This fall's push for a video game industry code of ethics

A veteran game designer wants her industry to build trust with players and game workers.

A slide from a recent presentation at the Games for Change conference.

“I think there's a lot of things that we need to talk about,” game industry veteran Celia Hodent recently told me over lunch at The New School in New York City.

We were both at the university’s main building to attend the Games For Change conference. She and colleague Fran Blumberg, from Fordham University, had just given a talk about their hope of establishing a code of ethics for the game industry. 

The conference was full of people optimistically talking about the potential of games to make the world better. 

Hodent was focused on how to make gaming itself better, and was fully aware that the very industry she wants to help might not want the aid she’s offering.

She has a plan, though. She is taking an evidence-based approach to set up healthy guidelines for gamers and game workers, involving topics such as loot boxes and harassment. And she wants to get the industry involved this fall. 

She knows there are skeptics, so she also has a promise: “We don’t want to be the moral police.”

Hodent has worked on video games for two decades, with runs at Ubisoft, LucasArts and Epic Games. At Epic, she was the head of user experience—the field involving how players interact with a game or other piece of software—at the launch of Fortnite.

These days, she’s a user experience (UX) consultant and has done that work in parallel with establishing an Ethical Games conference and pursuing her dream of a collectively considered and widely adopted video game industry code of ethics.

The ethics work springs from the UX work, she told me, because the latter requires caring about how people interact with games. “Of course, the game has to sell,” she said. “But we put human interest first and foremost.”

When she talks about ethics in gaming, Hodent draws a line between “moral panics”—claims games can make players violent, for example—and areas where she believes there’s sufficient effort for some concern. 

She cites, for example, loot-boxes, the in-game mystery packs that contain randomized rewards and that have been heavily regulated in some countries. She mentions “dark patterns,” the term for the kind of clickable interfaces that easily lead a user to signing up for something they didn’t intend to get. (She doesn’t call out specific games, but cites regulatory scrutiny, lawsuits over game addition and perpetual pressure on the industry from outside critics.)

Those systems are used to fuel many games’ profits but might negatively impact players, she says.

Hodent has also been concerned about games that provide players ever-better rewards the more consecutive games they play. “This is not rewarding engagement,” she says. “It's punishing disengagement.”

And yet these systems are used because, she acknowledges, they work. They make money.

“For monetization, it is difficult, because you need to sell the game, and you have pressure from executives and stakeholders, for good reason, because it's hard to sell a game,” she says. “But sometimes there's some pressure to do these things without really taking into account: Could that be harmful?”

In 2020, Hodent joined a handful of industry professionals to propose a code of ethics for the industry. It’s posted online (click, then scroll down). She considers it a starting point.

Some examples from the preliminary code:

• The sum of the money that players have spent in the game overall (e.g. microtransactions) should be clearly communicated to them and this information should be easily accessible from the game home screen.

• Company employees interacting with players on social media should be supported and protected against potential harmful behavior and speech from the public.

In January, Hodent and her fellow organizers held the first Ethical Games Conference (videos available online) and last month published a research-based set of papers about the conference’s topics, through the Association for Computing Machinery.

One paper about microtransactions proposes, among other things, that:

“developers should refrain from using player data to target microtransactions or profile players inclined toward purchasing them.”

These kind of suggestions, she says, are dependent on good research, not gut feelings or outside alarmism.

Hodent’s next step is a series of online workshops this fall (dates TBA) held in conjunction with the Belgian KU Leuven Digital Society Institute and the Thriving in Games Group where she hopes to convene publishers, developers, scholars, educators, and policymakers to identify the priorities and goals for a code of ethics that industry players would sign on to.

“I want the discussion to be constructive,” she said. “We need to be evidence-based where we have data. And for where we don't have data, it would be great if we could get the industry to partner with the researchers so we can have a more nuanced conversation.”

She envisions a code of ethics that would be specific enough to help players and workers but general enough that it wouldn’t be quickly rendered obsolete. 

Hodent realizes that it might be harder to get buy-in right now, when workers are being laid off and corporate leaders are stressing over profits. She therefore has a pitch that goes beyond the code being simply the right thing to do.

“We can always make the argument that: ‘If we do it now, it is going to build trust with players, and in the long term, it's probably going to mean more revenue.”

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Item 2: In brief..

☹️ Meta has closed Ready At Dawn, the studio responsible for the well-reviewed Lone Echo VR games, as part of consolidation in the firm’s high-spending “Reality Labs” business, Android Central reports.

• Ready at Dawn was founded in 2003 and, prior to becoming a VR developer for Meta, produced a string of high-quality God of War and Jak & Daxter games for Sony’s PlayStation Portable.

💰 Warner Bros. Discovery is “considering offers to sell … a stake in Warner’s video games business, which holds valuable intellectual property to Harry Potter games, said people familiar with the matter,” The Financial Times reports. 

• During a call with investors this week, WBD leadership said they’re bullish on games, especially in the free-to-play sector, IGN reports.

• The outlet also noted that WBD CEO David Zaslav said the company is “looking at” a “lot of interest among others in coming to take advantage of some of that IP for gaming.” Such a comment can be read as WBD being open to licensing more of its Harry Potter, DC Comics and other franchises to other game companies. 

🤔 Sony sold 2.4 million PlayStation 5s from April-June this year, compared to 3.3 million the year before, the company announced this week. 

• While hardware sales were down, revenue and operating income were up due to favorable exchange rates, increases in first-party game sales and more spending on PlayStation Plus subscriptions, the company said.

• In a conference with reporters and investors, Sony president (and PlayStation chairman) Hiroki Totoki said recent cuts at Bungie would result in the studio focusing on the development of Destiny and Marathon, while shifting other projects and “office functions” to PlayStation’s overall group. He added: “We’d like to optimize our overall studio structure,” but offered no further details. 

🎮 Epic Games will begin selling some Fortnite items that were previously only offered as unlockables through its battle passes, but only once 18 months have passed since they were part of a battle pass’ chain of rewards, the company said on Wednesday, altering a longstanding policy.

♣️ Balatro, the enthralling poker-inspired strategy game that is one of 2024’s many indie sensations, has sold two million copies, per the game’s social media feed.

• Balatro will get a free update next year that “will bring new ideas and strategies to the game,” also per that feed.

👀 Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit, a new 2D horror game that extends the universe of Scott Cawthon’s famous horror game series was announced this week to release on PC on Thursday. It was pushed live early on Wednesday after a purportedly accidental early launch in Japan.

• As part of a celebration of the original game’s 10th anniversary, dev/publisher ScottGames also announced a console version of Into the Pit, a crossover with Dead by Daylight, a new mainline FNAF game from studio Steel Wool and… a kart racer called Five Laps at Freddys that has a demo out on PC.

🎬 The Borderlands movie, out this week, is reviewing poorly, scoring just a 3% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

• Takes have range from “a disaster” to “Lots of fan service moments, but ultimately I don’t know if it will resonate. 6.75/10," according to a Kotaku round-up.