Exploring the Creative Potential of Values Conscious Design: Students' Experiences with the Values at Play Curriculum

Belman and Flanagan's 2010 study examines how undergraduate game design students engaged with the Values at Play curriculum, a four-week program that teaches students to embed social and political values into game design. Drawing on a focus group of six students, three women and three men, and analysis of their design documents, the authors apply grounded theory methods to understand how students grasped and applied values-conscious design. The work's central contribution is an account of the practical and conceptual difficulties students encounter when trying to make values explicit in games rather than leaving them implicit in mechanics and conventions.

The findings indicate that students came to recognize how values are often embedded in game features without deliberate intent, but they struggled with two recurring tensions. The first was reconciling values-conscious goals with the imperative to make games fun, and the second was resisting conventional genre clichés such as violent conflict. Students developed three broad strategies to address these challenges: repurposing familiar mechanics, adopting unwinnable or unconventional win states borrowed from serious games, and inventing original mechanics designed to foster empathy, such as a language-barrier mechanic in the game Cabbies. The authors conclude that values-conscious design can coexist with entertainment, pointing to Peacemaker and Hush as exemplars, while noting that the most engaged students produced the most coherent values-focused work.

The study's scope is deliberately narrow: it centers on a single curriculum, a small focus group, and undergraduate game design students in a specific educational context. The authors explicitly caution that their results reflect the most engaged participants and should not be taken as representative of the broader class. The project was supported by National Science Foundation funding and builds on Helen Nissenbaum's philosophical framework, situating its inquiry within longstanding debates about whether technological artifacts embody political values.