Video games' capacity for player choice makes them an excellent medium for expressing ethical dilemmas and developing the ethical thinking of players. However, translating complex ethical dilemmas to procedural games is challenging, particularly when the game creator intends to convey specific arguments in their work. This paper contains a close reading of ethical dilemmas in Fallout: New Vegas, Disco Elysium, and Frostpunk and applies Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of stratification as a means of understanding the process of collapsing the semantics of an ethical dilemma into the procedures of a digital game. It introduces the concept of consonance to refer to the consistency between procedural and semantic logic, and argues that the development of mechanics which maintain or enhance consonance is an important factor in creating persuasive procedural rhetoric about ethical topics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-531510 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Matte, Christian |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för speldesign |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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