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Here Sicart tries to sum up what he takes to be his main conclusions. Because the book is rather loosely structured and digressive, this short final chapter is quite valuable, and some of the things that get said here are actually rather surprising.
The first key point that he wants us to take away from the book is that computer games are ethically evaluable both as "objects" and "experiences." This seems to be just a metaphysical-sounding paraphrase of the obvious truth that we use the term "computer game" to refer to both the program itself and an actual run-through of that program by a player. Next, he re-iterates the stuff about the "player-subject." There is a very odd remark in this section that is supposed to justify his intuition that the issue of violence in games (his careless treatment of which Jon complained about in an earlier post) is of only "secondary" ethical importance. He says
Continue reading "Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 8 - Conclusions" »
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7.1 Failed Attempts: Ethics as Statistics (207-212)
Sicart gives two arguments here. The first is that games that explicitly measure ethical activity of avatars end up trivializing ethics. If they reward ethical activity, then the player just views the ethical activity as part of the algorithm to beat. Kant argued that there is a performative
contradiction in trying to have a good will so that you can get to
heaven, which would be analogous to having your avatar do the moral
thing just to get a higher score.
Continue reading "Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 7 - The Ethics of Game Design" »
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6.1 Understanding Unethical Game Content (190-199)
Sicart discusses the notorious part in Grand Theft Auto where your character gets more power after having sex with a prostitute. From the perspective of doing well in the game, the optimal strategy is to have your avatar pay the prostitute for sex, have sex with her, and then kill her so that your avatar can steal his money back.
Continue reading "Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 6 - Unethical Game Content and Effect Studies" »
At the start of this chapter, Sicart announces that he will “apply the framework” developed in Chapters One to Four to “specific issues” in the ethics of gameplay. But as it turns out, Chapter Five is blissfully devoid of any references whatsoever to the Foucauldian “body,” hermeneutic circles or “infospheres.” Instead what we get are some remarkably clear and often quite sensitive descriptions of the ethical dimension of three well-chosen games – Bioshock, Defcon and World of Warcraft. I’ll spend some time here going over what Sicart says about the first two of this trio, leaving WOW to Jon.
Bioshock is one of the most artistically successful console games of recent years, largely thanks to the fascinating and utterly original gameworld. The game takes place in an underground city build by a libertarian demagogue named Andrew Ryan. The player-subject enters the city while it is undergoing some horrificaly violent cultural decay. Sicart perceptively describes the game’s curious mixture of a radically inventive approach to world-building with rather drearily conventional FPS gameplay. But he is mainly interested in two features that make the player of Bioshock what he calls an “ethical subject.” The first ethically interesting feature is the fact that, after a few initial, violent encounters, the player learns via a single cutscene that (s)he has been unwittingly subjected to mind-control via one of the game’s two principal NPC antagonists. This provides the player-subject's ultimate mission – to kill Andrew Ryan – with a deeply morally ambiguous feel. The second feature is the opportunity that the player has of re-charging his in-game powers by killing “Little Sisters” – zombie-like NPCs that eerily resemble helpless little girls.
Continue reading "Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 5 - Applications" »
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4.1 Virtue Ethics and Computer Games (109-127)
4.1.1 Defining Virtue Ethics for Computer Games (110-113)
I think this section reveals what is thus far the signature weaknesses of this text. First, while Sicart does theorize about the "player subject" as distinct from the actual player, his ludological bias prevents him from theorizing about the avatar as a character in the fictional world. But I don't think you can be clear about the moral status of video games unless you are clear about this. Second, when we morally evaluate video games we often first evaluate the play-through of a given game as if it were a real world, and use deontological and consequentialist thinking to do so. To even make sense of what kind of virtues are manifest by you as a player, I have to be able to engage in this moral thinking about your avatar in the fictional world. Sicart of course does this (as does anyone when talking about morality and video games), but it comes out in needlessly unclear manners. "A player can actually play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas without committing any crimes, just exploring the virtual world of the game." (112) Well the player isn't committing any crimes when her avatar kills prostitutes. And in terms of the player, the only ethics we have so far from virtue ethics restricted to the hedonistic question of whether her game play ruins the experience for herself or other players. But then Sicart can't say (just prior to the quoted sentence) "Choosing to play this game, and to engage in the acts of simulated violence that are crucial part of the gameplay, is also an ethical action."
If your ethics just concerns virtues of players, concerning how well they produce a gradifying ludic fix for themselves and friends, then whether your avatar kills prostitutes in GTA is not an ethical issue.
Continue reading "Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 4 - The Ethics of Computer Games" »
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I found the shout-outs to Foucault, Badiou, Heidegger, Gadamer, and work on the phenomenology of the body to in sections 3.1-3.3 to be little bit frustrating.The stuff on Gadamer and the hermeneutic circle is picked up again in chapter 4, so we can put off discussion of it until then.
A couple of pretty deep phenomenological points are made in these sections. In particular, the non-detached
aesthetic experience we get while playing a game is often a function of
the moral affectivity we have as non-players. So the model of the player-subject as something that comes entirely into being ex nihilo during play is not going to work. This has interesting consequences for an account of what's going on when you "lose yourself" in an aesthetic experience.
Continue reading "Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 3 - Players as Moral Beings" »