Community and Care in Gaming
The Ethical Dimensions of the Nintendo Switch
The Ethical Landscape of the Nintendo Switch
The Nintendo Switch is a gaming console that has gained immense popularity for its revolutionary, flexible design. However, the ethics of using a Nintendo Switch are questioned due to parents’ concerns that it might worsen the negative aspects of gaming that could affect their children. While there certainly is some ethical risk to consider, Nintendo’s general alignment with feminist care ethics makes the Nintendo Switch an overall ethical product, as it allows the Nintendo Switch to address these parental concerns and even bolster community well-being.
Core Values of the Company
Feminist care ethics emphasizes care for other people’s experiences and circumstances. Given the wide range of people who can enjoy games, it’s especially important to see gaming from this ethical framework, considering how much game developers must account for the experiences of their audiences to make their games more enjoyable. This applies well to Nintendo’s case, as its products rely on user perspectives to improve. This was highlighted by an interview with the developers of the game Nintendo Switch Sports, in which game developer Takayuki Shimamura described the way he and the other developers approached user experience. He explained:
If you have a copy of this title in the household, you can easily set it up and play together even when you have guests. But in such cases, there is often a gap in ability between hosts and guests because the hosts are used to playing it… When two people with a gap in their skills play the game, please try playing online together and enjoy cooperating to play against online rivals… It would really feel like you are pairing up with someone and playing a sport.
This empathetic approach to product design demonstrates Nintendo’s reliance on feminist care ethics-adjacent values to give their customers the best experiences possible. However, parents often remain critical of gaming, due to their responsibility to protect their children from negative influences. To gauge the ethicality of the Nintendo Switch, it would be appropriate to review some of parents’ most pressing concerns.
Parental Concerns
According to an article by psychologist Celia Hodent, common parental concerns include children developing gaming addiction and suffering academically and socially, forming gambling habits through conditioning, being psychologically manipulated into making undesirable choices, and being influenced to behave violently. Hodent describes each concern and then breaks them down from a cognitive science and psychology perspective.
Gaming Addiction
Regarding gaming addiction, Hodent confirms that “it’s clearly unethical [for companies] to deliberately use persuasive techniques on children [to convince them to keep playing games]… when the intention behind is business-oriented.” She also recommends that for better brain health, children should do more activities than just playing games.
In-Game Gambling
Regarding the gambling concern, although Hodent denies that conditioning–engaging in certain actions and then learning from negative or positive results–is intrinsically bad, she highlights that in-game rewards become ethically questionable when obtaining them requires money. To counter this issue, she advises parents to protect their children from adult games, and game studios to “explore more transparent and less enticing monetization techniques.”
Dark Patterns
When it comes to dark patterns, or psychological manipulation, Hodent explains that whether manipulation is unethical depends largely on its intent. For example, if a video game company focuses solely on making money, it might try to guilt trip players into purchasing in-game items. Understanding a company’s intent is crucial for determining whether it is likely to use unethical dark patterns in its products. In order for companies to avoid using these dark patterns, Hodent states that “Placing the humans at the center of what we are creating is thus critical when considering ethics.”
Normalization of Violent Behavior
Finally, in terms of the violent behavior concern, Hodent denies its validity, but acknowledges that there are potential problems with showing certain content in games. Referencing the idea of classical conditioning, she writes that “if you consistently witness women portrayed as being less competent than men, you might implicitly integrate this harmful stereotype as being generally true.” To combat this issue, Hodent suggests that “game studios should monitor what behaviors they are encouraging and discouraging in their games.”
Although the Nintendo Switch is a gaming console rather than a video game itself, it must still address these concerns because it is used to play video games. The question then is: how can the Nintendo Switch manage the way its games are played so that parents wouldn’t have these concerns?
The Limitation System
Defense Against Parental Concerns
To address these concerns, the Nintendo Switch includes a system that gives parents extensive control over how their children spend time on the console, as noted by Simon Crisp from New Atlas.
Gaming Addiction
Parents can use the parental controls system to limit the amount of time that their children have each day to play with the Nintendo Switch. Although such limitations may not stop a gaming addiction entirely, they can be a useful tool for encouraging children to do more than just play video games.
In-Game Gambling
Parents can use the limitation system to set game age restrictions and bar specific games, preventing their children from playing games with loot boxes.
Normalization of Violent Behavior
Set age restrictions can also help prevent children from playing games that normalize violence or criminal activity. But even without the built-in limitation system, according to Nintendo’s “Age Appropriate Content” page, parents themselves can easily determine if specific games are appropriate for their children by “[taking] a look at the age rating of the game in question to see whether it is suitable for [their children’s] age.”
Dark Patterns
Finally, regarding dark patterns, the Nintendo Switch and its games are less of a concern, as Nintendo developers focus on users rather than on business tactics.
Weaknesses of Parental Controls
Although the limitation system gives parents control over their children’s gaming routines, using it can be inconvenient. According to a Reddit user on “r/NintendoSwitch”, the biggest problems arise from managing multiple profiles for multiple children. The user writes, “I either have to set the parental controls such that my younger gamers have access to games they shouldn’t so the older gamers can play them, whitelist a handful of games the younger gamers can’t yet play… or type my PIN in each time the older kids want to play a specific game.” The main problem with the Nintendo Switch’s limitation system is that it puts too much work on parents. It is unlikely that parents, especially older ones, would fully understand how to use the limitation system based solely on online instructions or a thick manual in the packaging. Instead, an educational information session for parents given upon purchase of the console would likely be more helpful. Regardless, it is a major part of the Nintendo Switch that needs improvement in its simplicity.
The Practical Benefits
Besides the parental controls, the Nintendo Switch offers many benefits that help it stand out in the gaming console market and show Nintendo’s commitment to serving communities. Simon Crisp from New Atlas explains that it features three different modes: one connecting it to a larger screen, another propping it up on its built-in kickstand as a desktop device, and the last using it as a handheld device. Its compact size allows for easy portability, and its detachable controllers enable shared gaming experiences. These features provide parents with more opportunities to spend time with their children flexibly. According to an article from the Pew Research Center, parents who spend time with their children in this way can “explain and contextualize the violent or negative messages that [their] children might pick up from playing certain games,” while forming stronger bonds. These features also help build camaraderie with friends, as explained in by Andrew Fishman from Psychology Today. In both circumstances, the impact of the Nintendo Switch reflects the aspect of feminist care ethics that values connectedness between family and friends.
The Nintendo Switch is accessible to the disabled community as well, despite its normally two-handed gameplay. According to an article by Grant Stoner from The Washington Post, the Nintendo Switch has occasional accessibility updates. With the arrival of the Version 10.0.0 system update, Stoner writes, “With a total of five presets that can be saved per controller, per system, players can create a total of 15 unique layouts to accommodate their physical limitations.” This means that by allowing for more customizability regarding which buttons on the controllers do what, even those with only one hand are able to enjoy the Nintendo Switch. Such accessibility updates also align well with Nintendo’s feminist care ethics, as they have expanded the inclusion of the Nintendo Switch, and, by extension, has increased its potential for community-building.
Conclusion
The Nintendo Switch, designed to foster community connections, has both flaws and benefits. While Nintendo aimed to reassure parents with the Nintendo Switch’s parental controls, the system is too complicated for efficient use. However, the Nintendo Switch demonstrates its ethicality through its alignment with feminist care ethics, shown by its potential to strengthen community bonds. Despite its shortcomings, the Nintendo Switch is an overall ethical product due to its social impact and intent to promote care and connectedness.
The writing for some of the sections in this article has been revised with the help of ChatGPT.
