Ethical Issues in Video Games: Insights From Reddit Discussions

Over the past few decades, the video game industry has seen exponential growth, evolving from basic entertainment into a sophisticated medium featuring immersive graphics, intricate storytelling, and highly interactive experiences. This rapid expansion has brought a host of ethical concerns to the forefront, including issues related to violence, gender representation, race, addictive game mechanics, and monetization fairness. These concerns have sparked ongoing debates on social media, yet public discussions on these matters remain largely unresearched. To address this gap, we conducted an exploratory study of ethical issues in video games by analyzing Reddit discussions through both manual analysis and machine learning techniques. We collected and examined 19,843 posts from a diverse set of stakeholders, including game designers, developers, players, and the people related to the players. Our findings offer researchers a foundation for further studies on the impact of specific ethical issues, aids practitioners in the development of more ethically grounded practices and facilitates regulatory bodies for shaping future policies. We also found that machine learning techniques are effective for extracting information about ethical issues in video games from large volumes of Reddit posts.