Introduction
Ethics is the practice of enacting moral judgment to achieve a better life—the process of making choices according to one's own conception of how to be a good person. Games and simulations can be rich playgrounds for the practice of these ethical choices, as they offer the ability to iterate and reflect on multiple possibilities and consequences. As such, educators and researchers are beginning to consider the use of games in supporting ethical reasoning and character development. Moreover, games have been and continue to be the subject of conversations, controversies, and deliberations about ethics. Game developers, publishers, and the public often differ in opinion about the choices made in the creation, distribution, and promotion of a game, bringing up larger questions about the role of entertainment, art, and business in our society. The potential for games to foster ethical thinking and discourse—and not whether games are inherently good or bad—will be the thrust of this timely book.

Objective of the Book
Designing Games for Ethics will provide a diverse and comprehensive compendium of case studies, theoretical frameworks, and empirical research in the emerging field of ethics, values, games, and play. This book will take a cross-disciplinary approach, inviting research, critiques, and perspectives from computer science, education, philosophy, law, media studies, management, cognitive science, psychology, and art history. It investigates the following questions: How do we better design and use games to foster ethical thinking and discourse? What are the theories and methodologies that will help us understand, model, and assess ethical thinking in and around games? How do we use games in classrooms and informal educational settings to support moral development? A major goal of this collection is to bring together the diverse and growing community of voices and begin to define the field, identify its primary challenges and questions, and establish the current state of the discipline. Such a rigorous foundation for the study of ethics will help to appropriately inform future games, policies, standards, curricula, products, and the like.

Target Audience
The target audience is very diverse, ranging from practitioners of game development to journalists, to philosophers and educators. Researchers and students studying game design, media and games will find this an essential text for understanding how to better design, teach, and study the current generation of learners. Educators will use this to further their understanding of the potentials and limits of games, and how to creatively incorporate emerging technology into their curricula, standards, and policies. Game developers and publishers can use this text to further their designs, to help refine their choices and practices, and to better think through the implications of their decisions. Journalists, cultural critics, and reviewers can use this publication to consider alternate ways to view games and the nature of their controversies. Finally, this text will attract members of diverse academic, development, and consumer communities to interact, share and discuss findings, frameworks and theories.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following: