Fostering Character Education with Games and Interactive Story Generation

Promoting ethical, responsible, and caring behavior in young people is a perennial aim of education. Schools are invited to include moral teaching in every possible curriculum. Efforts have been made to find non-traditional ways of teaching such as games or role play or engaging students in moral dilemmas. However, classroom environments need to consider time constraints, curriculum standards, and differing children’s personalities. Computer systems can offer rich environments that detect and respond to student knowledge gaps, misconceptions, and variable affective states. This chapter presents AEINS, an adaptive narrative-based educational game that helps the teaching of basic ethical virtues to young children to promote character education. The central goal is to engage students in a dynamic narrative environment and to involve them in different moral dilemmas (teaching moments) that use the Socratic method as the predominant pedagogy. The authors argue that AEINS incorporates appropriate game design principles and successfully manages the interaction between the narrative level and the tutoring level to maximize student learning. Moreover, it is able to convey the moral skills to its users, as shown in the evaluation.

The New Backyard

This chapter discusses the significant role that virtual worlds, particularly massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), such as Club Penguin and World of Warcraft, play in the social and moral development of children and adolescents. A central argument of the chapter is that MMOGs and other virtual worlds provide a new backyard within which children and adolescents engage in active social interaction and play out moral dilemmas. It discusses three important areas of development in the context of interactions in MMOGs. First, it explores the process of perspective-taking, which is an important factor in empathy and pro-social behavior. Second, it explores the impact that MMOGs might have on stereotyping behavior and the phenomenon of stereotype threat, a harmful outcome of stereotyping behavior. Finally, it considers the role of moral dilemmas in development and how MMOGs provide unique environments for social and moral problem solving.

War and Play

This chapter argues for a game design ethic for war game production and the development of games that produce a more realistic and conscientious critique of warfare, defined as antiwar and conscientious war games. Given the medium’s preponderance toward narratives and simulations of military conflict, there are surprisingly few works that seriously examine its consequences. This chapter surveys and critiques several existing antiwar and conscientious war games and examines design problems associated with exploring antiwar narratives. It concludes with an exploration of areas in which both new antiwar games can be developed and existing war games can be modified to produce conscientious messages about war. Artists and designers should have a vested interest in producing antiwar games to both enrich the medium and improve society by inspiring audiences to seek alternatives to conflict.

Uganda’s Road to Peace May Run through the River of Forgiveness

While gaming technologies are typically leveraged for entertainment purposes, our experience and aspiration is to use them to encourage engagement with global, politically-sensitive issues. This chapter focuses on our game design concerning the struggle of Uganda, a design that allows players to experience the atrocities and inhumane conditions and, by illuminating such values as peace and justice, helps them more generally to appreciate the moral complexity of a humane intervention. Rather than theoretical constructs to be debated in the abstract, the ethical struggles involved in determining a humane intervention in the game setting are grounded in different Non-Player Characters’ perspectives and operationalized within the underlying game dynamics. Beyond reporting on the designed game, the chapter draws the reader into the struggles of designing such an ethically contentious game.

Power to the People

This chapter defines basic principles of anti-oppression and its ethical implications. Anti-oppression is a framework used in social work and community organizing that broadly challenges power imbalances between different groups of people in society. This chapter positions these principles in the realm of game creation and argue for their use—particularly in the development of social issue games that in one way or another seek to spotlight and challenge social power imbalances. While the chapter outlines some essential theory, it ultimately takes a practice-based perspective to make a case for and support the incorporation of anti-oppressive principles in game design and development. It features the work of five organizations from around the world about their strategies for implementing equity in game/interactive design and development, and closes with broad guidelines to support integration of anti-oppression principles in game creation.

How Games Can Touch You

Novel kinesthetic and mimetic video game interfaces, such as the Wii Remote, PlayStation Move, and Microsoft Kinect, are seeing widespread mainstream appeal. However, with games ranging from the family-friendly Rock Band series, to the banned Manhunt 2, this chapter discusses the ethical implications of interfaces that seek to increase the verisimilitude of our game experiences, and offers a position from which to further consider the controller as an integral part of the overall game design.

Critical Gameplay

This chapter introduces critical gameplay design as a technique for creating digital games that offer alternative play. Critical gameplay provides the opportunity to explore game ethics through the way games are designed to be played. Since game designers outline the rules of play, game designs outline designer’s definitions of what is ethical and important. Taking the notion that design is a reflection of the designer’s values, this chapter outlines methodologies for exposing the intrinsic values in play and creating gameplay models from alternative ethics and values. The chapter concludes with examples of critical gameplay games that have been demonstrated to international audience.

The Axis of Good and Evil

Many games classify player decisions as either “good” or “evil.” This ignores the full range of moral behavior exhibited in real life and creates a false dichotomy: morally gray actions are overlooked or forced into one category or the other. The way actions are assigned to each category is subjective and biased toward the developers’ own moral beliefs. The result is a system that fails to capture ethical nuance and take morality seriously. This chapter examines how a good-and-evil moral framework compromises gameplay, and then proposes a solution.

Ethical Reasoning and Reflection as Supported by Single-Player Videogames

Ethically notable games are those that provide opportunities for encouraging ethical reasoning and reflection. This chapter examines how games can encourage rational and emotional responses. By examining ethically notable videogames, it illustrates a few of the different design choices that can be used to encourage these responses and the effects they have on players. It also identifies five challenges toward creating ethically notable games and examines each in the context of commercially released videogames. Each of these analyses serves as a framework not only for reflecting upon and understanding ethics and morality in games but also for outlining the design space for ethically notable games.

The Doctor Will Be You Now

In the field of fertility medicine, technology has vastly outpaced our ethical, legal, and social frameworks leaving us in a quagmire of gray morality. Seeds is a role-playing game and ethics simulation about Assisted Reproductive Technology and its effect on 21st century medical decisions. Players play the role of a fertility doctor and must make difficult ethical decisions through courses of treatment while balancing economic, emotional, and scientific concerns. With Seeds, the goal is to foster meaningful decision-making that may transfer from the game world into the real world through stimulating role-play and by creating a safe space for exploration of ethical issues. This chapter offers critical reflection on the design choices made in the process of creating this ethical exploration space on the subject of Assisted Reproductive Technology.