A theoretical and practical guide to integrating human values into the conception and design of digital games.
All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. “Big ideas” such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation―as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed―may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games. 
After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book's chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.

Values at Play in Digital Games

Computers & Technology

Mary Flanagan

Helen Nissenbaum

Games & Strategy Guides

The MIT Press

Bad Girls

Tells the stories of a variety of women as they struggle to cope with the complexities of modern life

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

ABACUS +

A strict Catholic upbringing in a small Maine factory town leads Rose to develop a self-destructive sense of reason, which she carries with her throughout her life, until a devastating relationship finally helps her to believe in herself.

Rose Reason

The Blue Woman and Other Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

A romance following the entanglements of four people: Eleanor, an American living in Britain; Jason, a megalomaniacal painter and Eleanor's lover; Clover, Jason's daughter; and Charles, a lawyer helplessly infatuated with Eleanor

Trust

United States

Scribner/Atheneum

Follow the story of a family that by chance finds a beautiful lake in New Hampshire. This book is filled with humor, sadness, and deep emotion.

Generations of Hidden Lake

Jackie Scanlan

Mark Flanagan

Self-published

Genre Fiction

Futura Publications

BLOOMSBURY

Soho Square is the first of a series of Bloomsbury annual anthologies of new works. It contains poems, essays, short stories and drawings.

Soho Square

FAY WELDON

DAVID LEAVITT

HELEN SIMPSON

Ahdaf Soueif

Deborah Moffatt

Alasdair, Gray

R. M. Lamming

Kurt Tidmore, Tobias Wolff, etc.

Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.

A crisp clean first edition.\nBy the author of "Trust" and "Rose Reason", this is a collection of stories about women of all ages who fail to behave as they ought.

Bloomsbury Classics

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Books by Mary Flanagan