Ethics assessment via game play?

In a previous paper the ethical nature of academic staff at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) was evaluated. Since engineering education research is flourishing world-wide a serious question was raised about staff adherence to basic ethical standards. An internal research programme was launched to evaluate staff's ethical orientation using a survey based methodology. The results indicated that a significant percentage acted in ethically problematic ways. As a consequence the idea of using a role playing game (RPG) was mooted to further investigate academic staff's situational ethics. This paper discusses the proposed game playing device that was designed as a manner of investigating the staff's understanding of engineering education research ethics. This paper reviews basic material on nature of play and in particular ethical role play in RPGs and analyses the manner in which an RPG would have to be designed to ensure reliable data collection of the staff's ethical standards when applied to educational research. From the basic review of game playing ethics and the necessary design elements it was clear that it would not be possible to develop such a measurement device. It is an open question whether any form of situated ethics can be evaluated or taught using a closed form RPG.