Designers often use a scripted approach to developing branching narratives for serious games. In this approach, the designer hand-crafts each dilemma at a low level, presenting these scenarios to the player with fixed branching pathways. However, this can create disconnect and disengagement within the player as the presented choices reflect the designer’s intent rather than the player’s interpretation of the scenario. On the other hand, a systems-based approach will allow the designer to develop a set of gameplay systems that integrate the game’s learning goals as interactive processes. However, this approach is not as sought after due to the difficulties designers face while implementing it into practice due to the requirements of a robust, cohesive gameplay system capable of organically producing dilemmas and scenarios. In this paper, we propose an oscillatory model for systems-based narrative design, which relies on the current understanding of the scripted approach. The oscillatory model goes back and forth between the scripted and systemic approaches to simultaneously build both versions of the game narratives.

This paper presents a theoretical framework that categorises the design paradigms commonly observed in ethically relevant games. This theoretical framework was developed based on game design factors responsible for the player’s decision-making process and their role in signifying morality in the gameworld. The model’s development was followed by an evaluation process constituting in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with ten professional game designers with industry experience. Secondly, this paper proposes an oscillatory, system-based approach to ethical gameplay in serious games. In this approach, elements from both scripted and systems-based design methods are used in a to-and-fro oscillatory manner to design a systems-based ethical game.

This paper presents a theoretical framework that categorises the design paradigms in serious games developed for cybersecurity training. This theoretical framework was developed based on game design factors responsible for the player’s decision-making process and their role in signifying morality in the gameworld. The model’s development was followed by an evaluation process constituting in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with seven professional game designers with industry experience.

Serious moral games offer a tool for moral development that can help players translate ‘head knowledge’of ethical principles into habits of everyday practice. In this paper, we present the design process behind one such game, Prescott & Krueger. It is a serious game for training information technology students in cybersecurity ethics. Our design draws on the Four Component Model of moral intelligence and the Morality Play model for serious moral game design. We reflect on how these models influenced our design process. The Four Component Model proved a useful set of lenses for developing learning outcomes and game narrative and mechanics, however the more prescriptive Morality Play model was more difficult to apply as the development of a sophisticated ‘moral toy’required modelling both low-level cybersecurity systems and high-level ethical interpretations. We reflect on the broader implications of this problem for serious moral game design.

When we make ethical decisions in everyday life, our choices are often influenced by what we see others doing around us. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as social proof. When we are uncertain about what to do, we are likely to follow the crowd, especially if we identify with them. In this study, we examine how this behaviour extends to video games, and how it is influenced by other design factors such as time-limited decisions. We present the results of a quantitative study of player behaviour in a visual-novel game The Great Fire. Before making a decision, players are presented with statistics showing what other players chose. We manipulated these figures to display different choices as popular, under timed and untimed conditions. We present preliminary work-in-progress results that suggest that players are indeed influenced to follow the crowd when facing an ambiguous moral decision, but can also show unexpected behaviour when faced with the non-moral choice of calling a coin flip.