  Machine ethics has received increasing attention over the past few years
because of the need to ensure safe and reliable artificial intelligence (AI).
The two dominantly used theories in machine ethics are deontological and
utilitarian ethics. Virtue ethics, on the other hand, has often been mentioned
as an alternative ethical theory. While this interesting approach has certain
advantages over popular ethical theories, little effort has been put into
engineering artificial virtuous agents due to challenges in their
formalization, codifiability, and the resolution of ethical dilemmas to train
virtuous agents. We propose to bridge this gap by using role-playing games
riddled with moral dilemmas. There are several such games in existence, such as
Papers, Please and Life is Strange, where the main character encounters
situations where they must choose the right course of action by giving up
something else dear to them. We draw inspiration from such games to show how a
systemic role-playing game can be designed to develop virtues within an
artificial agent. Using modern day AI techniques, such as affinity-based
reinforcement learning and explainable AI, we motivate the implementation of
virtuous agents that play such role-playing games, and the examination of their
decisions through a virtue ethical lens. The development of such agents and
environments is a first step towards practically formalizing and demonstrating
the value of virtue ethics in the development of ethical agents.

Artificial Intelligence