In May 2009 The MIT Press published my book, The Ethics of Computer Games. The book is available from MIT, from Amazon (us, uk) and probably your local bookshop. Support your local bookshop.
The Ethics of Computer Games is based on my doctoral work. It is a philosophy volume that gives a comprehensive view of the ethics of computer games, understanding them as designed objects but also as practices. It offers as well a philosophical model of computer game players as ethical agents, and a framework for analyzing the ethical dilemmas that computer games pose to different cultural domains, from unethical content to game design.
The Ethics of Computer Games is targeted to scholars, game developers, and the educated public interested in understanding the ethical complexity of computer games, and the role they play in our moral lives.
Since the book is quite a philosophical read, and some developers have expressed interest in it, I have made some slides that summarize each chapter and try to provide a reader for the main arguments. These slides make little sense if read separate from the book, as they are intended to make more clear the intentions and arguments presented in each chapter, and are very dependent on the examples from the book.
The slides are here to download in .pdf format:
Computer Games as Designed Ethical Systems
Unethical Game Content and Effect Studies
As of August 2009, I have started wrapping up the research conducted as a follow up to this book, and I am preparing its sequel. In The Ethics of Computer Games 2: The Lost Books (work in progress title) I will present an analysis of how ethical gameplay can be designed, introducing a technique for developing engaging ethical experiences. The sequel will also give an overview of what do we mean by ethical gameplay, and why it is important. I expect to have something else to say about it by the end of 2009.
[...] la web y los escritos de Miguel Sicart, de los que rescato en especial A Thousand Lives y The ethics of computer games. En este último texto, se plantea una mirada comprensiva sobre la ética ímplicita en los [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Silvana diGregorio. Silvana diGregorio said: #IDGBL10 Blogged on identity and ethics in WoW http://bit.ly/byBCtb see also slides of Sicert's book on game ethics http://bit.ly/crA1EM [...]