Ethical Games

Toward Evidence-Based Guidance for Safeguarding Players and Developers

Celia HodentFrancine BlumbergSebastian Deterding

August 12, 2024,

Editorial, News

As video games have moved to the mainstream of entertainment and popular culture, they also have given rise to new media fears. These span concerns for player welfare such as gaming addiction, negative effects of ‘screen time,’ gambling-like mechanics, dark patterns and questionable business practices, online toxicity, and extremism. Questions of game worker welfare are similarly making headlines, such as harassment, discrimination, or precarious and unhealthy working conditions. To sort warranted concerns from unwarranted moral panics, the first Ethical Games Conference, held in 2024, gathered the state of the art of research on ethical issues in games to inform evidence-based guidelines for industry and regulators. The selected full papers and opinion pieces of the conference, collected in this special issue, showcase a wide range of issues and barriers, and aspirations to move from avoiding harm to using games for positive social impact.

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Celia Hodent

Celia Hodent

Expert in game user experience (UX) & applied cognitive science (human factors).

Francine Blumberg

Francine Blumberg

Blumberg's research interests concern the development of children's attention and problem solving skills in the context of informal and formal digital learning settings.

Sebastian Deterding

Sebastian Deterding

Sebastian is chair of Design Engineering Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London. He established the gamification research network and co-authored "The Gameful World" (MIT Press), and is co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Games: Research and Practice.

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