David Millard

Back in 2017 I gave a keynote at Educall called “People Like You, Like Blog Posts Like This“, it was a reflection of ten years of doing research in Web Science, and a warning about the unintended consequences of technology – especially in the face of mass adoption.

Around the same time I was working on Storyplaces (which you read about here) a project to explore the poetics of mixed reality narrative games – what has also been called Locative Literature. Mixed reality games is all about overlaying digital content onto a physical location. Doing so changes the location, providing new ways to experience the space (a form of psychogeography), and I began to wonder – does the same thing apply here? What are the ethical implications of mixed reality games, and are we sleepwalking into a similar set of wicked problems?

I received some seed money from the Web Science Institute to explore the issue, and along with colleagues at the University began to explore the questions. We undertook a number of interviews with mixed reality designers to try to unpick the problems they perceived and the techniques they use to overcome them. Unfortunately for us, COVID hit around the end of the project, and we all found ourselves dealing with more pressing issues. The work we had started on ethics had resulted in a workshop paper that captured our initial thoughts, but stopped there.

When we later wrote the LoGaCulture proposal I was still hoping we might address the unanswered questions around ethics, and it became an important part of the project. The first year of the project has provided the opportunity to complete that initial work, resulting in a much more substantial literature review around mixed reality ethics (in order to identify a set of ethical dimensions) and (finally!) a proper analysis of our interview data (in order to identify a set of ethical strategies used to address them).

I am very pleased to announce that this work has now been published in ACM Games: Research and Practice, a premier journal for games research.

Dimensions and Strategies

In the paper we outline the ethical problems that have been identified in the literature. You can read the paper for the full details, but these were:

• Claim Rights – focused on the people associated with the place where the MR Game is situated, e.g. preserving cultural norms, or protecting them from trespass and Graffiti.
• Duty of Care – focused on the player of the MR Game, e.g. their safe passage and consent, and requirements for accuracy and fairness.
• Social Justice – focused on the social and cultural responsibilities of the designer, e.g. providing accessible and inclusive experiences, protecting people from harassment or exploitation
• Privacy – focused on the use of personal data, e.g. managing surveillance, protecting players information from each other
• Control – focused on respecting players freedom and agency, e.g. avoiding dark patterns, preventing player manipulation

From our interviews we discovered an extensive set of 15 strategies, covering 64 different tactics – concrete things to manage ethical concerns within a game project. These fit into 3 areas:

• Design Strategies – that apply during the conception and development of an MR experience: Practising inclusive design, involving stakeholders, developing an editorial process, through careful interaction design, and integrating with existing activities on site.
• Participant Management Strategies – that apply to the selection and support of players: Controlling who participates, training them adequately, framing the experience in a positive way, providing space for reflection, and giving them power over their personal data.
• Logistical Strategies – that apply to the management of the live experience: Live monitoring, pretesting, and undertaking pre-visit checks

What’s Missing?

The framework is really a description of the state of our undertsanding of ethics in mixed reality, and on reflection its clear that there are already deficiencies.

In particular we can see that Liberty Rights are not well reflected in the framework – these are the rights of expression and free speech that are so important to Western Democracies, and crucial in the European context. While professional codes of conduct steer us to respect rights of ownership, they do not tend to include this element of free expression that is clearly in tension with the Claim Rights of location stakeholders. One of the great challenges of Mixed Reality ethics will be striking the balance between these two groups.

The problem is related to issues of Authorised Heritage in the cultural heritage sector, effectively pointing out that the stories we tell about certain sites is heavily dependent on who is doing the telling. We can expect these conversations to be extended to mixed reality games at cultural sites, but the conflict with free expression goes beyond this, and the question of who can augment and change a place has no easy answers.

The LoGaCulture Commitment

Another observation is that many of the strategies rely on the judgements of the people executing them. For example, an editorial process is only as good as the editor. For this reason its clear that a purely ontological approach to ethics in mixed reality games is not sufficient.

For this reason within LoGaCulture we have developed a more dynamic commitment to ethics, that draws on these dimensions and strategies, but goes beyond them to setout a reflective and critical approach to ethics based around a four part commitment:

1. To critically engage with the ethical aspects of the case studies throughout the design, development, and deployment stages of the project.
2. To draw on the strategies identified in Section 3 as appropriate to reify this engagement, and to explore new strategies where they are missing.
3. To actively analyse our case studies for the ethical issues identified above, making no assumptions about the absence of bad actors, and to take measures to deal with those issues when they are found.
4. To work with our cultural partners within the scope of their cultural heritage values but to respect artistic freedom where possible, and to explore potential places for dissenting or alternative voices within the scope of the project.

Our plans now are to develop a set of tools that would help designers to think about ethical issues in their designs, and we are organising two workshops (NHT24 and EMRE24) where we will invite other researchers to come together and think about mixed reality ethics. Ultimately we would like this to lead to a LoGaCulture policy brief to inform legislators and heritage organisations about the ethical issues ahead.