Hello everyone.
My name is Lucy Sparrow and together with my co-authors Martin Gibbs and
Michael Arnold, I will be presenting our paper titled 'The ethics of multiplayer
game design and community management: Industry perspectives and challenges'.
Players can behave in a number of ethically questionable ways in
online multiplayer games, whether that's through griefing cheating,
trolling, hacking, and so on.
And our previous work has shown that players themselves draw from a range of
'ludomoral' factors in making ethical judgements about these in-game behaviors.
And these perspectives can often be in conflict.
So this complex ethical landscape presents a challenge for game designers, who have
to continue to find fair, appropriate, and feasible ways of dealing with these
ever-evolving in-game behaviours and values in a playful and digital context.
Our research question therefore asks: how do game industry professionals
understand and approach ethical considerations in the design and
management of multiplayer games?
And what are the challenges they face in doing so?
To answer this question, we performed 21 in-depth interviews with a range
of game industry professionals, from game designers, developers, community
managers, producers, and so on
We then performed reflexive thematic analysis to generate five key themes
that capture the perspectives as well as the challenges and tensions
facing our participants in the design and management of multiplayer games.
The first theme highlights how ethics compete with functionality
in the design process.
So because of a focus on making sure a game functions correctly, ethical
considerations may be left aside or left too late, at which point they
can be difficult to implement, or they may interfere with core mechanics.
As one participant asked in a kind of tongue in cheek way, "what
button is it going to be on?"
The second theme points out how notions of right and wrong player
behaviours are sometimes unclear.
One participant described digital games as a "weird, amorphous blob
space" in relation to ethical design.
So there are a lot of grey areas when it comes to unsporting behaviour in digital
games in particular, and it can be very difficult for industry professionals
to know where to draw the line.
Thirdly, ethical design decisions come with risks to reputation,
revenue, safety, and wellbeing.
One participant said, "ethics can be awesome when you
don't have to feed people".
So something like a moderation system in a game, for instance,
can be very costly, and it can also sometimes put off the 'whales', or
the players that are contributing a lot of income for a company.
Furthermore, participants reported receiving a number of death threats,
rape threats, doxxing and other harmful behaviors from players who
were unhappy with ethics-related decisions that were made in a game.
The next theme stresses how industry professionals can be unprepared and
unsupported in making governing decisions.
So, many participants got into the game industry because
they wanted to make fun games.
But as one participant said, "it's all fun and games until
someone gets stabbed in the eye".
So managing player communities is often more akin to governance than it is
to play, with industry professionals being expected to punish, discipline or
morally educate players, despite having little to no training in doing so.
Finally, our participants felt that the goal of completely eradicating
toxicity is unfeasible and unreasonable.
Participants expressed that there was a limit to their
responsibility to govern players.
As one participant said, "it's not our job to save the world".
At the same time, there was a sense that players and humanity in general
were ultimately unreasonable and would always find ways to thwart
a system or harm other players.
Based on our participants' insights in the interviews, we've created a set
of five design considerations to act as kind of springboards for ethical
discussions in this design space.
The first is foresight and planning.
So since they're inevitable, ethical considerations need to be
considered from the very beginning of the game design process.
Secondly, community managers need to be further supported and
integrated into the design team.
Thirdly, 'agency over interactivity' refers to finding ways for players to
have choice over their interactions with each other in a game rather
than being forced to interact.
Fourth, there is a need to unpack ethical values, like integrity, transparency
in design teams, just to ensure that they have real meaning and impact.
And finally we emphasise adaptability or a kind of 'agile ethics' that allows
and plans for changes over time and across different spaces in what is an
often very fast changing ethical context.
And that's all for me.
So thank you for listening.