The game I played was Wizard101. The target audience is children and teenages who enjoy fantasy worlds. It was made by Kingsisle Entertainment. The platforms include Playstation, Xbox, and desktop app.
One way Wizard101 invites players to care about the world is that by allowing the player to customize their character in the beginning as well as choose their name, this causes the player to feel that they have a stake in the game from the very beginning. Because of this action of agency, the player will begin to feel attached to their character as well as by extension the other characters. The player will begin to see themself as a wizard because they got to spend time picking out attributes and a name. This plays into the sunk cost fallacy, as the player must spend energy and time customizing their character before any of the actual game play starts, which will motivate them to play further.
Another way Wizard101 invites care is that every time a player talks to a character in the game, they need to press the next button to keep hearing what that character has to say. By splitting up the narrative into bite-sized dialogue chunks, and necessitating small acts of intention from the player every time they press the next button, Wizard101 necessitates the player to build up how much they care about the game. In addition, a player needs to press the x button to even talk to characters in the game, giving them the sense that they intentionally chose to talk to these characters which would motivate them to keep talking to the characters instead of just walking away.
Lastly, because all the characters in the game that are giving the player the quests want help from the player, this creates a sense of need and duty in the player’s head that causes them to feel that the characters in the game are those they need to protect. This causes the player to want to see the game through in order to help the people they need to help.
To address the ethics question, Wizard101 does not adequately provide representation for people of larger sizes in the character customization section of the game. There should be a wider representation of sizes instead of just limited selection that there currently is.
Additionally, there could also be greater representation of diversity in general. For example, when choosing the player’s name, the player is limited to a selection of Western-sounding English names. There is no option to come up with one’s own name, which would help give the player more agency in their gameplay process. Currently, the player has to spin a 3-part spinner and choose from different combinations of words. However, even these combinations of words themselves do not have enough of a wide variety of diverse qualities. They are, again, all Western and English sounding words. Not only would allowing the player to come up with their own name give the player a stronger sense of intentionality, this would also aid the gameplay in that the player would feel a stronger connection to their character and thus be motivated to continue playing further due to this fact.
