Paper Trail: Business Ethics

M.I.S. has a reputation for excellence, so when reports start coming in of customer complaints, pushy salesmen, and low-quality products, it’s obvious that something fishy is going on. As the company's newest accountability agent, it's up to the player to investigate what's going on at M.I.S. and how high in the company the problems stretch. Paper Trail is a point-and-click adventure game designed to lead the player through an interactive ethics case study. Players explore a morally tenuous business environment and come to know their own ethical frameworks along the way. As they dig into the problems at M.I.S., they will have to decide if they are a consequentialist, deontologist, or virtue theorist, and then attempt to make ethical decisions that match their chosen framework while avoiding cognitive bias such as appeals to authority and framing. The game offers a branching storyline where player choices have repercussions, changing how characters react to them and what information they can get from them.