Ethically designing unethical worlds

gamedeveloper.com:

Every game abstracts what it portrays to a certain extent. Game mechanics are representations of the in-universe experience, and decisions about how to abstract an idea are ones about how best to communicate it. In other words, it’s an act of translation.

For strategy and simulation games, however, these decisions can be especially complicated: the information that faces the player can often be reduced down to numbers and structures on a significant scale, and the way those ideas are translated can communicate entirely other ideas.

For instance, grand strategy game Crusader Kings 3 has a system of hereditary traits that function as buffs and debuffs. In addition to any implication from opinion modifiers, some traits are explicitly color-coded as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. This information doesn’t belong to the world (nobody while arranging a marriage can perceive someone’s genetic history), but to the player. So when you see that a trait relating to visible disability is coded as ‘bad’, and associated with population dread, the translation seems biased, and the design intent is ambiguous.

For games intentionally working with ethically complex themes, explicit communication between the game and the player is all the more necessary. In a talk for Roguelike Celebration, Strange Scaffold’s creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr. explored some of the design discussions that came about in making Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. When trying to work out how you could value an organ, he cited the example that organ size relates to health. If a gigantic heart is more valuable than a small heart then that would be an unwanted design step towards (in his words) “Eugenics The Video Game”.

In an interview, Nelson Jr. expands on his thoughts