Games can invite players to try on moral identities, but players ultimately choose how to respond to this invitation. In this study, I explore how the design of a game and the context it is played in affect whether players tried on a moral identity when completing in-game actions. I interviewed seven students who had played an ethics game and asked what influenced their perception of the game’s ethical significance. After coding interview transcripts using an established framework of design and contextual features related to serious games, I found that environmental constraints, formal constraints, goals, and the game context all influenced whether students tried on moral identities during the game, suggesting a complicated relationship between player identity, game design, and game context.

Although board, card, and other analog games can serve as useful educational technologies, little research exists to support teachers’ efforts in finding analog games that are pedagogically appropriate or likely to be well-received by their students. In this study, the authors retrieved data associated with 208 educational games from the crowdsourced website BoardGameGeek. They used this data to summarize players’ description of games into 15 themes, mechanics, and genres that can support teachers’ comparison and evaluation of analog educational games. They then analyzed how these design features influenced player reception of these games—as evidenced by game ratings on BoardGameGeek. To do this, they used two models: a hierarchical regression (features were nested within themes, mechanics, and genres categories) and a flat stepwise regression (features were all at the same level). Both analyses indicated that themes were parsimonious and significant predictors of game ratings, suggesting that the theme of an educational game may be an important consideration for teachers. The findings of this paper present helpful initial guidelines for teachers, teacher educators, and others interested in educational analog games; however, holistic evaluation of analog games and thorough consideration of their pedagogical potential are important.

Today’s students face a wide range of complex moral dilemmas, and games have the potential to represent these dilemmas, thereby supporting formal ethics education. The potential of digital games to contribute in this way is being increasingly recognized, but the author argues that those interested in the convergence of games, ethics, and education should more fully consider analog games (i.e., games without a digital component). This argument draws from a qualitative study that focused on the use of an analog roleplaying game in an undergraduate activity that explored ethical issues related to politics, society, and culture. The results of this study are examined through an educational technology lens, which suggests that games (like other educational resources) afford and constrain learning and teaching in certain ways. These results demonstrate that this game afforded and constrained ethics education in both ways similar to digital games and ways unique to analog games.