Pro-social Games

The Dilemma of Games: Moral choice in a Digital World Session Organizers: Gene Koo, Shenja van der Graaf

Today's "digital natives" are also a generation of gamers. While all ages enjoy computer and online games, they are particularly meaningful to youth culture. Although some advocates argue that games depicting violence might promote aggressive behaviors in children and have called for more regulation of the industry, games as a medium also have the potential to advance pro-social values and behaviors. After all, games offer choices, but few of these choices invoke ethical, civic, or moral dilemmas. How can games promote such values such as compassion, charity, or sacrifice? Can they marry these values to the kind of "systems thinking" that games promote and which are becoming more vital in an increasingly complex and interdependent world? Perhaps more importantly, how can such values cross the boundaries of the medium into the real world?

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Take 1:

The generation of "digital natives" are also a generation of gamers. Games have become a widespread medium for people of all ages, but particularly for youth -- and largely at the expense of television. Some advocates have fretted that the violent content of some games might promote aggressive behaviors in children and have called for more regulation of the industry. But what about the potential of the medium to advance pro-social values and behaviors?

As a medium, games uniquely offer players choices that they make themselves. While some games have delved into the possibilities that choice offers, only a small handful have examined the moral dimensions of choice in a sophisticated manner.

Perhaps most promising among the possibilities of games is the way in which they can network large groups of geographically dispersed people into functional teams of players. In this way, the "guilds" that exist in Massively Multiplayer Online Games may actually function like the bowling leagues that Robert Putnam frets about in his work on social capital. If games are generating social capital, are they the kind of capital that translate into civic capital as well? Can they be designed explicitly to emphasize particular values, e.g. conflict resolution, mutual sacrifice, compassion?

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Take 2:

In the evolution of media, games mark a substantial break from predecessors. While books, for example, capture thoughts and ideas, games enable the capture and conveyance of systems. While many commercial games have concentrated on such systems as physics (enabling "shooter" games), some games have approached other kinds of systems such as urban development (SimCity), economics (the "Tycoon" series), and, perhaps most lucratively, teamwork (World of Warcraft and other "MMOs").

Few games explicitly or intentionally address moral issues, even though most presume basic values or principles. Yet society has reached a stage where understanding the moral dimensions of systems is becoming a critical "literacy."

In what ways do games already offer a means to understand systems critically? In what ways must they further evolve to reach that point?