Contribution Colour-Coding Key
Aysa / Camilla / Combined
Ethical Impact
Considering the themes of our game, ethics is an important thing to factor in throughout the design process. The narrative explores themes of online stalking and harassment, driven by misogyny and incel culture. These issues, unfortunately, are very prominent in modern culture and have affected many people’s lives. We have purposefully avoided basing the game’s story on any specific real event; we feel as though doing so would be disrespectful to the victims and may come across as us dramatising or romanticising this issue.
Instead, we have drawn more broad and unspecific inspiration from real life incidents surrounding these topics to inform the tone of the game. The game needs to be more serious in tone, with disclaimers in the menu screen to emphasise how much we discourage the behaviour portrayed in our game. Instead, we want to use our narrative to raise awareness of these sensitive topics in game media. Still, we need to ensure these topics are handled with care, respect, and responsibility.
How Will We Be Respectful in Today’s Moral Environment?
Don’t Exaggerate
Games tend to be intense and typically exaggerated in nature with entertainment appeal to the player. Given our narrative, we intend to avoid this theatrical approach. Instead, we aim to portray a very realistic point of view that is both saddening to viewers and hopefully eye opening. By highlighting the dangers and disrespect our main character faces, we will hopefully bring light and awareness to the danger of stalking and harassment online.
Don’t Portray Real-Life Cases
A lot of current media choose to replicate and retell real-life cases and situations, whilst sometimes this can be good, these companies are still profiting off of someone’s misfortune. Profiting off of someone’s story without permission is undoubtedly unethical, and this includes the possibility of accidentally misrepresenting a victim’s story or dramatising it for the sake of entertainment. As stated, our game is inspired by these real-life cases, but we intend to strongly state somewhere within the game that it is entirely fictional.
Support Resources
You never know what someone has experienced, and since the main themes of our game may be potentially triggering to some players, we intend to employ the appropriate content warnings. Whilst yes, this may ruin the ‘surprise’ of the game, it is important to consider people first before shock factor. Alongside this, we will also include the appropriate resources for anyone struggling with online harassment and stalking, even showing players how to properly report it during sections of our game that include said content. Properly informing players about the game’s nature and explicitly showing them how a sensitive topic such as this should be handled, will hopefully inform our playerbase on what to do if they happen to find themselves in a similar situation.
The Main Character Is More Than A Victim
We want our main character to feel realistic. It would portray the main character’s resilience alongside her vulnerability. Having a fully fleshed out personality and interests that have nothing to do with harassment and stalking, makes the main character personable and relatable to the player. The character’s defining traits will not revolve around the main themes of the game but rather her personal hobbies; this would only help to deter the mindset that ‘victims are simply victims’ or the idea of a ‘perfect victim’ which we see often within current media.
One of the main things we have considered ethically, going into the production of User_Unknown, is how the gameplay will work. The main thing we aim to avoid within our gameplay is portraying the stalker’s point of view. We don’t want to enable this behaviour and give people a platform to potentially play out their disgusting fantasies. Keeping the stalkers faceless and having them almost be background characters that are never playable, will deter people from potentially going into the game to romanticise these situations or have a torture simulation.