GCAP 2020: Four lenses for designing morally engaging games

Welcome to everyone who has come here from our GCAP talk Four lenses for designing morally engaging games. If you missed the talk, I will post a link to the video when it becomes available. Slides are available on Slideshare:

If you’re interested in diving deeper into these questions, there are a number of resources we can recommend. Details and links are available below. Unfortunately, some of these are hidden behind academic paywalls. We have linked to public versions wherever possible.

First of all there are our own papers:

• Formosa, P., Ryan, M., & Staines, D. (2016). Papers, Please and the systemic approach to engaging ethical expertise in videogames. Ethics and Information Technology, 18(3), 211-225.
• Ryan, M., Staines, D., & Formosa, P. (2017). Focus, sensitivity, judgement, action: Four lenses for designing morally engaging games. Transactions of DiGRA 2 (3), 143-173.
• Staines, D., Consalvo, M., Stangeby, A., & Pedraça, S. (2019). State of play: Video games and moral engagement. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 11(3), 271-288.
• Staines, D., Formosa, P., & Ryan, M. (2019). Morality play: A model for developing games of moral expertise. Games and Culture, 14(4), 410-429.
• Ryan, M., Formosa, P., Howarth, S., & Staines, D. (2019). Measuring morality in videogames research. Ethics and Information Technology, 1-14.

Some longer books that survey the field:

• Sicart, M. (2013). Beyond choices: The design of ethical gameplay. MIT Press.
• Schreier, K. (2010), Designing Games for Ethics: Models, Techniques and Frameworks, IGI Global

For a general easy-to-read introduction to moral psychology:

• Vozzola, E. C. (2014). Moral development: Theory and applications. Routledge.