Role-playing games provide a particularly fruitful environment for the development of critical, ethical reasoning skills, a core component in developing a citizenry capable of fully participating in a cosmopolitan, democratic society. In this study, ethnographic interview participants recount particularly engaging ethical situations in their own game play. Through their responses, thematic trends develop that help us identify key elements in games that provide opportunities for the development of these crucial skills.

Live action role-playing games share a range of characteristics with massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Because these games have existed for more than 20 years, players of these games have a substantial amount of experience in handling issues pertinent to MMOGs. Survey and review of live action role-playing games, whose participant count can be in the thousands, reveal that features such as size, theme, game master-to-player ratio, and others interact to form complex systems that require several different groups of control tools to manage. The way that these games are managed offers a variety of venues for further research into how these management techniques can be applied to MMOGs.

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