What is it about?
Lots of discussions about games involve the values of people discussing them: violence in video games, sexism in video games, politics in video games. These things are all values-based discussions. As such, we looked at the ways values manifest in all the stages of a game's life: it's design, development, publication, its play by players and its reporting by players, the media, etc. As it turns out, values pervade many elements of game design, development and their cultural discussions, if we know what to look for - games for empathy, games for change, games for social good and other popular approaches to games in recent years all interface with values in some way.
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Why is it important?
This work is important as it helps grow the conversation around how values impact how games are made, perceived and how they are discussed within popular culture. It expands on recent popular notions like empathy games and "games for change", and advocates hat a better understanding of values as designer, developer, publisher or player helps us better understand games within the wider social context.
Perspectives
The article primarily advocates for prosocial reasons for integrating traditionally "Western" values into games as a force for good. It mentions, but does not delve too deeply into, notions that "dark" values can and do exist in games, and the outcomes related to these.
Adam Jerrett
University of Portsmouth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Values throughout the Game Space, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, October 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3549520.
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