult games on this podcast.  So, we do so here and now and honestly, with a bit more speculation and off-the-cuff “let’s try this idea out and see if it sticks” mentality.  We explore whether adult games should be treated differently than other types of pornography, whether age-gating is actually desirable, and a bunch of other issues. 

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Fae Daunt is an Australian academic, researcher, and developer. Turning their experience in web into an endless curiosity for development and design, they have married their cultural experiences and academi...

What should we think about when we bring sex and intimacy into video games?  In this episode, we explore issues of player sexuality, in-game intimacy, representations of consent, and how video games can take chances and explore sexuality responsibly.

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Our guest for this episode are:

Zhia Zariko is a media and communication expat into games design and development. Originally studying written communication, she did an elective in games, aesthetics and culture and never looked back. She now holds a Masters on Let's Play videos from RMIT, Australia, and has been teaching games d...

How do players morally engage with games?  What can user experience research and moral psychology tell us about how players experience and think about ethical decisions in games?  We chat with philosopher Paul Formosa and Game Designer Malcolm Ryan about their collaborative ongoing research exploring these questions.

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Our guest for this episode are:

Paul Formosa is a Professor of Philosophy, Head of the Department of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Paul has published widely on topics in moral and political ph...

Games are supposed to be fun and playing in a historical setting or replaying historical events can be really fun.  But when does the use of history become morally problematic by misrepresenting that history, leaving out alternative perspectives, or failing to communicate to the player when the game is or is not meant to be historically accurate?    

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Our guest for this episode is Dr. Bram De Ridder - a postdoctoral researcher in applied history at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He has performed extensive research into the topics of public and applied history, and has...

The monsters we see in video games are usually antagonists that we destroy without remorse.  But what is a monster and are there ethical questions that arise in relation to how they’re represented?  In what ways can monsters utilize racist and sexist tropes in harmful ways?  Can we treat a type of monsters as a race of pure evil?  And is there anything that monsters might do that is beyond the pale?  We chat with Dom Ford about Monster Ethics!

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Our guest for this episode is Dom Ford - a freshly-minted PhD from the IT...

How would you make a game about a topic as important, complex, hard to talk about,, and NOT fun at all as domestic violence against children? We chat with Mathew Staunton about his game in progress on this topic and the ethical and design challenges it faces.

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Our guest for this episode is Mathew Staunton, Ph.D. Originally north Dublin, he is a historian, publisher and printmaker, currently teaching and supervising research in the Printed Image department of the École des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris, France. His main research interests are th...

Toxicity in online gaming is an incredibly complex problem to solve. Teams of moderators often seem hopelessly outmatched by the amount of toxicity and its sometimes ambiguous nature.  But, what if we brought an AI into the game to help us with both toxicity and fraud by bots, which are essentially other AI?  In this episode we look at one company’s attempt to do just that.

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Our guest for this episode is Camille Guillemot who started her career fighting fraud by making gaming a safer place for gamers. She quickly realized that fraud was...

Making money playing games on Twitch or YouTube sounds like a dream come true!  But money never comes without strings attached.  Streamers face pressures to build up their audience, ask for financial support, land and keep sponsors.  It’s hard work and many burn out.  Meanwhile, there’s questions about the ways Twitch and YouTube benefit from their labor.  What are the ethics of making money playing games on Twitch or YouTube?

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Our guest for this episode is Dr Mark R Johnson, a Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the Un...

This is part 2 of our first two-part exploration of predatory monetization.  Our guest, Elena Petrovskaya has been researching player complaints about monetization and has categorized them into 35 different types of potentially predatory monetization techniques – from pay or wait to the use of battle passes to aggressive advertising and dark interface design patterns.  In part 1 we went over all of them.  If you haven’t listened to it yet, I highly recommend going  back and checking it out.  This time, we evaluate.  We ask what is supposed to be predatory in these techniques, which ones we think are not actually problematic...

When it comes to monetization in games, what do players see as misleading, unfair, or aggressive?  Elena Petrovskaya asked this question to over 1000 players and organized their complaints to create a taxonomy of 35 potentially predatory monetization techniques organized under 8 different domains.  There was so much here to talk about, we ended up with our first two-parter episode.  So, in this episode (part 1), we go over each of these monetization tactics from unfair matches to how in-game currency can disguise real prices, to the use of aggressive advertising, and much more.  Then in our next episode (part 2), we’ll explore whethe...

When a player steps into a game, often that game will have a political structure and the player’s choices in that structure may respond to their sense of justice.  That sense of justice can also connect us as groups or factions in games.  Can these factions engage in unethical in-game political action?  Can players in massive multi-player games be considered citizens of those gameworlds in some sense?  If so, can those worlds be tyrannical or benign dictatorships?  Does justice demand giving players in such games democratic representation?

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Our guest for this episode is James "...

Putting blockchain and NFTs into games and marketing that as Play to Earn promises a revolution in gaming that will make money for both game studios and players.  It’s a win-win for everybody! – or is it just hype created by cryptobros to ruin games by turning them into money-making machines?  What is the promise of Play to Earn supposed to be and what ethical concerns does it raise with regards to how it treats both players and developers?

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Our guest for this episode is Dr. Tom Rodgers, a Sociologist and Criminologist working at the Un...

Putting blockchain and NFTs into games and marketing that as Play to Earn promises a revolution in gaming that will make money for both game studios and players.  It’s a win-win for everybody! – or is it just hype created by cryptobros to ruin games by turning them into money-making machines?  What is the promise of Play to Earn supposed to be and what ethical concerns does it raise with regards to how it treats both players and developers?

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Our guest for this episode is Dr. Tom Rodgers, a Sociologist and Criminologist working at the Un...

Most players think that loot boxes (essentially randomized rewards schemes) are a form of gambling, and many are concerned that they’ll bring the same dangers of gambling to gaming.  Some have called for governments to regulate loot boxes in games as they do with other forms of gambling.  What have governments done about this?  Has any of it worked?  Is any of it necessary?

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Our guest for this episode is Leon Y. Xiao, PhD Fellow at the IT University of Copenhagen and a Visiting Scholar at the School of Law of Queen Mary Univer...

Games have been getting more and more gamblified in recent years.  This has occurred both within games and in terms of gambling on esports and game items out of the games themselves.  What is gamblification in video games?  How does it occur?  Where can we expect it to lead?  And should we be concerned about it in the way that we’re concerned as societies about traditional gambling?

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Our guest, Mark R. Johnson, is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on game...

Players, game devs, artists, voice actors, marketing people, and everyone else that works in the game industry - even game design students - sometimes need to talk to someone who understands how the video game universe can be uniquely emotionally taxing and difficult to navigate.  The Games and Online Harassment Hotline was set up two years ago to help! We think they’re an amazing resource for the gaming community in ways that go far beyond what you might expect.

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Our guest is Jae Lin, the Director of the Games and Online Harassment Hotline and...

We’re always interested in the way that video games depict us.  One topic that we think has got too little attention is that of how games depict madness, mental illness, insanity….  We chat about the ways video games approach madness, common gaming tropes about madness and psychiatric institutions.

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Our guest, Stefan Heinrich Simond, is a game studies scholar from Germany. He hosts a weekly podcast on game studies and video game culture, called Studying Pixels. He teaches at Philipps University Marburg and University of Wuppertal and is currently working on his PhD dissertation on madn...

We encounter poverty in lots in games.  We might play in a GTA-“ghetto” or interact with people in a “slum” using common tropes our culture has about the poor.  We might be poor ourselves and set out to level up through the tropes of wealth and power.  Sometimes our real world economic capacity can even be a factor in a game – say, with pay to win gamrs.  In this episode, we look at how poverty is depicted in games and what questions it raises about how we should play and design them.

In esports, players trash talk, fans trash talk – even  commentators trash talk! 

Sometimes trash talk is fun harmless banter, but other times is unsportsmanlike and shows disrespect for the game or other players.  And, of course, trash talk can easily turn into harassment.   What norms do esports have about trash talk and where should we draw the line between morally acceptable and unacceptable trash talk?

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Our guest, Sidney Irwin, is a PhD candidate at the School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences at Central Queensland University. She is currently working on a dissert...

Game development is often a creative collaboration among people with very different skill sets, passions, and worldviews.  What does it mean to treat the people you’re working with in projects like these as a part of a team?  What does it mean to respect one another?  What can be done when interpersonal conflict inevitably arises?

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Our guest, Casey O’Donnell, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. His research examines the creative collaborative work of videogame design and development. This research examines the cultural and collabor...

When we heard that David Churchill hosts an AI competition with the Real Time Strategy game Starcraft, we were instantly fascinated.  We wanted to know what cheating concerns a competition among AIs raises, and also what real world implications arise when training AIs to control strategic military assets in a game.  Dr. Churchill did not disappoint!

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Our guest, David Churchill, is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Memorial University (MUN), in St. John's, Newfoundland Canada.  In 2016 he completed his PhD in Computing Science on Artificial Intelligence for Starcraft, and he’s researching AI and C...

Have you ever considered how gaming and game companies contribute to environmental problems like global climate change?  We haven’t!  At least not until we spoke and were inspired by our guest Paula Escuadra to think about the many ways that game companies and design can help bring about a greener world!

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Our guest, Paula Angela Escuadra, has spent OVER 12 years elevating the power games have to redefine our relationship with failure and create meaning. She leads research for Xbox Game Studios Cloud Publishing, helping developers make great games that foster meaningful communities. She co-f...

Hundreds of millions of players have pirated video games.  Most of them didn’t feel any guilt about it.  Some even felt justified.  But game companies, like virtually all producers of creative products, have told us for decades that piracy is wrong – that it’s theft somewhat similar to stealing physical things.  Are they right?  We’ve teamed-up for this episode with the hosts of the Studying Pixels Podcast to try to shed some light on whether or when pirating video games is morally justified.

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We’re used to the idea of organizations that try to do good as non-profits, but what about for-profit companies – like the great majority of game companies?  Some for-profit companies are choosing to play a positive role in the world and to do so as a certified B-Corporation.  One of these is ustwo games’, best known for their fantastic Monument Valley games.  We chat with ustwo’s Justin Michaels about what it’s like to be a game company dedicated to doing good as a B-corp.

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Our guest, Justin Michaels, is the COO of ustwo games...

It’s hard to imagine games without AI, but having AI in games also raises a host of ethical questions involving their use by players and game companies.  We explore the possible use of AI for cheating and manipulation, the importance of transparency, and responsibilities of AI’s programmers.

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Our guest, Gillian Smith, directs the Interactive Media & Game Development program at Worcester (Wooster) Polytechnic Institute, where she is an associate professor of computer science. Dr. Smith's research interests are in computational creativity, game design, computer science education, and the intersection of traditional crafts and compu...

Game companies have lawyers to tell them how to operate within the law.  They have accountants and data analysts to tell them what is and is not profitable.  But it’s very rare for them to consult with an ethicist about the morality of their games or operations.  Well, we think that’s unfortunate and shortsighted.  What are ethicists and how can they help video game companies?

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Our guest, Dr Catherine Flick, is a Reader in Computing and Social Responsibility at DeMontfort University in Leicester (Lester), UK, and a Visiting Fellow at Staffordshire University. Her spec...

Video games have been accused of being addictive and making players more violent and sexist.  Studies have been cited that confirm these claims.  And politicians suggesting laws limiting what video games can do have referenced the “scientific consensus” on these issues. But how does good research on these topics actually work and what does it tell us about the connection between games, violence, addiction, and sexism?

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Our guest,Rachel Kowert, Ph.D, is a research psychologist and the Research Director of Take This. She is a world-renowned researcher on the uses and effects of digita...

Someday people may be gods – all powerful entities able to control the physics of virtual worlds and the functionalities of NPCs.  We might even give NPCs free will, a soul, or immortality – who knows what else?  In this episode we have fun thinking about some of the moral choices that would come with being a video game god.

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Our guest, Dr Richard A. Bartle, is Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK. He is best known for having co-written in 1978 the first virtual world, MUD, the progenitor of the $30bn Mas...

We’ve done 40 episodes about ethics and video games and the word “God” or “Religion” never came up.  How do religion and video games connect with one another and what can the religious ethics of Paul Tyllich tell us about how to approach video games?

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Our guest, Benjamin J. Chicka is Lecturer of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Curry College. His work connects classical American pragmatism, process theology, and ground-of-being theology.  Playing as Others: Theology and Ethical Responsibility in Video Games (2021) is his book on how moves toward greater diversity and inclusion in the video game industry can...

There’s lots of research going on about video games.  Some of it involves product testing like VR games or the effectiveness of interfaces.  Some of it looks at the impact of gaming on players for things like violence, sexism, and addiction.  What ethical concerns come into play when doing research like this on live human beings like you and I?

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Ashley ML Guajardo is an associate professor of Entertainment Arts and Engineering at the University of Utah where she teaches game design and games user research. When she isn't researching Twitch streamers or Twitc...

Video game transactions are a highly unusual, perhaps unique, business model.  Our guest Elie Cohen essentially calls it an exploitative scheme where “the house never loses”.  It’s not that they’re always bad, but they easily can be exploitative, wrong, or simply “uncool”.  What can or does make a microtransaction exploitative and what can be done about it?

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Our guest, Ellie Cohen, is a PhD candidate at Princeton University and an Assistant Professor in the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program and Department of Philosophy at the University of Utah.

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There’s deception in Among Us and bluffing in Poker.  But then there are multiplayer games where players you trusted will scam, betray, and backstab you to get ahead.  Few things can be as upsetting in a game as being the victim of such treacherous play.  But what, if anything, is wrong with playing this way?

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