Ethical
Within the games industry there are many instances of ethical issues that affect the developers, consumers and anyone who becomes involved along the way (be it reviewers or other people in the media). An ethical issue is anything that can be taken as 'offensive' or potentially 'dangerous' towards a certain group of people or activity, this often comes under two general themes.
The first of these would be a specific part of a game being deemed ethically wrong due to the way it makes people think towards a certain people, in this example the problem drawn is regarding racism. The first Resident Evil 5 trailer had massive repercussions on the developers as it depicted a main character from the Resident Evil series coming into violent contact with a group of infected (Zombies), now on the surface as a description this is perfectly acceptable and almost cliche of games that came out around that time but when you actually see it from an outside point of view it looks like a rather well-built white American man killing a lot of defenseless African people. This was met almost instantly with media uproar that this game is racist, out of context this it's clear to see why this conclusion is drawn and from the inside of the industry we see that companies like Capcom that develop their games are a little too close to even make this comparison and therefore assumption that what they've created is racist because to them they know it's a protagonist trying to survive against creatures that are no longer human, but from an outside perspective this seems blatantly thoughtless and offensive.
The second point to make on a different tangent towards ethical problems in games is the assumption that people develop around how they think games will affect people's behaviour. We as gamers understand that playing Mario doesn't make us want to jump on turtles for example but even from early instances of graphically redundant video games there is uproar about them being far too violent (Death Race for example), this isn't helped by the advance in visual technologies that now mean we can depict things that seem so lifelike that these issues are actually brought up with some clout. Many examples are drawn of people coming to the conclusion that children who play video games will take their life lessons from ways in which they interact with a fantasy world within a video game that may seem so realistic that they will apply these to their own life, for example killing a prostitute to get your money back or killing someone with a claw hammer because Manhunt was released recently. These issues take place under other contexts of gameplay aswell other than just violence, there are examples of ethical problems that come from anything from people who see certain things as horribly explicit sexually, or even moral choices regarding 'religious' content about an in-game belief system so to speak.
Developers have to be constantly mindful over these issues when creating a game so that they don't offend people as they can alienate an entire portion of their potential market simply by offending them within a game in a way that was not intended to be seen as that at all. As mentioned above a lot of times in which these problems seem to get past developers is when they are too close to the thing they are creating and literally just don't see a problem, which draws another good point. Does noticing something is racist make the people who have developed it racist, or is it the person who comes to that conclusion? The trouble with ethics is that it is entirely dependent on the position of the person viewing it, which is why some issues seem ridiculous to some of us (especially within the industry or at least close conjunction with it's mechanics), and equally perfectly understandable and valid to people either on the outside who take personal offense or parents, for example, who want to protect their children from certain things that may be within a video game.
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