Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney. Tonight, I'm joined by

Rowan Kaiser. Hello. And freelance writer, Ruth Cassidy. Hello. So today we're going to be

discussing the challenges and different approaches to depicting ethical dilemmas or modeling the dynamics

of worlds governed by amorality or immorality.

Rowan, you were moved to this topic after reading Ruth's excellent story,

ethically designing unethical worlds for game developer.

This is an angle on strategy games that I think we touch on every few years.

It certainly comes up a lot in our conversations.

But I'm curious

where you see some of the most salient issues in the strategy games landscape around this topic

right now. I think that like this is a thing that the grand strategy games and the big four-xes are really starting to deliberately get into.

Civilization sort of started with it, with its approach to nuclear war and global warming,

and then it went away from it, and now it's kind of trying to push back on it.

But the paradox games are really, really like

trying to walk that tight rope of depicting historical events versus endorsing historical events

in games like Crusader Kings where you can commit eugenics on your children or Hearts of Iron,

which World War II is pretty difficult ethically to break through. So that's sort of my initial

take on it. There's also like all kinds of different other, different other forms. And Ruth's

article was city builders, which I think it centers on Frostpunk as one of them,

which is like just built on that entire idea of how do you, how do you ethically build a city

in a world where, you know, you have to be a complete asshole to survive.

So, yeah, there's lots of different vectors, but my initial one personally was the grand

...