When we experience isolation or social exclusion, it activates the same neural circuits as when we are inflicted bodily suffering. I think most of us have experienced this phenomenon at some point in our lives, so this conclusion exposed in Neurobiologie et éducation : conférence du Prof. Dr. Gerald Hüther (VOSTFR) is not really a surprise.
With this in mind, the inclusive aspect of a game becomes essential: it is not morally acceptable to produce a game that creates suffering.
From my experience, a concrete example is the Dixit board game. In this game the goal is to make some players guess a card, but not all. The catch is that you have a better chance of guessing correctly the cards of people you know well, and a higher chance of succeeding in having people you know well guess your cards.
As a result, players who already have strong social relationships tend to strengthen their relations even more, but players who are not already part of the social group majority are excluded due to the game mechanics.
Aware of this, the flaw is corrected in Mysterium. The game is identical in its mechanics (making people guess cards), but the collaborative approach naturally encourages players to get to know each other better in order to succeed. The designers have managed to keep the fun game mechanics (despite this bias, Dixit remains a very good game!) while reversing the relationships between the players: the new game objectives promote empathy even more (players try to imagine how the other players will perceive a visual) and the discriminating mechanics disappear (even if only a part of the group guesses, the whole group benefits from the discovery).
Have you encountered a similar bias in you carreer? How did you deal with it?