Rule Sets, Cheating, and Magic Circles: Studying Games and Ethics

Abstract

This paper provides frameworks for understanding how ethics might be expressed in gameplay situations, and how we can study the ethical frameworks that games offer to players. There are many ways to delve into such topics, and this paper considers only a few approaches. It briefly surveys some of the important questions and critiques arising from audience studies, theories of play and games, and work on cheating, and begins to build a framework for considering ethics in relation to games and players that transcends the “place apart” that games are often constructed as.