Playing the Belly of the Beast: Games for Learning Strategic Thinking in Tech Ethics

This paper, presented as an in-progress design study by Aditya Anupam of Georgia Tech, argues that tech ethics education has focused heavily on identifying ethical problems while neglecting the strategic skills engineers need to act on them within corporate environments, where dissent can bring retaliation. It asks whether digital games, and specifically interactive digital narratives, can teach students strategic ethical inquiry at a safe distance from the workplace. The answer is pursued through the design of Lights Out Warehouse, a conversation-based narrative in which players take the role of an automation engineer at a fictional e-commerce firm, NileCorp, tasked with automating warehouses while seeking outcomes that support workers, the company, and the player's own job.

The game is organized around three kinds of organizational structure: distributive structures governing how resources and wages are allocated and monitored, power structures shaping authority and collective leverage, and cultural structures such as market fundamentalism and technological solutionism. Player choices in multiple-choice conversations affect characters' trust, their support for unionization, and their preferences among full, selective, and assistive automation. The five planned acts move from research through decision-making and organizing to a final set of endings, with the best outcome achieved when workers unionize and assistive automation is adopted. The paper is a prototype description rather than an empirical study, so its claims about learning effectiveness remain untested; planned next steps include revising content through interviews with activists and engineers, classroom deployment, a tabletop adaptation, and student redesign of the game.