Weak statement for those who don’t believe in God. More to that, we have number of Gods in different religions and corresponding society parts… Holy books aren’t physics books, they can be (and are!) treated differently even within one religion under one formal God.
I would want that book of “fundamental base logic”. We (as humans) have common base needs (air, water, food, freedom of will etc.) - and in most countries corresponding fundamental rights are reflected in laws. You can do whatever you want until you don’t break other’s fundamental rights i.e. you don’t break laws established and accepted by your society. Ethics in this case is just some additional rules that you may or may not accept. And it’s up to everyone to design his own such rules, reveal or not reveal them, exchange them etc. No one has a right to explicitely state that this and this is definitely good for society, as no one knows the whole society. A society is a collection of individuals, so what’s good for one can be bad (not fundamentally, in terms of his rights, but morally or whatever) for another, so these debates look quite pointless to me. Every statement has to have facts and studies behind it, leading everyone’s logic to one conclusion, otherwise it’s simply an opinion, not better, nor worse than completely opposite opinion. And debates will never end.
I rather see the differences as an advantage - that is WHY we need to have societal rules. If we were functioning the same we‘d not need rules.
But I also agree that what we call morals is built into us - as I alluded to in the psychopath comment. So maybe some people would like to be more selfish but society pulls them along - they get funny looks when they say „No you can‘t have that sandwich I‘m never gonna eat myself“.
Oh goody! I love the deep end of the discussion pool!
I will toss in a couple of observations of my own for the agree / disagree replies.
So, the word “morals” seems to effectively mean the definition of the concepts of “good and evil” to actions that an individual chooses to perform. In English, there is a subtle difference that must be paid attention to when referring to an individual’s morals vs socially understood morals. Everyone has their own set of morals that they pick up via education, experience, and choice. To equate the concept of morals in culture to an analogous example in formalized government, you could use the word “laws”. … hmm… yeppers, seems about right. The whole idea in layman’s terms? “You do these things and the world is a little bit better and fun, You do these other things, however, and you will be damaged, sometimes in quite vague ways”
So “ethics”, yeah? That would be the actual application of morals to determine the set of actions you allow yourself to take. The concept is part of a subset of one of the seven virtues known as “diligence” to oppose the mortal sin “sloth” (Christianity). Following the previous example, it would flow along with government as “law enforcement”, or the systematic application of morals to everyday actions. For businesses, this can be put as simply as the Lockout/Tagout system used by electrical maintenance staff, wet floor signs on wet floors, and making sure that hazardous chemicals are properly labeled, and most of all, firing employees who think the previous three examples are just ignore-able BS. In laymans terms, “I actually walk the walk, on top of the talk.”
Does this help?
Edit: oh snap! almost missed a joke op!
What does a highly moral, yet unethical, person say a lot?
“Do as I say, not as I do!”
… though definitive… not really that funny… meh
maybe something about televangelists?
Well, back to the topic, about “a game developer’s responsibility”: of course, there’s one more powerful regulator for the developer (be it a company or a person) called market. If a game you published is completely within laws (you’d barely publish otherwise anyway) but considered immoral/unethical by the vast majority of society - it won’t just go well. If you produce something that is formally legal but non-acceptible for most people - you won’t just sell it, you’ll lose competition to better (and this time statistically proven better) games. What goes well in one country won’t go as well in another, with different society. Having that obviously fair market judgement, why would you need anything more than that? You try something, you get feedback, you make changes. You can’t be responsible for every player’s playing style or enforce “a preferred playing style” as game will become boring. You have to provide freedom of choice, just like in real world. If we start to apply “ethical” stamps like “stealing is bad” - that means, we can’t even have rogues as a class in our game. Etc.
p.s. the truth is, no ethical stamp is true for every possible context. A good RL example is USSR’s history - when business was not just considered un-ethical, but officially illegal, people were massively stealing from the country - and, while were massively punished and jailed for this, they accelerated the system’s collapse. It happened, individuals appeared to be more ethical than the bordering rules. So, to me, the main conclusion is that we have to provide freedom, and let players build their own “ethical rules” within the game world.
My argument is that “game ethics” can’t be applied directly to game content. That’s morals. Does your religion consider demons in games to be offensive? Who cares? The market will correct that kind of stuff. No one says an author is unethical because they wrote a book about witchcraft. It’s silly. A painting of Jesus playing poker with the other apostles is likely to be called immoral by some but I imagine no one would call it unethical.
Conflating these two words does not make sense. Examples of where one applies and the other doesn’t are easy to come by.
The ethics of a game developer come into play when they are abusing the relationship with their players in some way that the law doesn’t (yet) directly cover. There is still room to argue over what is right and wrong here. For example, is it wrong to exploit gamblers by making your game super-addictive to gamblers and including micropayments with each transaction? How far is too far? Some would argue that almost every F2P model is ‘evil’ on some level though some schemes are clearly more unethical than others. Lots of room for deep discussion on any number of topics here.
Leave the game content to the morality police.
Regarding player behavior in the game, that’s the players’ ethics and not the game developers. Where it comes into game development ethics are where the game developer starts to take advantage of the unethical behavior of their players in some way.
For example, if some bug lets players steal the inventory of some other player requiring the victim to have to repurchase items with real money… a game developer that knows about that bug and knowingly does nothing to fix it for months and months: that’s unethical for sure.
An important point that I completely share btw. If we want to establish rules, we have to assist in modifying laws. If I’m going to propose some modification to the law, I’m going to ask developers, some reputable representatives (maybe put up some temporary committee of them for this, or whatever) for some statistics, known and hypothetical cases etc). Then we develop some recommendations and hopefully make it to the law. With all the reasons, logic chains and conclusions published of course. This is the right way to make these changes, I believe. It’s much harder to speculate when you have all this stuff listed on your table.
Wouldn’t it be considered something sort of online casino and thus come under corresponding laws? I really never heard of any sufficiently big real projects/cases regarding this yet.
Well, you won’t see any cases for selling lootboxes any time soon. The main argument being that gambling is “risking money/things of value in a game of chance to obtain more money/things of value”. Loot boxes are definitely in the game of chance category, but you will never get money, and the items gained have no value beyond the scope of the game. The businesses direct the devs to make sure to have two main key features for making sure that this practice does not fall under the definition of gambling.
lootboxes must be obtainable, somehow, for FREE. Now, you don’t have to risk money. “You are now paying for a service that accelerates the acquisition of something that the game allows you to get for FREE.” ← The CORE of F2P, and the bane of actual fun.
and the bonus, optional, CYA thing: Items won from lootboxes are usually non-tradeable. The winner is the only one who can use it. This means that value cannot be derived by trading them with other players. Oh, and we can get more people to “accelerate” their acquisitions, now, too.
Then the businesses direct the lawyers to write up in the EULA : you mustn’t sell accounts, you mustn’t trade these items. If you do, you the bad boy, and we smack you.
Then the business can say, “Sure! It LOOKS like gambling, but it’s free and they’re not getting anything of actual value out of it. SUCK IT!”
So, thoroughly legal, questionably moral as viewed by society, and unethical due to the fact that they are actively trying to hit a spot as close to gambling without actually touching it as they can, rake in money from it, and advertise the “awesome graphics! awesome gameplay!” to try not to draw attention to it.
MWHAHAHAHAHAAAA!
It seems odd that the Chinese developer “TENCENT” in comparison to American developer “EA”, though less moral as viewed by society, is actually more ethical in that it is quite up front about “pay-to-win”.
And as for a game of Trolling where trolls out-troll each other? Highly Immoral by society, Legal, Highly Offensive, and, quite possibly, Completely Ethical. However, your thought experiment is fatally flawed in that it can never be used. Ethics are gauged after something is actually done. Much like, until someone actually builds a device that does it… it is theoretical science, not applied science.
Yes, and I’d say market reacts. I know people, that never play F2P due to this. However, on the other hand, people still can play for free, which is a good side of the concept. For instance, in SWTOR you can level and play/see a lot of high quality AAA content (I’m more “explorer” type of a player) without paying for it, except for the highest grade stuff (most of epics etc). It’s like: ok, you can’t get the whole game for free, but you can get 2/3 of it for free. Which is still a lot, so I have to admit F2P scheme as something not necessarily bad in general. I’d still leave those judgements to market anyway. I agree that it is fair enough to write and display a disclaimer: this game can cause addiction, it has “virtual” gambling elements, and, due to the game world’s complexity (including unpredictable players in it) can have other unintended-by-developers negative side effects - but, to be fair, who ever reads these disclaimers?
btw: this forum can cause addiction too. And I never saw a proper disclaimer. Too bad for your ethics, guys.
