I recently watched two TEDTalks. The first was titled ‘Why tech needs the humanities’ (2017) and was presented by Eric Berridge, the cofounder of BlueWolf, an IBM company. The second was ‘Teach arts and sciences together’ (2002) presented by Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut. While neither are exclusively […]
ethics
19 posts
Reigns, released late last summer, situates the player as king of an ancient kingdom, located somewhere faintly European, somewhere in the early 7th century. But you’re not one king; you are all kings, a long-reaching dynasty of king after king, each taking up the crown upon his predecessor’s fall. The […]
I’ve written about my old undergraduate pastime of playing Dungeons and Dragons before, though working towards a PhD has made time a precious commodity I can rarely spend on social gaming. I did get the chance to do a little tabletop gaming over winter break, and, as it always does, […]
I’m never quite sure who decides which games should get sequels, and why. But, if you had told me three years ago that NieR: Gestalt and Replicant was going to get a sequel, my initial comment would have been someone else played that game? NieR: Gestalt and Replicant (Square Enix) […]
Recently while playing The Division with a friend, he pointed out that you could kill the dogs that wander around the town. For those who haven’t played, there are often dogs walking around the post-pandemic landscape. They don’t bite or jump or attack. They just bark randomly and otherwise mind […]
Last Friday, Alex Layne explored legal definitions of terrorism, stalking, and cyberbullying to draw some conclusions about cyberterrorist acts, specifically in terms of online harassment against women tagged as “social justice warriors” by the GamerGate movement. Alex’s piece ignited a firestorm on Twitter, with responses ranging from mockery and downplay […]
In my continued efforts to see the end of war, I’ve kept with playing This War of Mine: The Little Ones. In my last post I mentioned that the major draw of this game (for me at least) is the often neglected story that other games like Call of Duty, Ghost […]
I recently started playing This War of Mine: The Little Ones, and thus far I’ve put about 5 hours into the game. My first reaction as of now: hot, boiling tears of sadness and desperation running down my face — there may have been some snot in there too. The game […]
As promised, my ESL composition class played A Bird Story and it’s been a wonderful and insightful experience reading their reactions to a game they’ve deemed as unworthy of “gaming” status (I’ll touch on this a bit below); they didn’t anticipate that I would, however, expect this reaction from them regarding a […]
(No direct spoilers here for episode five, but instead just general discussion of narrative structure and larger considerations of the game as a whole.) Since the release of the first episode, my experience with Life Is Strange has been a series of ups and downs, but as the story has come […]
A quick stroll through the Playstation or Xbox stores reveals the distinct lack of a once-common feature: demos. A search of the Steam store returned 15 demos released since the beginning of June, most for free but some available only for purchase. Many of these demos, however, are for games […]
When I was a kid, I wanted to be Han Solo, or Princess Leia, or some sort of princess hybrid of the two. They were my heroes. Sometimes I wanted to be a female Robin Hood instead, or Laura Ingalls or a character from a fairy tale, but whatever the […]
I have always been a huge advocate of ethical reflection and thoughtfulness in the classroom. I believe that regardless of what you teach about or what you teach with, you should be cognizant of the possible ramifications for your students. For example, I gave a talk in 2011 about how […]
Sometimes it really is about ethics—or is it? GamerGate members (ostensibly) launched a site this week called Deep Freeze, which, in their own words, aims to serve as “a journalism reference resource, conceived to supply a reader with easy-digestible[sic] information to determine the reliability of an individual writer or outlet.” […]
Episode 99: August and Everything After: An Actual Discussion on Ethics and Gamers (Right click and save as to download, or hit us up on iTunes or Stitcher) This week, Alex, Alisha, and Sam talked GamerGate, the continuing, shifting mass that continues to dominate so much of the discussion of […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the continued impacts of GamerGate lately, though not perhaps in the larger sense of wondering what it all means, but how it jibes with my experience with and in gaming media. While it’s been several years since I did any writing about games outside […]