Jose Zagal just presented our co-authored paper, “Good Violence, Bad Violence: The Ethics of Competition on Multiplayer Games” at the DiGRA-FDG 2016 conference. It’s coming out in the conference proceedings soon, but, if you just can’t wait, you can get your hot little hands on the final version right here.

There’s a more formal abstract, but here’s a quickie version:

There’s a whole set of fascinating questions about the ethics of competition. Some kinds of competition seem healthy and transformative – they take our hostile impulses and turn them into something positive for all involved. Other kinds of competition seem problematic, including, perhaps, trash-talking, spawn-camping, and ganking. But where’s the line, and how do we draw it? The paper argues against certain standing accounts that provide a simple, unidimensional answer. One target is the view, from the philosophy of sports, that all that matters is player consent. Instead, we use a magical sprinkle of Bernard Suits’ work to argue that morally good competition requires a whole host of factors in alignment, including player consent, successful game design, and psychological fit. Many older views tend to locate all the moral lifting in the intentions of the players. Our view distributes that responsibility between the players, the game designers, and the structure of the player community.

(This paper is the first published tip of a massive and sprawling project that I thought was just one quick idea, but has metastasized into multiple distinct papers on various aspects of the morality of game competition. Turns out: it’s a complex topic.)