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Category Archives: ethics
The Course of Empire
Update (7 Feb): For a sketch of the Haitian information infrastructure, check out Michael Deibert’s post from Slate, Haitian Radio Returns to the Air. Original Post I wonder how others feel about this newly-listed MIT Media Lab course (spring 2010). On the one hand, there’s a lot here to be admired: The course is clearly the [...]
Tetris and Torture
Raph Koster revisits his book on A Theory of Fun as he points to Loodo’s Calabouço Tétrico, a highly-polished, deeply disturbing Flash-based Tetris variant that replaces colored blocks with human beings in different states of distress. Speaking of it on his website, Ian Bogost points back to his text, Persuasive Games (wherein he rejects as [...]
The Lost and the Damned at The NYTimes
The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel has a nice review of GTA’s new downloadable expansion, the evocatively named biker scenario The Lost and the Damned. Schiesel gets it right, I think, when he observes that All sorts of games are about visions of power, often accompanied by violence. But most titles are set far away [...]
The Good, the Bad, and the Silly
Trying to discover a little bit more about ethics and the nature of malevolence in MMORPGs, I rolled a new Horde character: Badflower. I’ve made it to level 8, and this much is clear: In Warcraft, there are the Good, the “bad,” and the silly. WoW’s two factions are the Alliance and the Horde: Your standard [...]
What Would Tocqueville Make of the American (Digital) Farmer?