This book opens with a question: Can games create “ethical experiences by design”? The author answers this question with something akin to a manifesto:

I aspire for games to have the same cultural and aesthetic impact that some North American mainstream films had in the late 1970s. […] I aspire for games to transcend entertainment and claim their part in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection. (p. 2)

To achieve this, it becomes crucial to establish a gaming connection in the relationships between ethics and fiction and between ethics and aesthetics. To this end, the author examines the ethical components of several games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout: New Vegas, and Dys4ia.

For the ethics of fiction, the author relies on Wayne Booth (although games are more similar to digital hypertext, a particular type of alternative fiction). Here we can ask: Are games analogous to reading fiction? Readers of fiction do not alter the text ordinarily, as game players do as a matter of course. Fiction is not hypertext, although Jorge Luis Borges’ work, like his branching-style short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “is very suggestive of interactive fiction” [1]. Sicart, here, is relying on an unduly limited definition of fiction to generalize about fiction as a broad field.

Sicart is addressing the broader point of how film and literature are like games, since he is comparing them. Furthermore, how do we know what the participant’s ethics are or how many gamers are thinking about ethics while playing?

The author notes, “It is worth asking how aesthetic experiences invoke ethics and what the experiential relation between aesthetics and ethics is” (p. 17). To make his point about ethics and aesthetics, he gives three works as examples of aesthetics and art: Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of darkness, the movie Apocalypse Now, and Ubisoft’s game Far Cry 2. While the first two are generally accepted as examples of art, the game is not.

In my view, at this point, the author would have to provide considerable evidence establishing a connection between games and aesthetics for his argument to be persuasive. He believes games are an aesthetic experience (as evidenced only in Footnote 33 on page 156), but here, too, the context is rather limited since the reference is actually to players of sports, not games.

A more substantive objection to the author’s manifesto may lie in the question of violent games. Many may wonder how we could consider bloody shoot-em-up games as inducing ethical reflection and aesthetic experience. The author addresses the point: “How can violent and disgusting video games be considered to be a source of aesthetic experiences? Let me answer with a story.” After visiting an art show featuring “a bizarre and disgusting alternate world,” he contends that, like art, games “allow us to explore within relatively safe grounds what we would otherwise never do.” He concludes:

Bad art and violent games are purposeful only because they are aesthetic experiences in the shape of games and because they demand from us that particular framing and contextualization. (p. 19)

He summarizes his contention clearly: “Play involves a player in a way that demands rational thinking, aesthetic performance, and moral awareness” (p. 20).

Are the author’s ideals applicable in practice? Consider a point he makes early on. In practice, game players know and enforce the rules, as in pick-up basketball games, a notion attributed to Bernard Gert. The author does not address what the players do when there is a dispute and no referee is available. In other words, do we live in the world of Rousseau or Hobbes? The author would have us believe that playground disputes are handled peaceably.

Throughout the book, the author offers a marvelous accumulation of insightful comments from intelligent and articulate game makers. Their ideas are stimulating, idealistic, and thought-provoking. The difficulty of accepting the book’s thesis is in grasping the author’s purpose in writing it. He attempts persuasion, which is partly prescriptive, partly descriptive, and almost totally aspirational. This is an idealistic and stimulating consideration of the possibilities of game design, even if the era of ethical game play is not in the offing.

The index is thin and the bibliography tends more toward gaming and theoretical works. As an alternative, it may be more useful to consider previous titles on the same topic [2,3].

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