Ethics in multiplayer games and moderation

Project overview

The booming digital games industry faces many ethical challenges, from combatting in-game toxicity and managing player content to ensuring diverse and inclusive workplaces. Developers, players, and researchers are faced with difficult questions of how to design games and manage players amid rapid technological and socio-political changes.

Our goal is to define, understand, and tackle the ethical concerns that develop around digital gameplay. In turn, we aim to clarify what it means to play and design ethical games in ways that benefit both players and the industry.

We tackle these pressing issues through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates insights from human-computer interaction, game studies, sociology, philosophy, and game design.

Key areas of research include:

  • Player interactions in multiplayer games
  • Toxicity, harassment and griefing
  • Human and AI moderation
  • Ethics in game design

Project team

Contact details

Publications

Sparrow, L. A., Gibbs, M., Arnold, M. (2021). [Best paper award]. The Ethics of Multiplayer Game Design and Community Management: Industry Perspectives and Challenges. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 8-13. Yokohama, Japan. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445363

Sparrow, L. A., Gibbs, M., & Arnold, M. (2021). Ludic Ethics: The ethical negotiations of players in online multiplayer games. Games and Culture, 16(6), 719–742. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412020971534

Sparrow, L. A., Antonellos, M., Gibbs, M., & Arnold, M. (2020). From ‘Silly’ to ‘Scumbag’: Reddit discussion of a case of groping in a virtual reality game. In Proceedings of the 2020 Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA’20). http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DiGRA_2020_paper_272.pdf

Sparrow, L. A., Allison, F., Gibbs, M., & Arnold, M. (2020). Productive distrust: Playing with the player in digital games. Paper presented at the 2020 Digital Games Research Association Australia (DiGRAA’20), Feb 2020, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. http://digraa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/DiGRAA_2020_paper_5.pdf

Sparrow, L. A., Gibbs, M., & Arnold, M. (2019). Apathetic villagers and the trolls who love them: Player amorality in multiplayer digital games. In Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (OzCHI'19), Dec 2019, Fremantle, WA, Australia. DOI: 10.1145/3369457.3369514