{"id":3391,"date":"2010-11-27T17:01:32","date_gmt":"2010-11-27T22:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=3391"},"modified":"2010-11-29T20:16:27","modified_gmt":"2010-11-30T01:16:27","slug":"ethics-of-game-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=3391","title":{"rendered":"Ethics Of Game Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I have recently come across a number of reflections on the ethics of game design prompted in part by a story about the closing down of an installation<\/a> in 2008 of Virtual Jihadi<\/a> by artist Wafaa Bilal. (GamePolitics has a number of stories on Bilal and the controversy<\/a> and here is an interview with Waffaa Bilal<\/a> about the controversy.)<\/p>\n

What did Bilal do? Well, he modified a propaganda game called Night of Bush Hunting<\/a> (or Quest for Bush) which in turn was a modification of a cheap game Quest for Saddam<\/a> – a first-person shooter where you hunt Saddam – all to draw attention to the stereotypes of arabs in games.<\/p>\n

What’s so special about these games? Gameology has a careful comparison of Quest for Bush and Quest for Saddam.<\/a> Quest for Bush apparently was\u00a0 just a swap of resources in Quest for Saddam to change who you hunt. A skin of Bush exchanged for a skin of Saddam. The comparative review points out that,<\/p>\n

the ease with which the Global Islamic Media Front transformed Quest for Saddam<\/em> into Quest for Bush<\/em>, a game that seems to portray jihad, should call attention to the problems with the content of the original. And these are problems which aren’t intrinsic to violent video games. Creating a game that repeatedly portrays the killing of a specific individual or ideology and then distributing that game in a context that sincerely advocates the killing of that individual or ideology precludes any claims about that game’s facetiousness. So whereas a hypothetical DOOM mod that replaced demon sprites with depictions of Arabs would insert xenophobic content where there previously was none, Quest for Bush<\/em> simply switches the variables on an already political (and probably xenophobic) game’s content.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me there is now more reflection in the gaming community on games and ethics. A good example is in Gamasutra where Dean Takahashi wrote a longer essay on the\u00a0 Ethics Of Game Design<\/a>. Some of the issues raised:<\/p>\n