A prominent independent developer labelled modern games such as World of Warcraft "unethical" at a recent Melbourne conference.

Jonathan Blow, creator of upcoming time-bending game Braid, told the Free Play conference at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image that games can be art but he is concerned about what they are really teaching players.

"I believe that games are important to the future of humanity," Mr Blow says. "It sounds like a grand statement but it's obviously true for other forms of art that we're very familiar with. Films and novels have drastically shaped the society that we live in; without them our lives would be very different.