Grant Recipients
Marcel O'Gorman, English Language and Literature
Mark Hancock, Management Sciences
Jason Lajoie, Council for Responsible Information and Technology
Jennifer Whitson, Sociology and Legal Studies
(Project Timeline: May 2021 - April 2022)
Description
- This project developed a game intended to prepare students to identify and engage with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of their research.
- The game has been built on Twine, a free and open-source tool for making text-based games.
- The efficacy will be trialed within three courses, and assessed using a pre- and post-survey that describes if and how students recognize ethical issues in their research related to tech innovation, as well as the Defining Issues Test, Version 2 (DIT2), which is a verified measure to assess ethical development.
- The game will be developed with input from faculty at multiple departments and schools at the university in disciplines related to design, game studies, and research-creation.
Goals
- Explore how a game can be designed to promote ethical consideration of the impacts of technological design among students.
- To offer one pressing instance of this larger set of issues related to this need, scholars like Timnit Gebru [1], Safiya Noble [2], Ruha Benjamin [3], and Simone Browne [4] have shown how tech innovations remain tainted by legacies of systemic colonialism, racism, and misogyny.
- Without broad uptake of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion principles, as practiced by responsible design, innovations will continue to perpetuate and entrench these systemic biases.
Objectives
- Develop a text-based narrative game intended to engage ethical thinking around topics related to ethical and responsible design;
- Deploy the game in three courses (one per semester); and,
- Develop and conduct pre-and post-survey testing to determine its effects
Findings
- Text-based narrative games can prompt critical thinking on ethical issues for some players—in this case ethics in tech, and the games industry in particular.
- However, the students to find this reflective practice most impactful will likely be those that already have a prior familiarity with narrative-based games.
- In addition, feedback has indicated that students would find the gameplay more engaging if more visual and aural elements were added to the gameplay.
Dissemination and Impact
- The research and practice involved in creating the game helped the student investigator with his dissertation preparation and provided a valuable opportunity to work on specific game/narrative design skills.
- Discussions of the study may be included in the dissertation itself.
- The game was playtested in ENGL 294: Intro to Game Studies and it will be featured in the Fall 2022 iteration of that course as an example of “critical game design”.
- Additionally, the game was featured as part of the Games Institute’s 2021 Annual Report to highlight members’ research.
- The student creator of the game intends to use the experience of making and sharing it as part of a conference presentation in the future, ideally at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI) to contribute to research on ethical tech engagements.
Implications
- The project has provided assurance that a text-based narrative game can, for at least some students, provide an interesting means for thinking through ethical issues in the real world.
- Involvement with this project has strengthened ties between the Critical Media Lab and Games Institute as its research goals coincide with both labs’ interests.
- The grant brought together faculty members from English, Computer Science and Sociology, allowing them to compare notes about teaching ethical approaches to tech design.
References
[1] J. Buolamwini and T. Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” in Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, New York, NY, USA, Feb. 2018, vol. 81, pp. 77–91, [Online]. Available: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html.
[2] S. U. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018.
[3] R. Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons, 2019.
[4] S. Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.
[5] C. Mitcham and E. E. Englehardt, “Ethics Across the Curriculum: Prospects for Broader (and Deeper) Teaching and Learning in Research and Engineering Ethics,” Sci. Eng. Ethics, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1735–1762, Dec. 2019, doi: 10.1007/s11948-016-9797-7.
[6] S. M. Lord et al., “Talking about a Revolution: Overview of NSF RED Projects,” presented at the 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Jun. 2017, Accessed: Sep. 12, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://peer.asee.org/talking-about-a-revolution-overview-of-nsf-red-projects.
[7] R. Chatila and J. C. Havens, “The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems,” in Robotics and Well-Being, vol. 95, M. I. Aldinhas Ferreira, J. Silva Sequeira, G. Singh Virk, M. O. Tokhi, and E. E. Kadar, Eds. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019, pp. 11–16.
[8] K. E. Björnberg, I.-B. Skogh, and E. Strömberg, “Integrating social sustainability in engineering education at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology,” Int. J. Sustain. High. Educ., vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 639–649, Jan. 2015, doi: 10.1108/IJSHE-01-2014-0010.
[9] Digital Education Strategies, The Chang School of Continuing Education, and Ryerson University, The Art of Serious Game Design. .
[10] K. Schrier, “EPIC: A framework for using video games in ethics education,” J. Moral Educ., vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 393–424, 2015.
[11] M. Consalvo, T. Busch, and C. Jong, “Playing a Better Me: How Players Rehearse Their Ethos via Moral Choices,” Games Cult., vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 216–235, May 2019, doi: 10.1177/1555412016677449.
[12] J. P. Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
[13] K. Squire, Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age. Teachers College Press, 2011.
[14] M. Kelly, “Designing Game-Based Writing Projects to Foster Critical Ethical Reasoning in the English Classroom: A Case Study Using Plague Inc: Evolved,” Simul. Gaming, p. 1046878120953592, Sep. 2020, doi: 10.1177/1046878120953592.