On political gameplay [Part 3]

In the last post, I explained how political gameplay can be applied in multi-player games. So what’s the case in single player-games, which in the so-far called “political games” are the majority.

In my first post, I claimed that in these traditional political games, the players do not experience political gameplay, but rather “play” with politics. For multi-player games I proposed a gameplay that instead of imposing ideology onto the players, it would rather afford for the players reveal hidden ideology that already exists in their subconscious minds. Under this scope, in single player players, political gameplay takes a form of ethical gameplay. Ethical gameplay, as already examined and assessed by Miguel Sicart (see The Ethics of Computer Games, The banality of simulated evil: designing ethical gameplay), addresses ludic interactions that challenge the players’ ethics. In single player games, it can be easily prescribed by allowing the player to make non-systemic ethical decisions.