Sep '25 • General discussion
The Ethics of Play
Maybe a year ago, I wrote this article on the ethics of game development for a friend's website. When the website went on hiatus, prior to publication, I posted it on Linked In... and now it's here, for anyone who wants to start the conversation on gaming and narrative design:
Take a stroll through the toy section of a Target or a Walmart. How many of the toys and games you see in those aisles, whether or not they’re “for you” specifically, feel like they demand to be played with? How many toys, that are on the market right now, make you feel inspired to play? Can you count them on one hand? What percentage of the products on display fit that description, would you say?
Now, count how many of those toys and games feel like they exist to develop a product line or expand a brand. How many of those toys exist so that kids can create their own worlds, or have their own adventures, as compared to the toys that simply encourage kids to remember stories and adventures they’ve already watched on TV or in the movies?
Is this article making you feel anxious? It’s making me feel anxious.
Consider the games you play, either on your phone or on your computer. Do you actually look forward to playing any of these games? Or, are you playing them to escape from reality for a moment, or to relieve some negative feeling you might be having? If you’re playing a game to escape a stress or anxiety, how much of that stress or anxiety was created by the game itself?
Seems to me that as a society, we’re not having very much fun. None of us really know how to play, anymore. What’s even more alarming is that we’re passing our vacant sense of fun down to our kids through the toys and games we engage them with.
Play serves a vital role in our culture. More than film, more than music, more than news or politics, play is a direct and open doorway to the subconscious of the people we engage. When a person plays, they are developing habits.
Five out of seven decisions any given person will ever make are made purely through habit. Two of those seven decisions reflect a person’s conscious understanding of their ethics, their desires… their choice, basically. Everything else a person does is a reflection of the neural pathways that person has developed through repetition. Basically, people do the things they’ve done before. What is play, if not the act of doing something over and over again?
Lots of things are scaring me about American society, right now, but one thing in particular that brings bile to my throat is seeing an advertisement that reads “THIS GAME IS SO ADDICTIVE!” When the habits a game is instilling in a player base only serve to drive the player deeper and deeper into the wheels of the game’s own microtransaction or ad-driven business model, who benefits from that? Is it the player? Most mobile games today offer the player rewards for logging in at specific times, or for logging in at least once per day. Most mobile games offer players additional rewards for making as much progress as possible, when they do log in. More than anything else, games today are designed to compete for the player’s attention. When players are logging in more consistently, and for more extended periods of time, the game is working.
At the same time, most games only offer players a limited number of lives - with the opportunity to extend their gameplay through microtransactions. Up until the player has used up their lives, the purpose of the game is fundamentally to get the player hooked on the promise of what can be achieved if only they can continue playing. Once those lives are all used up, the purpose of the game is to collect the microtransaction that allows them to keep on grinding. Any other game mechanics the game has to offer, fundamentally, work in service to this central gameplay loop.
If we look at gameplay as a habit generator, what are we really teaching people with this kind of game design? On some level, we must be teaching people to overextend themselves in service to a system of authority. On some level, we must be teaching them to buy their way out of problems. When anxiety and “fear of missing out” are the primary motivators for playing, we’re teaching them to recognize those feelings as signs that our players are enjoying themselves.
What’s more, nobody’s going to question the logic behind these value systems. Nobody’s asking people to accept these ideas as true or valid. Instead, we’re inviting people to practice them until they become second-nature.
While it’s certainly true that people don’t have to play these games, our society is churning out games whereby the simple act of continuing the game is the most important thing a player can do. More and more, we’re reinforcing the idea among our playerbase that people DO have to play these games. At the same time, we’re giving people fewer and fewer alternatives for play.
Our reality is that today, play is something we appropriate as a means of directing people’s behavior in service to some pretty grotesque conflicts of interest. When a toy is encouraging kids to essentially act out the memes that define the brand of an intellectual property, who do you think is winning? How can we be surprised that the empathy and ingenuity of our society is failing, when this is how we cultivate ourselves?!?
Knowing how to make something that’s actually fun is not nearly as easy as it sounds, but I do have a few basic pointers to offer:
First, the thing we are asking our player to do, or to imagine, should be something that empowers them. If we’re making a toy, then our job is to design tools by which the player can expand their world in some way. If we’re designing the rule system for a game, then we have to create the tools by which our players can engage the game and each other in a way that helps them grow. Our job isn’t to make imaginary worlds more tangible, or to give the player a taste of some larger experience. Our job is to help the player create their own worlds, and their own experiences, for themselves.Here’s the second point I want to make: We have to take full responsibility for the habits we plant in the brains of those who play with us. Build your games and toys around the things your players are going to be doing, and make sure the things they’re doing are in service to their own success and growth.
While this sounds like an obvious ethical necessity, it’s also financially risky. If people don’t like doing the things you’re inviting them to do, they’ll ignore your product! When games and toys create loops of activity - habits - that bring the consumer back into the game, or the intellectual property, or whatever it is, the question of whether the client thinks the product is actually fun becomes a lot less important!
If the client is habitually inclined to play a game until they need help winning - for the price of a microtransaction, let’s say - or if they’re constantly coming back to your intellectual property to feel some sense of connection to the world you built, then the question of whether they’re actually having fun is only affecting two of every seven decisions they’re making. Relying on those other five decisions to keep your customers engaged is just plain good business… but that’s also a relationship built on manipulation and false pretense. When you look around at how people have fun today, for the most part, it seems pretty clear that the habits we build through play aren’t empowering us in our happiness or our lives. So, let’s say we’ve designed something that invites our players to expand their world and grow as people. Let’s say that we’re inviting them to do things that we believe will be delightful, challenging, and inspiring for them. Are we having fun, yet? Did we do it?
Not hardly. Build that thing, whatever it is, and test it. Find the problems with it, whether those problems are technical design failures or just the nagging feeling that something isn’t right. Rebuild. Retest. Again and again, you have to redesign and reinvent your super fun thing… until it’s finally time to give it to other people, so you can see how it works for them. Which it probably won’t!
Making fun is an iterative process. You’re a mad scientist. Your process involves worldbuilding and storytelling. Your process involves neurology, and human behavior. Part of the process involves engineering, both in how you design the play itself and in how you understand the things your play is simulating.
Despite all the knowledge and experience you will most certainly develop through your labors, the biggest part of designing play is just a weird combination of experimentation and empathy. Letting people play and observing them in a present and unconditional way is a vast and vital part of our work, because you can never really tell someone how they’re supposed to play. All you can do, really, is give them better things to play with. Do that, and they will love you. Do that, and companies will pay you anything to bottle and sell what you’ve created. What they will find, every time, is that what you’ve created refuses to be bottled and sold.
It belongs to the players.
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The Ethics of Play
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As a working screenwriter and script doctor on more than 70 film projects, Tennyson E. Stead is teaching the fundamentals of success in screenwriting.
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