Abstrakt
This chapter considers several approaches to players'' ethical experiences of serious content in advanced video games. For Sicart, the ethics of videogames is the result of the relations among three ethical elements, creating the distributed network of responsibilities: a designed object, a player and an experience or process, and the gameplay.
Although Sicart''s approach to the distributed network of responsibilities is mainly theoretical, it is potentially a very useful tool for the ethical analysis of today''s advanced videogame titles. The author identifies the application of this approach as the most relevant option for any researcher attempting both to deconstruct and to analyse the ethical structures and problems found in the latest videogames.
The chapter focuses on the ethical implications of unethical game content in single-player games with defined win conditions, as well as implementation issues of unethical content in serious videogames.