University of Tübingen

Big Brother Meets Joystick: Ethical Perspectives on Surveillance Imagery in Digital Games

This paper examines how surveillance is depicted in digital games and evaluates those depictions from an ethical and epistemological standpoint.

• Games shape players' imaginaries of surveillance, and their depictions, both visual and mechanical, can either normalize questionable monitoring practices or make distributed surveillance visible and open to critical reflection.
• The authors propose a two-dimensional framework for analyzing surveillance in games: visual aesthetics (e.g., eye-in-the-sky cameras, scan lines and glitches, blue/green overlays and binary code) and ludic, rule-based embedding.
• Many games, including some ostensibly critical of surveillance, reward players for hacking cameras or data mining in consequence-free minigames, which can create a false sense of empowerment.