TWEAKING MORAL COMPLEXITY IN VIDEOGAMES? OPTIMISING PLAYER EXPERIENCES ON BASIS OF MORAL COMPETENCE Benjamin Hanussek 1 , Tom Frank Reuscher 2 and Tom Tucek 1 1 University of Klagenfurt, Austria 2 Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Germany ABSTRACT The gaming industry has been, compared to social media platforms, rather slow in developing its effective methods of game analytics. Considering the difficulty of interpreting player behaviour, this might be no surprise, yet the possibility of modelling player ethics might bring more reliable user metrics. Modelling ethics is the creation of user profiles based on their ethical decisions in-game. Recent publications in that field show an increasing interest in this practice and consider the outcome of succeeding in creating profiles containing data on applied player ethics as highly valuable. Modelling ethics is still not a well-studied practice, but its implications in perspective to cases of data abuse by Big Tech companies seem troubling. It is important to consider, interrogate and discuss the possibilities of this emerging practice critically. How can ethical profiles be rendered? How does inconsistent player behaviour affect the ethical metric? Who owns this kind of data, and for which purpose is its utilisation admitted? These and many more questions must be addressed immediately before unethical practices take place, and policies lag behind. Therefore, we intend to present the work of Pereira Santos to define the modelling of ethics as a new method of Game Analytics, how it can be applied, which data it can extract and how it can be interpreted. Further, we propose a new experimental design for how the modelling of ethics may be approached. For that, we want to shift the attention from trying to create full-fledged ethical profiles of players to their measurable moral competence as a more reliable metric. Moreover, we discuss the prospects of modelling ethics and the moral implications for the industry and move towards a conclusion that urges immediate policies to address the method. KEYWORDS Moral Competence, Moral Complexity, Player Modelling, Game Analytics, Game Studies,Videogame Ethics 1. INTRODUCTION The production of videogames has been, from a historical standpoint, not data-driven (El-Nasr et al. 2016: 3). This has changed in the last decade, and game analytics have become increasingly important in the industry's decision-making processes. "Game analytics is the application of analytics that should provide B[usiness]I[ntelligence] for game development. Game analytics consist of telemetry data, which are raw data collected outside organisational boundaries, and game metrics, which provide visualisation and quantitive measures of this raw data" (Lassila et al. 2019: 2149). Applying Game Analytics to develop and optimise videogames is connected to the more substantial emergence of free-to-play business models around 2010 (cf. Livermore 2016: 35-36; Mäntymäki et al. 2019: 1164) and is hence "heavily inspired by web- and mobile analytics [that] relies on analysis of comprehensive user behaviour data to drive revenue." (El Nasr et al. 2013: 4). While game analytics seems to be an aspiring methodology for the industry to optimise development procedures and in-game performance, player metrics remain challenging to analyse and interpret (Santos Pereira 2020: 104). While player metrics can assess player behaviour as fact, players' motivations or emotional states that endorse particular behaviour is a black box to the data analyst. S/he cannot know why a player chose to design an avatar in a certain way or why a player applied specific behaviour based on that singular metric (Zagal 2013: 80-81). This black box causes a considerable problem to the reliability and value of user data from players' in-game behaviour. So, the question is not if or how player metrics should be rendered but rather which data applies for a faithful rendition. ISBN: 978-989-8704-31-3 © 2021 214