123B. Defining Digital Morality in Gaming

The idea that someone would define morality for me would make me uncomfortable. So how and why would someone go about this? Is it even appropriate to try?

Where do you even start on the road for making rules for others to follow? Politicians do this all the time, and in a functioning democracy or republic they can claim some public authority to do so. Technology, and especially psychometric modelling, has put even that authority into question as people can now be manipulated into giving up their rights very easily under false pretences.

So who can you trust? Does that even matter anymore? You are going to be told what to do in this life, and your ability to comply is going to determine the difficulty level of the real life game you play. I personally am a big fan of consent, and given how I’ve been treated in life by authority figures, I have pretty serious authority issues. I’m not a fan of the fact that Fate has made me an Authority. The death threats that come along with it are an unwanted bonus.

Why Me?

No governmental body protects me. No academic institution protects me (more on that next), and some in industry find my existence inconvenient. My family members have instructions not to post or tag pictures of me with them on social media, for their protection. My status as an ethicist cripples my industrial career. The only company I know of that hired them recently was Microsoft, and they fired them faster than they hired them.

I wrote about some of these challenges in my first paper written after I joined Substack: Protecting Children: The Job No One Wants. People on LinkedIn treat me like I’m boasting about what I do. Like it’s some privilege. If you look at it that way, it really is a privilege. But it’s not like anyone else wants that privilege.

Look behind me. Who else is in line for this job?

No one.

I wasn’t picked by European regulators to assist them with defining right and wrong in the digital age because I was the best candidate. I was picked because I was the only candidate. No one else was willing to write about the subjects they needed to produce regulatory policy. That’s what they told me when they first contacted me. That I was their only source. I certainly didn’t volunteer to do this. When you are told that you are needed to protect children and that if you decline, it won’t happen… What do you do?

Of course that scenario didn’t happen by accident. I didn’t fly out of my mother’s womb writing papers on interactive media ethics. When I was applying to the economics and interactive media programs at USC for my PhD I found the two best people I could to be mentors and they accepted. One was Professor Mike Zyda, the creator of the GamePipe Lab, the primary feeder program for Blizzard Entertainment.

The other mentor was Professor Henry Jenkins, the Godfather of transmedia. His knowledge of media and its evolution is unchallenged. Gaming is not his specialty, but it’s under his umbrella. When Congress investigated the Columbine Massacre, where some hardcore gamers shot up a school and shocked the world, Dr. Jenkins is who they called to testify. He gave very pro-industry testimony and he’s clearly very smart about navigating politics.

Both read my 35 page Sustainable Virtual Economies and Business Models paper that I wrote in 2009 to establish formally the field of game economics. I also submitted this to the admissions board. Dr. Zyda told me the contents were worth at least $250,000 USD (in 2009) to industry, so that’s why I never published it. Dr. Jenkins told me it was very advanced material and demonstrated my level of expertise in the subject matter.

I told him at the end of 2009 that the next time Congress called to get expert testimony on a gaming related matter, I wanted it to be me instead of him. I didn’t mean any disrespect and he didn’t take it that way. He fully supported my goal but of course I would have to prove that I was “that guy”, and that meant I had to publish to establish that expertise.

Despite such strong sponsors, merit, the highest GPA of all applicants, and my paper submission, I ran into a hitch. Dr. Jenkins told me that USC had rejected me for “non academic reasons”. Dr. Jenkins is a legend, and of course fully tenured. That means he’s protected and can’t be fired. But something threatened him enough that he couldn’t tell me what was going on. Whatever it was, forces way above my pay grade had assembled against me. Whatever it was, clearly my academic path had come to an end even though I had done all that was asked of me. I give some thoughts on what happened there in my paper on Scientific Cynicism.

So far we have two reasons why I’m the person in this role:

1. I was the only candidate.

2. I’m free from academic and political influence. I would add that I’m almost entirely free of industrial influence.

When the UK Office of Fair Trade contacted me in 2013, after the call the first thing I did was contact Dr. Jenkins and ask him for advice. He was quite happy that I had reached that goal. He said I was ready and I was the right person. I got the impression that he was actually relieved that he was not under that responsibility anymore. Some day in the future, maybe someone else will come and take the burden from me as I did with Jenkins. Then I can post pictures of me and my lovely partner on the internet like normal people in my final days.

Knowing that this is my Fate, and that I essentially asked for it, fills me with resolve. There’s no one else rushing up to hand off this baton to. I’ve had allies before in the effort to protect children, and they’ve all aged out or otherwise got tired. But now things have gotten serious enough that it’s not just about children. Adults are threatened by the way interactive media is heading, and I warned regulators in 2013 that this was coming if they did not act promptly.

Obstacles to Morality in the Digital Age

The idea that there is some universal morality that all civilizations share was addressed briefly in the previous paper. This is called normative morality. When I went about trying to define the key elements of game economics, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. So I went to the source for conventional economics, Adam Smith. He established the foundation and rules for the field in his The Wealth of Nations (1775). In the 2009 paper I submitted to USC, I approached the task in a style similar to Smith’s.

For morality, I tried a similar approach. I studied a number of religions to get clues to modern normative morality. The problem I encountered is that they were written 2000 plus years ago, and the modern issues at hand were entirely incomprehensible back then. Some concepts like “protecting children” were so normative that they were unwritten. Any society that didn’t include that as a moral standard, those societies don’t exist anymore.

High courts in various countries are constantly strained to write laws to constrain the authoritarian ambitions of various groups like politicians or police. Any ambiguous area that has not been decided clearly in law is exploited mercilessly by bad actors, for economic reasons or power. As humans progressively collapse the ecosphere, life will keep getting harder, as our ability to eat the planet and each other will advance, and people will get more desperate. The need to set boundaries will only increase. The careful way that we created those boundaries over decades in the past is now insufficient to deal with the pace of “progress”.

Ultimately, a lot more resources will need to go into regulation and the whole process and infrastructure of regulation will have to become much more sophisticated. The way it is done now, including the way I was contacted, probably has not changed much in the last 300 years. When the ICPEN had the Panama conference in 2013, where I testified, the major players (the USA and China) just didn’t show up. They wanted the rest of the international community to know they would refuse to be bound by the ICPEN despite being members.

With the exit of the UK from the EU in January of 2020, the CPCN (the regulatory body for the EU) updated their enforcement rules and powers. Since then they have moved aggressively (for regulators) to protect their citizens, knowing that they could not count on support from the USA, UK, or China. Of course this also meant they didn’t need consent from those other powers.

The Moral Principles

What religions do provide is a set of Moral Principles that all the rules for their culture use as a guiding North Star. While those Principles may be insufficient for our purposes, they do show a system for how it can be done. So here we do the same thing. I will list the Moral Principles that the EU is utilizing, which one of my papers described these Principles going back as far as 2013, and how those Principles are being used to generate legal language and guidelines.

Note that when I describe my papers as source material for European regulators, I’m saying that because in 2013 they explicitly told me they were using my papers for this purpose. I have not had contact with these regulators since 2013. So in cases where I list source materials that they seem to be using post-2013, I’m making an assumption based on the similarity of wording but I don’t have explicit confirmation that they used those papers as source materials.

Note that any paper I put into the public space is intended to be public information. I want people to use that to make their works better. Regulators certainly can do this without asking me for consent or citing me. I have noticed others in social media parroting my works without crediting me. They seem to be feeding my papers into AI and reposting them without citing me in order to appear expert. This is inappropriate behavior that I do not consent to, and readers of such material (especially from “game economists”) should beware.

The CPCN has been tracking/studying “Dark Patterns” since 2017. I believe the source material here is 55P. The Future of F2P: The Force Wars, from 2017 where I introduced the concept of “Darksiding” and addressed regulators directly:

I used a “Star Wars” theme in this paper which of course would be inappropriate for regulators, thus the minor name change which apparently was agreed upon in 2024. The use of “shrinkflation” to reduce product volume covertly without reducing price is a similar technique used in real space.

I elaborated further on why raising prices with data analysis while reducing product value would cause a future crash in the industry (which we are in the middle of) in my earlier Data Implosion paper.

“Dark Patterns” (which I will call DPs from here) are a very broad category, extending to literally anything that regulators consider unethical/illegal consumer-antagonistic efforts to exploit consumers of any age.

Source materials would primarily be my related papers and an aggregate of consumer and member country complaints about various issues. The latter often are not addressed by my work. The works that I believe (post 2013) or know (2013) are being sourced for the DFA are:

Two Contrasting Views of Monetisation (2011, presumed source) “Fun Pain” used to manipulate and harm consumers (including children, topic: Zynga) is explained.

Zynga Analysis (2011, Presumed source for DP 15: “Friend Spam”) Also discusses the unrestricted sale of game credit at stores to bypass parental consent.

Gaming Addiction (2012) My first written input on the subject. This led to PBS asking me to talk on the subject in 2013. From the DFA:

The Top F2P Monetisation Tricks (2013) This paper went super viral and was translated to over 20 languages by the community. King sending lawyers after me and Gamasutra just made it more viral. The iconic paper on DPs.

Systems of Control in F2P (2013) Explains how industry uses psychological warfare to obfuscated prices and purchase decisions. Key source for DFA:

Monetising Children (2013) The document regulators cited as the reason they contacted me.

Free is Getting Very Expensive (2013) More about how industry tricks consumers. I believe this was an uncredited source for the South Park episode “Freemium Isn’t Free” which aired 10 months later. Ironically (of course) I am “The Devil” in this episode, who basically reads from the above papers, and ends up being the good guy.

Compassion in F2P (2013) Warns against targeting people with mental conditions that might be especially susceptible. Industry really did not like this paper, arguing intensely that that’s not their responsibility. This paper introduces the key arguments in support of the CPCN’s 7th and largest Principle:

And directly from the DFA:

Secrets of F2P: Threat Generation (2015) Explains how developers threaten players into spending, and gives instructions on how to identify these techniques major developers such as Supercell use.

How the ESRB is Promoting Children’s Gambling (2017) This article on how the USA body responsible for protecting children was actually targeting them with gambling content. This removed any illusions that USA regulators would cooperate with EU regulators.

I’m getting close to wrapping up here due to size limits. But there is even more here that is not in the DFA.

Principles NOT in the DFA

The legal rational for many of the rules proposed in the DFA are very complicated and potentially tricky to enforce. Some involve things we know are going on, but are very far from having enough data/science to properly communicate, much less regulate.

Digital Drugs: Gambling and other mechanics designed to manipulate dopamine in games and social media enjoy widespread use. I’m possibly the world’s top proponent of designs that tap into additional and even less understood neurochemicals in the human body. In a way, having Digital Drugs ignored in the DFA is convenient for me. I’ve had a team of neuroscientists on standby to run studies on my DDs as I deploy them, since 2014 when the studies were greenlit by Wargaming. If that happens, these might be the primary academic sources for information on the effects of DDs. At that point I think it would be important for developers to disclose in advance that these mechanisms are used in the game, to allow consumers to choose if they are comfortable with DDs being used to get a “higher high” than what is possible in legacy games.

Threat Generation: The DFA dances around this but does not tackle it directly. Again, this is likely because it is difficult to define. Regulating this might involve a “Stress Score” attached to a game, which would involve the additional expense of testing/measuring this prior to game release. Fortunately, my neuroscientists have developed the technology to do all of these tests in seconds without blood draws. Once it is demonstrated and published, I think regulators and consumers world-wide will want this information attached to new products.

The key things are consumer education, product testing, and consumer consent if a product uses significant DD technology. Perhaps this might also involve DD-capable designers like myself being identified and independently regulated before they are allowed to do what… I already do. [It does occur to me that if society continues to be intolerant of deviant technological paths/education, I could end up 10 or even 20 years in the future being the only person (self) trained to do these things. In this case it would be a waste to regulate one person. The usual strategy for dealing with Anomalies like myself is to partition them from society to avoid the complexities, tolerances, and self reflection that my existence forces upon others.]