Designing Moral Games: A Manifesto for Ethical Imagination (2024-present)
A BOOK TRILOGY IN PROGRESS that examines how games and digital systems encode ethical values—and why designers are increasingly called to take responsibility for the rules, outcomes, and identities they ask players to inhabit.
Moral Code
What We Owe Our Players: A Field Guide to Deontological Game Design
Moral Code explores deontological ethics as the foundation of rule-based systems. rom game mechanics to the everyday, the book examines how obligation, fairness, and consent are encoded into structures that govern not only justice, but also behavior. Using examples from AI regulation, family court cases, AAA and Indie games, it argues that ethical design begins with knowing what can and cannot be commanded, knowing what is possibly universalizable, and our duty to each other in a peaceful society.
Moral Engine
The Game of Greatest Good: A Field Guide to Utilitarian Game Design
Moral Weight interrogates utilitarian ethics in optimization-driven systems. Through examining climate change scenarios, AAA and social impact games, and metric-obsessed platforms, the book asks what happens when outcomes justify harm. In a culture increasingly governed by scoring, efficiency, and engagement metrics, it challenges designers to reconsider whose well-being is counted—and whose is expendable.
Moral Compass
Who We Become When We Play: A Field Guide to Virtue in Game Design
Moral Center applies virtue ethics to character creation, role-play, and streaming culture. Focusing on avatars, parasocial design, and performative identity, the book examines how games shape moral character over time. In an era where selfhood is practiced publicly, it asks what it means to design systems that cultivate integrity rather than spectacle.
This is the first three paragraphs of the introduction to:
Moral Code: What We Owe Our Players: A Field Guide to Deontological Game Design
I didn’t come to art and game design to entertain.
I came to it because watching how decisions that shape our lives—by algorithms, governments, corporations, politicians, institutions, parents, teachers, colleagues, neighbors, artists, and yes, game designers—have often been devastating. At the time of this writing, federal agents patrol cities like Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Boston, Portland, and Chicago (NPR, 2025). Will the protesters be successful? What city is next? The behavior of the ICE agents mirrors the Brown Shirts (Siemens, 2017) and I fear for what we will leave to our children and grandchildren.
I noticed inequality and personal violence for the first time in my life around the age of fourteen. I was aware of the bullies at school picking on people who were somehow “different.” I remember asking my dad, “Why do people hurt each other so much?” And I cried. I didn’t have the words for it yet but I was crying for all the people who were excluded or hurt based on their gender or skin color or ability. I cried for the veterans and the people of Vietnam—the first war I remember seeing unfold. I will never forget my father’s face. He looked overwhelmed, unsure of how to console his teenage daughter weeping for the world. But what he told me that day never left me. He said, “The most we can do is work for a better world. You can be a part of the solution. Find a way to make it better. Everyone has something special to give the world, find your passion and use your talents to make a better world.”
I make art. I make games. I notice details. I have a firm, abiding belief that play is the antidote. These are the gifts that I can use to move the needle. Play is our process of learning how to be together, work together, decide things together, and survive together (Brown, 2009). It is an approach to administer the antidote. It’s how we practice being human. The people of Portland (Lozano, 2025) and Ronald Rael (Rael, 2021) (Rael, 2017) both agree with me. At least their actions using play as a form of resistance speak to this idea.
