It’s About Fate, Among Other Things: Digital Games, Dialogical Teaching, and Ethics

This paper presents preliminary findings from a study of how teachers use digital games as tools for dialogical teaching of ethics. Its central argument is that games do not automatically produce learning; their educational value depends on students' gameplay experiences being talked into meaning and connected to curricular goals. The research focuses on teachers, an underrepresented group in game-based learning research, and examines how the game's elements function as dialogical resources in authentic, non-interventional classroom settings. The theoretical framing draws on sociocultural discourse analysis and the Games as Tools for Dialogic Teaching model.

The study uses two qualitative case studies, observing seven teachers and their classes and conducting semi-structured retrospective interviews. The game in focus is The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012), whose narrative is punctuated by moral dilemmas. Teachers project the game in classrooms, pause at key moments, and ask students to apply ethical theories to the dilemmas before discussing competing solutions. Some teachers had used the game for years and others for the first time, which gives the sample a range of experience levels.

The preliminary analysis identifies three key findings. First, the moral ambiguity of the dilemmas fosters multivoicedness, as students adopt diverging positions that sharpen the contrasts between consequentialist, duty-based, and virtue-based ethics. Second, the dilemmas function much like classical thought experiments such as the trolley problem, which helps explain why most teachers found the game relatively easy to use; reported difficulties mostly concerned technical problems, time constraints, and students treating the game as a challenge to beat rather than a source of ethical questions. Third, the narrative links dilemmas into a coherent whole, allowing retrospective reflection on earlier choices and encouraging students to take on characters' perspectives, which many teachers felt made it safer to voice otherwise sensitive views and supported deeper analysis of ethical nuance.