Ethics and Environmental Impact of Video Games

As video games grow in popularity, concerns regarding their ethical and environmental implications are brought up. While once, topics like their impact on child development or harm to Earth might have been considered minor or irrelevant, these concerns are now voiced in numerous articles across the internet, amplifying the urgency to develop games in an ethical context before matters are blown out of proportion. For the purposes of exploring both past and present views, this work draws from older and newer sources surrounding many topics on the idea of game development in the video game industry. Essentially, video game development raises ethical concerns relating to topics such as child development, representation, and data privacy while also causing potential environmental implications such as its carbon footprint, additionally adding to the ethical concerns of game development. These concerns highlight the need for a proper balance between innovation and ethics. To begin this conversation, let’s first define what we mean by ethics, in our context. According to Britannica, ethics is what one considers morally good or morally bad (Singer, 2024). While the concept of good or bad can differ from person to person, when considering ethics in a game development perspective, we might consider an overall, general, consensus. Additionally, since we are referring to game development, in specific, we might consider how the development process for video games can define a morally good or morally bad outcome and how this opinion might have differed many years ago, as opposed to what it looks like today.