Back when I was an undergraduate, I took a course on Social Issues in Interactive Media and Games. As part of this course, I had to play a variety of Facebook games with my class. Games on Facebook tend to be manipulative and are often designed in ways that exploit the player, so we needed to play and examine the designs of several of these games (I remember playing CityVille and some Marvel game).
I have always had a very negative view of Facebook games. While I trust Facebook's privacy settings, I don't trust Facebook games and apps to not annoy my friends with obnoxious posts and message. I know there are settings to stop this, but I was afraid I would miss something or that they wouldn't work, and my friends would still get annoyed. So for this class, I decided to create a second "gaming account" on which I would add my classmates and play games. Notably, this was the option suggested by my instructor if we were uncomfortable with playing the games on our personal account. I found that this worked fairly well.
However, now that I have read Dennen & Burner (2013), I realize that I was breaking Facebook's Terms of Service, which, like the rest of the world, I have never read. That said, I think it is still up for debate as to whether or not my instructor and I acted unethically. Ethics is about more than just following rules. I need to respect Facebook, the service I use for free, but I also need think about how am affecting others. Spamming others with useless junk isn't a good thing. Similarly, my instructor made that suggestion in order to keep his students comfortable online. Was he unethical for putting his students' comfort over rules. Another interesting aspect of this situation is that the lesson wasn't just using Facebook. It was about Facebook. In many situations, instructors could teach via other mediums. But teaching about Facebook without using Facebook would be much harder.
So what do you think? Did we behave unethically by creating another account for the lesson? Or is it ok to break rules in certain situations? Do you hate Facebook games as much as I do?
Hi Greg,
ReplyDeleteAs far as no harm was done i think it was ok! In my personal opinion, In some situations it is better to break some unnecessary rules, like this one, in order to avoid a bigger bad, which is to annoy your friends with all this advertisements of games.
I think it is important to realise that even you think that you use Facebook for free, the owners of Facebook make money on advertisements that you are watching there. So, it is a tricky thing.
And yes, I don’t like Facebook games. They are, like the most mobile games, nowadays, designed to pull as much money as possible from the players. I prefer to pay once for the game or monthly for subscription, but not for the box of digital gems :)
Thanks. I certainly never felt like we did anything bad. We broke a rule, but we weren't being malicious. We all have different ethical boundaries, and sometimes the rules and our boundaries don't align. In those cases, we have to make decisions that either break the rules or our ethical principles.
ReplyDeleteAnd the nature of Facebook being free is a tricky thing. If you think about, we are kind of the product in the system, with Facebook supplying our attention for advertisers. I don't know whether or not something is free should change our ethics necessarily. However, I think it does make our relationship to facebook a little less clear cut.
And I'm with you on the games. I'm old fashioned that way, but times are changing. It will be interesting to see where it goes.