Category Archives: ethics

What Would Tocqueville Make of the American (Digital) Farmer?

By Garrison | Published: April 23, 2010
In Jan­u­ary of this year, on the day fol­low­ing the death of his­to­rian Howard Zinn, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz deliv­ered a thought­ful lit­tle talk at SUNY Buf­falo. In so doing, I think he man­aged neatly to extend Zinn’s 20th Cen­tury civ­i­tas a lit­tle fur­ther into our own time. “I’m wor­ried that stu­dents will take their obe­di­ent [...]
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The Course of Empire

By Garrison | Published: February 1, 2010
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 [...]
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Tetris and Torture

By Garrison | Published: February 19, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in Aesthetics, Politics, Rhetoric | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Lost and the Damned at The NYTimes

By Garrison | Published: February 18, 2009
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 [...]
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The Good, the Bad, and the Silly

By Garrison | Published: February 15, 2009
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 [...]
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