Embedded Ethical Experiences: Designing Playable Case Studies for Ethics Education

Providing learners with authentic ethical situations in a formal educational environment can be challenging. While we encounter ethical situations daily (e.g., how we treat those around us; temptation to illegally use copyrighted content), some types of ethical situations are high-risk, rare, and/or embedded into contexts that learners don’t typically inhabit. For example, learners studying user experience design may someday be pressured by a boss to implement “dark UX” patterns to increase sign-ups by deceiving users. Learners can benefit from the ability to practice recognizing unethical behavior, making decisions in ethically complex contexts, and learning from their responses. A new genre of highly realistic educational simulations, called Playable Case Studies, can provide a context in which players can experience ethical conundrums in a safe environment, helping learn from mistakes and successes. In order to make the experience authentic and not obviously about ethics, it makes sense to embed ethical experiences into simulations focused on other topics in which ethical issues arise. An example of this approach is described, wherein an ethical situation is embedded within a cybersecurity Playable Case Study called Cybermatics. Many questions remain about how to design and evaluate such experiences in ways that lead to effective learning.