PHILOSOPHY OF VIDEO GAMES

Realistic Modern Warfare Game!

Here's a witty little clip from THE ONION about the most realistic video game about modern warfare that has ever been released:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/ultra_realistic_modern_warfare

The real (though presumably unintended) irony of this piece is that the US Army now uses video game environments for actual training that probably resemble the game described in the clip fairly accurately. See the following article on the AWE (Asymmetric Warfare Environment).

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/04/21/news_6093860.html

World of Warcraft and Philosophy at amazon

There are two really positive reviews for World of Warcraft and Philosophy: Wrath of the Philosopher King at amazon.com (click link to see). Pretty cool.

Kudos to Luke and John for all the work they did sheparding everything through. Me and Mark's paper is a lot better for all their help.

Great talk by Ian Bogost

There's a great talk by Ian Bogost on-line ( HERE ) that has all sorts of interesting points, including incisive thoughts about the ludology/narratology brouhaha and the connection between "flat ontology" and issues of emergent properties. I know it's the beginning of the semester, but in the next few weeks it would be cool if anyone (Silcox?) reading this could respond with their thoughts on the talk in the thread below. I'll try to have something posted in the next week.

Nice Spiegel article on current state of Brain-Computer Interface

I think that we're going to learn a lot from the kind of work discussed in THIS ARTICLE.

I'm frankly amazed that the only military applications thus far are for possible non-verbal communication between soldiers. Maybe that's because the technology is pretty crappy (much of it does not work well with about 30% of people; and for those who can use it, the error rate is still very high). The trick I think is going to be to use these technologies to assist rather than all by themselves. I think something similar happened with the artificial heart. When put in as a heart replacement the recipient never lived very long, but when scaled back to just assist the original heart the technology did a lot better. So the trick will be to see how the various measurements of brain activity can be incorporated into existing human computer interfaces rather than attempting to replace them.

Here's three crude examples. (1) Assume that heightened alpha waves correlate with better ability to operate remote operated weapons. If you could put into the regular interface for the training machines of these weapons the kind of feedback mechanisms to heighten alpha waves, and incorporate that into the weapons themselves, then you'd get a better weapon system. (2) Perhaps some kinds of brain states correlate with dangerous inattention. A pilot's helmet could measure for this and ring an alarm. (3) I hate to mention interrogations, given the horrific news that has been coming out about American violations of the Geneva Conventions, but here goes. It will probably never be the case that a machine can automatically tell if someone is lying. But it seems plausible that this brain-computer interface work at least has the potential to produce pretty good tools to assist in interrogation of suspected criminals.

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 8 - Conclusions

[Please note that all the posts related to Sicart Reading Group are gathered here.]

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

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 7 - The Ethics of Game Design

[Please note that all the posts related to Sicart Reading Group are gathered here.]

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.

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 6 - Unethical Game Content and Effect Studies

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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.

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 5 - Applications

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.

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 4 - The Ethics of Computer Games

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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.

Sicart Reading Group, Chapter 3 - Players as Moral Beings

[Please note that all the posts related to Sicart Reading Group are gathered here.]

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.