
Ethics in Games
Mia Consalvo leads this MIT CMS.608 Game Design session on how ethics operate inside video games. Drawing on Miguel Sicart's work on game design ethics, she asks students to supply examples of how designers build moral systems into games, how players actually behave within those systems, and how community norms shape what counts as acceptable play. The discussion pushes into the gap between rules as written and rules as enforced by player culture, and into how in-game behavioral standards connect to, or diverge from, ethical standards outside the game world. A controversial sequence from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was originally used as a discussion trigger but has been removed from this recording for copyright reasons. What remains is a classroom conversation grounded in specific game examples rather than abstract moralizing, taught as part of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program.