The Ethics of Video Games

The Ethics of Video Games Miguel Sicart’s articles “Ethics: A Virtue Ethics Approach to Computer Games” and “The Ethics of Computer Game Design” are based off his book “The Ethics of Computer Games,” in which he states that the playing and designing of computer games can be ethical and moral decisions. He declares that video games are ethical “objects” and that the players are ethical “agents.” Sicart also argues that video game designers have a responsibility for how ethically wrong or right their creation is. Computer games or video games started out as innocent, family games that were rarely ethically questioned; but in today’s world video games have become a factor in many murders, such as the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. Due to games influencing people to commit these wrong doings, game designers need to think more of how a game is ethically right and less of how it would be more addicting; I’m not saying they shouldn’t make games addicting, I’m just stating that game companies can focus more on moral standards when creating their product. The question, who is more accountable for recent violence, the players or the designers; or is it the coders or the designers? In the video game industry, code is the source of video games, thus it is the source of morality and ethics; but without players, video games’ morality is just “potentiality” (The Ethics of Computer Game Design, 1). The players are, in my opinion, the ones most accountable for the extreme violence from playing video games. Code, as I stated before is the source for all video games. In the video game industry programmers are the ones who create the engines for game designers to use to create the actual game. Since programmers create these engines, they are more responsible in what occurs in a video game, right or wrong, than the actual game designers. Code is more important when it comes to morality in video game, as Sicart explains: “as an ethical instance, code seems to be more important

Cited: Sicart, Miguel. "Game,Player,Ethics: A Virtue Ethics Approach to Computer Games." International Review of Information Ethics, n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2013. . Sicart, Miguel. "The Ethics of Computer Game Design." N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2013. .