Teaching Ethics in Online Environments: A Prototype for Interactive Narrative Approaches

Ethics is an important part in the training of professionals. Most associations have their own code of ethical practices, and many public and private institutions highlight the importance of integrating ethical standards into their practice. Due to this, ethics already appears, in one way or another, in almost every syllabus in professional and higher education courses. Nevertheless, ethics is often taught in a descriptive fashion that refers almost exclusively to regulations, and thus ethics quickly becomes a matter of compliance. Learning ethics, however, should also lead to becoming skilled in the sort of ethical awareness, reflection and reasoning capabilities that is needed to anticipate, understand and react appropriately to current and future challenges that can seldom be reduced to a set of regulatory principles. In order to teach (and learn) ethics as a skill, a more direct experience to ethically relevant situations that prompt for subjective reflection is needed. In this regard, interactive narrative experiences can be used as a way to prompt subjective involvement. This paper presents the design of a prototype of an interactive narrative created to teach ethics. The prototype integrates insights from game design, such as attachments, meaningful choices, and the creation of spaces for subjective reflection, and is conceived as a complementary tool that could easily be integrated as part of a learning module. This work introduces the required background, presents the prototype and its design, and provides reflections on the relevant decisions behind the development of interactive experiences aimed at teaching ethics.