Welcome: Ethical
Games Conference
upcoming workshops (fall 2024)
Ethical Games is a two-day, single-track online conference and special issue with ACM Games aiming to bring together game academics to advance the debate on ethical design, development, and live operation of digital games with the long-term goal of providing concrete recommendations to the game industry and protecting players more efficiently with evidence-based guidelines.
The first Conference took place on January 2024, which will lead to the publication of a special issue with ACM Games: Research & Practice journal in late 2024. Visit our Youtube channel to watch videos of this 1st conference!
We can currently putting together a steering committee to lead a set of workshops between academia, game industry, and other people concerned with this topic. If you’re a game developer, academic, regulatory body, or other expert in the domain of ethics in games, feel free to fill out this form to give us feedback and request to participate to our upcoming workshops (we aim for fall 2024).
Youtube Channel
Videos of our 1st Conference
next workshops
Fall 2024
Where
Online!
SUBMISSIONS
Participation request form
Organizers
Dr. Celia Hodent
Ethical Games Founder
Pr. Sebastian Deterding
Imperial College London
Dr. Fran Blumberg
Fordham University
Publication
round table
This first Ethical Games Conference will lead to the publication of a special issue with ACM Games: Research & Practice journal in late 2024.
Background
By some counts, a third of the world population is now regularly playing digital games.
With this growing reach, we also see growing concerns about possible negative impacts of games on players, such as online toxicity, media addiction, financial harm from predatory monetization techniques, or so-called dark patterns. Research on these various ethical concerns is varied and patchy and not widely shared within the games industry, making it hard for game developers to tell apart warranted concerns from unsubstantiated moral panics. In parallel, we see game developers standing against long-standing industry issues around diversity, equity, and inclusion or worker rights and demanding industry action on climate change. In short, the public, researchers, and game developers are all pointing to the ethics of game design and development, and the lack of clear ethical standards for the game industry.
In response, Ethical Games will bring together research on ethical concerns pertinent to video game development and the game industry workplace. By convening academics and industry professionals, the conference will also make the current state of research more approachable and accessible to industry professionals. Third and finally, Ethical Games wants to initiate a conversation to establish evidence-based code of ethics for the game industry that game studios could pledge to follow.
