Chapter 33 Exercises: Game Design Ethics

These exercises ask you to look hard at real games, including games you love. The point is not to produce a purity score or a blacklist of titles. The point is to build the skill of seeing design choices as ethical choices — and to build the habit of articulating what you would do differently if the choice were yours.

Work through these exercises in order. The earlier ones build vocabulary you will need for the later ones.

Analysis Exercises

A1. Dark-Patterns Audit — Three Games

Pick three games you currently have installed. You should choose:

  1. A free-to-play mobile or console game (ideally one with monetization you have actually used)
  2. A premium game (a game you paid for once, with no in-app purchases, or with only cosmetic DLC)
  3. A live-service game or one with a battle pass (Fortnite, Destiny 2, Apex Legends, Genshin Impact, etc. — anything with seasonal content)

For each game, walk through the following checklist. For each item, answer: present, absent, or partial. If partial, describe what form it takes.

Variable-ratio monetization - Loot boxes or their equivalent (packs, crates, keys, surprise mechanics) - Gacha pulls - Random cosmetic drops tied to purchase - Disclosure of odds (and is it readable)

Time-pressure dark patterns - Daily login streaks with consequence for breaking them - Limited-time events (how frequent, how long) - Countdown timers on purchase offers - "Season" structure that produces FOMO on content

Price manipulation - Crossed-out "original" prices on cosmetics (are they real prices?) - Bundled items where the "savings" is computed against prices that never existed - Currency obfuscation (how many currencies are there; are conversions clean?) - Minimum currency purchases that leave a remainder

Social dark patterns - Friend-pressure mechanics (gifting lives, asking for help, leaderboards) - Notifications designed to bring inactive users back - Public display of other players' spending (e.g., streamer/whale showcases)

Accessibility and inclusion - Difficulty options - Text size / color blindness / motor accessibility - Subtitles on voice content - Representation in protagonist, major NPCs, and non-cosmetic character options

For each game, write a one-paragraph summary: the overall ethical posture of the game, your best guess at the design intent behind the patterns present, and one change you would make if you were on the design team.

Total length: ~800-1200 words across the three games.

A2. The Whale Question

Look up publicly reported revenue numbers for one large free-to-play game (Candy Crush, Fortnite, Genshin Impact, Coin Master, FIFA Ultimate Team, or any other you can find data on). Find the monthly or annual revenue figure. Find or estimate the monthly active user count. Divide revenue by MAU to get ARPU — average revenue per user.

Now do a thought-experiment distribution. Assume that 1% of users contribute 50% of revenue. What is the average spend of that top 1%? Assume 10% contribute the next 30%. What do they spend? And what does the remaining 89% contribute on average?

Write a 300-word reflection on what these numbers mean. Who is the game actually serving, in a financial sense? What design choices would serve the top 1% most; which would serve the remaining 89% most; where do those conflict?

A3. Kids' Games Case

Pick a game rated E or E10 (ESRB) or PEGI 3/7. Play it for at least 30 minutes — or if you cannot stomach that, watch 30 minutes of gameplay on YouTube from a non-sponsored source. Answer:

  • What in-app purchase prompts appeared? How often?
  • Could a 9-year-old complete a purchase without adult intervention?
  • What data does the game appear to collect? (Check the privacy policy; note if it is COPPA-compliant or claims to be.)
  • What social features are present? What moderation is visible?
  • What dark patterns, if any, did you observe?

Write a 400-word brief to a hypothetical parent considering whether their 10-year-old should play this game. Be honest — don't moralize and don't dismiss; describe what you saw.

Design Exercises

D1. Redesign a Loot Box

Take Overwatch's original loot-box system (pre-Overwatch 2). Players could buy loot boxes with real money. Each box contained four items from a pool; items were cosmetic only (skins, sprays, voice lines, emotes). Probabilities were not officially disclosed initially (later published under regulatory pressure).

Your task: redesign this system so that it (a) preserves the player excitement of cosmetic collection, (b) generates meaningful revenue for the developer, and (c) eliminates the gambling-adjacent properties that made the original system ethically questionable.

Produce a design document, ~500-700 words, covering:

  • What replaces the random box
  • How monetization works (direct purchase? earned currency? both?)
  • How cosmetic rarity / excitement is preserved
  • What the player experience looks like when they want a specific item
  • What the expected revenue impact is (be honest — will it be less? more? same?)
  • One specific concern a product manager would raise, and your response to it

You can look at how Overwatch 2 eventually moved to a direct-purchase model and decide whether to do the same thing, do it differently, or do something novel.

D2. Ethical Battle Pass

Battle passes are a less-objectionable-than-loot-boxes monetization tool, but they are not ethics-neutral. They create FOMO (miss this season, lose this content), they encourage play-to-completion schedules that can feel obligatory, and they push players to buy "tier skips" when they fall behind.

Design a battle pass for a hypothetical 40-person co-op game that:

  • Provides the monetization structure the studio needs
  • Does NOT produce unhealthy play patterns (no rushing, no skipping sleep to finish, no FOMO panic)
  • Allows returning/lapsed players to re-engage
  • Works for the player who plays 3 hours a week as well as the player who plays 30

Include: pricing, duration, tier count, what happens to unclaimed tier rewards after the season, whether tier skips are available, what happens to a player who buys in on day 80 of a 90-day season. ~600 words.

D3. Monetization-Free Version of an F2P Game

Pick an F2P game whose core gameplay you enjoy. Imagine your studio has the rights to release a premium, monetization-free version of it. Players pay $20 once; they get the whole game. Redesign:

  • What you keep (core loop, characters, content)
  • What you cut (monetization hooks, treadmill systems, FOMO)
  • What you redesign (progression, if it was tuned for grinding; difficulty, if it was tuned to sell power)
  • What this version costs to develop relative to the F2P version

Write a 400-word pitch to a publisher explaining why this version might sell, who the audience is, and how you'd market it.

Critical Exercises

C1. Ethics Statement for a Game You Love

This is the hard one.

Pick a game you genuinely love — a game you have many hours in, that you have recommended to friends, that has been part of your life. The game should have at least one ethically questionable element (monetization, representation, accessibility, labor, or something else).

Write an ethics statement from the designer's perspective — first-person, ~600-800 words. You are that designer. You are acknowledging the ethical issues in your own work. Cover:

  • What you are proud of
  • What you would do differently if you could
  • What you could not change (commercial constraints, prior decisions baked in)
  • What you would do on your next game
  • What you want the player to understand about the choices that shaped the game

The goal is to practice the honest self-assessment that ethical design requires. It is easy to critique a game from outside. It is harder to critique one you love. Doing the latter trains the muscle you will need to critique your own work later.

C2. The Worker and the Player

Read one of the following (summaries or primary sources are fine):

  • Jason Schreier's reporting on Red Dead Redemption 2 crunch (Kotaku / Blood, Sweat, and Pixels)
  • The California DFEH lawsuit against Activision Blizzard (2021)
  • The Riot Games class action settlement coverage
  • A Roblox child-labor exposé (Wired, Bloomberg, People Make Games)
  • A Can I Play That? accessibility review of any AAA game

Write a 500-word response connecting what you read to a design choice in the product. Specifically: in what way did the internal workplace condition shape the design that shipped? Be specific — vague "bad conditions = bad games" analysis doesn't count. Identify a mechanism.

C3. Your Own Ethics Line

Write a personal ethics document for your own future work. This is not for anyone else to read; it is for you. ~400 words. Cover:

  • Game types you will not work on (if any)
  • Mechanics you will not implement (if any)
  • Conditions under which you would leave a job
  • What you will trade for commercial success and what you will not
  • What you will push back on internally even when it costs you

Keep this document. Look at it again in two years. See what has changed.

Debate Exercises

DB1. Gacha — For and Against

Write two essays of ~400 words each on gacha monetization. The first defends gacha as a legitimate, well-understood-by-players, economically-sustainable business model that funds otherwise-unfundable free experiences. The second prosecutes gacha as gambling-mechanic exploitation deployed at scale against populations who did not consent to being gambled at.

Write both. Steelman each side. Then write a 200-word personal reflection on which argument you find more compelling and why.

DB2. Hardcore-Only Difficulty

Some games (Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, historically Sekiro) ship with only one difficulty. Argue for and against this practice.

For: artistic vision, community cohesion, the specific experience difficulty produces that cannot be preserved at lower difficulties.

Against: exclusion of disabled players, limited-time players, older players with degraded reflexes; the false opposition of vision and accessibility.

~350 words per side, ~200-word reflection.

DB3. NFT Items in Games

Ubisoft Quartz failed. Most major publishers have backed off NFT integration. A subset of the industry continues to push. Argue for and against NFTs as a legitimate future of game items.

For: true digital ownership, cross-game interoperability, player-to-player economy, novel revenue streams.

Against: energy cost, speculation dynamics, pyramid-economics risk, indistinguishability from scam, no solved interoperability problem, vastly worse UX than centralized alternatives.

~350 words per side, ~200-word reflection.

Extended Exercises

E1. Monetization Timeline

Pick a live-service game you know well and build a timeline of its monetization over its lifetime. You will need to dig — use archived patch notes, press coverage, community threads, and Wayback Machine snapshots. Cover:

  • Launch-day monetization (what the game shipped with)
  • Each major monetization change, in order
  • The community reaction at each change, as best as you can reconstruct it
  • The revenue trajectory, where it is publicly known
  • The design changes that accompanied monetization changes

Write a ~600-word analysis of what the timeline shows. Most live-service games drift toward more aggressive monetization over time — did yours? If yes, what pressures drove the drift? If no, what held it in check?

Games that work well for this exercise: Fortnite, Genshin Impact, Overwatch / Overwatch 2, Destiny 2, Apex Legends, Hearthstone, Path of Exile, Warframe. All of these have well-documented monetization histories.

E2. The Five-Question Meeting Test

Take one feature from your progressive-project action-adventure game and run it through the "five questions" from the chapter:

  1. Who am I designing for?
  2. Who am I extracting from?
  3. What would this look like on the front page of a newspaper?
  4. What is the worst-case outcome for a vulnerable player?
  5. Am I being asked to design something I would not freely choose?

Write ~300 words per question, answered honestly about your feature. Then write a 200-word reflection on which questions surfaced something you had not considered. For most designers, at least one of the five will produce an uncomfortable answer. That is the exercise working.

E3. Reverse-Audit: A Game That Got It Right

Pick a game you think handles monetization, accessibility, or representation well. Not perfectly — no game is perfect — but better than its peers. Examples to consider: Celeste, Tunic, Hades, Stardew Valley, Deep Rock Galactic, Factorio, The Last of Us Part II, Cyberpunk 2077 (post-update), Path of Exile.

Write a ~700-word "positive audit" that names specifically what the game does well, why you think those choices were made, and what constraints the designers must have pushed back against to make them. The exercise trains the muscle of seeing ethical design as a set of active choices, not a default.

E4. Mock Meeting — You Are the Designer

Role-play exercise. Write out a meeting dialogue, ~500-700 words, between yourself (as lead designer) and a product manager who is asking you to implement a specific predatory feature. Pick the feature — a daily login streak with escalating penalties, a limited-time "starter pack" with a fake countdown, a legendary-gem-style multi-tier random-reward system, a lootbox-to-craft-parts converter, whatever you want.

Write both sides of the conversation. Your goal is to push back effectively. The PM's goal is to defend the feature using the standard industry arguments (revenue targets, competitor parity, "players want this"). End the scene with a concrete outcome — you got the feature killed, you got it modified, you lost and agreed to ship it, you escalated.

This is a rehearsal exercise. You will have this meeting, or something like it, someday. Rehearsing it now is practice for the real one.

E5. The Accessibility Pass

Run your progressive-project game through the accessibility checklist in Appendix I. For each category, score: already implemented, partially implemented, not implemented, not applicable. For each "not implemented" that is applicable, estimate the cost (in hours) to add it. For each "partially implemented," describe what is missing.

Produce a ~400-word summary: what the game currently supports, what you will add before launch, what you will cut for scope, and what you are explicitly declining to add (and why). This document becomes part of the ethics statement in the progressive-project update.

E6. The Long Letter

Write a letter — ~600 words — to a designer you will be in a decade. Describe the ethical commitments you are making now that you want that future-you to remember. Describe the compromises you are expecting to have to make and the line beyond which you do not want to cross regardless of pressure. Describe the work you want to have done. Describe the things you do not want to have ended up doing.

Put the letter in an email to yourself, scheduled to deliver ten years from now if your email provider supports it, or in a text file in a folder you check once a year. This is not a gimmick. Designers change slowly, over years, and the drift is invisible from inside. A letter from the person you used to be is one of the few tools available for catching the drift in time.

Deliverables

Submit:

  1. A1–A3 analysis (one document, ~1500-2000 words)
  2. D1–D3 design documents (separate documents, ~500-700 words each)
  3. C1–C3 critical essays (separate documents, as specified)
  4. DB1–DB3 debate essays (paired arguments + reflections)
  5. E1–E6 extended exercises (separate documents; E2 should be submitted as a structured document with each question's answer separated)
  6. A short (~200-word) overall reflection on what, if anything, has changed about how you think about games after doing these exercises.

Total expected output: ~8000-10,000 words. Time commitment: a weekend of focused work, minimum; some students will want to spend a week. The work is not busywork; these are the conversations you will be having for the rest of your career, and building the reps now is the point.

A Note on Grading These Exercises

If you are doing these as coursework, a note for your instructor: these exercises do not have correct answers in the conventional sense. They have honest answers and dishonest answers, thoughtful answers and lazy answers, and the grading should reflect that. A student who concludes that a game they love is ethically compromised and writes honestly about it has done the work. A student who concludes everything is fine has either not engaged or has something worth examining. The point of the exercises is the struggle, not the conclusion.

If you are doing these on your own, the same standard applies. You are not grading for a correct answer. You are building a habit of mind. The habit is what persists; the specific conclusions about specific games will all be wrong in a few years, because the industry and the conversation both change. The habit of asking — of refusing to let the questions stay unexamined — is what you keep.