Chris Crawford on Game Design

Values

By far the most difficult question, though, concerned the problem of values. It was easy to build equations for air pollution deaths and such, but in the end, how important were those deaths compared to the economic benefits of the factories that create the air pollution? In effect, I had to put a price on human life, something that makes all of us queasy. Environmental problems are difficult precisely because they force us to confront such uncomfortable issues. My design problem was to integrate values into the design without creating something that would be dismissed as narrow-minded.

I spent too much time trying to figure out how to be politic in this delicate matter; it seemed that, no matter how I approached the problem, somebody ...