

Ask HN: Unethical Programming? - DanielBMarkham

The recent story about FaceBook's Farmville having more traffic than Twitter got me thinking: is there such a thing as unethical programming?<p>I know many of you will say that Farmville is harmless because it takes people away from boredom and provides them with entertainment. And, after all, they choose to do it.<p>But there is an undeniably addictive nature to these games. Each game not only competes with other games that a person might play when bored, but it also competes with stuff a person <i>should</i> be doing.<p>So -- where's the line? Would you write a game that "entertained" doctors in surgery? (Put another way, if you were designing medical software, would you add game-like hooks to keep people's attention focused on it as a way of competing with other medical devices?)<p>Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch? A game that millions of people spend 40-hours-a-week on, like Wow? FaceBook's games are using players to perform hours and hours of menial, mindless tasks as they market and sell to them and other FB users. At what point do you cross the line between simply entertaining people and harmfully manipulating them and using them?
======
dkersten
Regarding games, Richard Bartles book, Designing Virtual Worlds, touches on
this topic. Its an interesting read.

 _Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch? A
game that millions of people spend 40-hours-a-week on, like Wow?_

I have no issues with this. Then again, I never did get into WoW, so...

 _Would you write a game that "entertained" doctors in surgery?_

I probably wouldn't feel very comfortable about this however.

------
stonemetal
>>Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch?

Heck yeah, I would sell it as a weight control device.

>>is there such a thing as unethical programming?

Sure writing a program that by design, or through gross negligence, does
unethical things is unethical programming.

Is car manufacturing unethical because people die using your product? Is
farming unethical because people come to harm (choke, get fat) using your
product? Everything has a risk of harmful use that doesn't make everything
unethical.

