Day 9: FotLC through the 113 lenses from The Art of Game Design

Day 9: Lens 111: The Lens of Responsibility
To live up to your responsibility as a game designer, ask yourself this question:

Does my game help people? How? 

Well at the least it brings a group of six players together and puts them in a contentious social situation with rules. That's useful socialization and learning. Maybe it teaches strategic thinking. Maybe it has themes of the dangers of hegemony and the futility of war and the struggle for dominance... but whether things like that transfer out of the context of the game is an open question. Perhaps I could underline the theme by donating all profits from the game to a pertinent charity?

Addendum: Many months of development later I have taken on the themes of the game in much greater depth and have plans to do things in the kickstarter to involve a more diverse set of writers in creating the back story for the tribes. Also the end of the game poses the moral dilemma directly to the winner and forces more transference of the message of the game.