Human Value Based Game Design

Abstract

Human values play an integral role in human's life and accordingly in design for humans. Digital games as an influential media the same as other technical artefacts carry human values. However, considering human values in game design is not a common approach, which caused many ethical debates. HuValue is a card-based design tool based on a comprehensive value framework to help designers considering human values in different phases of their design process. This tool is created due to the lack of a comprehensive value framework for design and intended to be useful in general design practices. In this paper, inspiring from Values at Play project, we proposed three applications of HuValue for analysing games, defining vision and core value(s), and also translating the core values to action verbs and mechanics, which shows the capability of our tool for being used in game design area specifically for designing human value based games.