Paper Information
| Title | Videogames and the Ethics of Care |
| Presenter(s) | John Murphy and Jose Zagal |
| Session | Ethical Reflection in Games |
| Time | Saturday, October 23, 10:15a-11:15a |
| Location | Parlor A |
| Format | Paper Presentation |
| Description | Videogames have the potential to create ethical experiences and encourage ethical reflection. Usually, discussions of this potential are understood in the context of the dominant moral theories: utilitarianism and Kantianism. It has been argued by feminist moral philosophers that a complete moral theory needs to include the concept of an ethics of care. We utilize the ethics of care as an alternative lens through which to examine the ethical frameworks and experiences offered by videogames. We illustrate how this sort of analysis can provide insights by examining the videogames Little King's Story and Animal Crossing: City Folk from the perspective of care ethics. We show how Little King's Story's fictive context, gameplay, and asymmetrical power relationships encourage the player to care for the citizens of his kingdom. In Animal Crossing: City Folk the player is a member of a small social network that encourages her to care for her neighbors as part of a larger interconnected social ecosystem. Both games result in the player feeling an emotional attachment to the game's characters, and the value placed in these relationships becomes the motivation for further ethical player behavior. We conclude by discussing some of the challenges and limitations of a care ethics perspective and outline a series of future research questions that should be explored. |
| Top Paper Award | This paper was selected by the program committee as a Meaningful Play 2010 Top Paper. It will be submitted to the Meaningful Play 2010 Special Issue of the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS). Due to the copyright requirements of the journal, only the abstract is available in the conference proceedings. |