Ethical Thinking and Sustainability in Role-Play Participants

Karen Schrier

Simulation & Gaming, 2015, vol. 46, issue 6, 673-696

Abstract: Purpose. Can games provide a holistic understanding of the ethical decision-making process related to sustainability and environmental management? Method. Thirty participants, 18 to 34 years old, were recruited. Twenty were then randomly assigned to play a popular role-playing game, which raises an issue of whether to drain or preserve a virtual lake . Ten participants were assigned to a control condition, which involved a written version of the lake dilemma. Using a researcher-developed coding scheme, this study compared the ethical thinking skills and thought processes used to approach the lake scenario . Findings. Control condition participants more frequently chose to drain the lake than game condition participants. The top-ranked thought processes used by the control condition participants were reasoning -related only, whereas the top-ranked thought processes used by the game condition participants were both reasoning - and empathy -related, which may have related to their greater likelihood to preserve the lake. While, most game participants chose to preserve the lake (75%), game participants chose the “negative†choice in this scenario more often than any other (non-sustainability related) scenario provided in the game. Implications. This study helps us to understand how people think through sustainability-related scenarios, and how to use games for policy making and education.

Keywords: digital games; environmental management; ethical thinking; ethics; games; human-computer interaction; interaction; simulation/gaming; sustainability; sustainable development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:simgam:v:46:y:2015:i:6:p:673-696

DOI: 10.1177/1046878114556145

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