Serious Games, Stealth Interventions, and Accounting Ethics

With the accounting profession actively seeking new ways to enhance ethics training in higher education as well as foster the ethical sensitivities of practicing professionals, there are mixed views on the effectiveness of current ethics training programs. It is generally believed that ethics training for practicing accountants is more effective when participants can have immersive experiences with ethical dilemmas in a natural setting. To date, enhanced immersive training experiences have largely been achieved through hypothetical scenarios, rather than real settings. The argument for this paper is in the use of a newly designed serious game of ethics, Bogart, to provide players with an immersive and potentially impactful real world experience. Providing immediate feedback is a distinctive feature of serious games, which enables players to ascertain the consequences of each of their decisions. This is a particularly useful feature for ethics education. However, unlike most other games Bogart that we had not foreseen. In this paper, we provide a personal narrative of the design choices and implications that only became obvious in the pilot testing phases and beyond. We draw on Kaufman and Flanagan’s (2015) ‘embedded design’ approach to serious games design and the business ethics literature to reflect on the consequences of the design choices we made whilst developing Bogart. While the game design choices followed pedagogically appropriate and peer-reviewed pathway techniques, we still encountered numerous implementation issues and a number of unintended ethical consequences. uses stealth interventions and misplaced rewards. While these were intentionally designed to add a further pedagogical dimension to the context and bring about interesting consequences, there were outcomes