TWEAKING MORAL COMPLEXITY IN VIDEOGAMES? OPTIMISING PLAYER EXPERIENCES ON BASIS OF MORAL COMPETENCE.

The gaming industry has been, compared to social media platforms, rather slow in developing its effective methods of game analytics. Considering the difficulty of interpreting player behaviour, this might be no surprise, yet the possibility of modelling player ethics might bring more reliable user metrics. Modelling ethics is the creation of user profiles based on their ethical decisions in-game. Recent publications in that field show an increasing interest in this practice and consider the outcome of succeeding in creating profiles containing data on applied player ethics as highly valuable. Modelling ethics is still not a well-studied practice, but its implications in perspective to cases of data abuse by Big Tech companies seem troubling. It is important to consider, interrogate and discuss the possibilities of this emerging practice critically. How can ethical profiles be rendered? How does inconsistent player behaviour affect the ethical metric? Who owns this kind of data, and for which purpose is its utilisation admitted? These and many more questions must be addressed immediately before unethical practices take place, and policies lag behind. Therefore, we intend to present the work of Pereira Santos to define the modelling of ethics as a new method of Game Analytics, how it can be applied, which data it can extract and how it can be interpreted. Further, we propose a new experimental design for how the modelling of ethics may be approached. For that, we want to shift the attention from trying to create full-fledged ethical profiles of players to their measurable moral competence as a more reliable metric. Moreover, we discuss the prospects of modelling ethics and the moral implications for the industry and move towards a conclusion that urges immediate policies to address the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]