Yesterday I posted a transcript of Jenova Chen’s interview on Joystiq in which he discussed how his attempt to create a cooperative game failed and his subsequent conclusions about designing for moral behavior. This sparked some good discussion that I’ll try to recap here. Here’s one exchange that transpired on Facebook: Kristen Maxwell: At SXSW [...]
The Joystiq Show #028 pulls off a coup of an interview of Jenova Chen, who offers some pretty profound thoughts in response to Alexander Sliwinski’s “So what did you learn from creating Journey?” question. The answer, basically, is that he discovered some possible truths about the interrelationship between morality and the systems within which we [...]
David Theo Goldberg’s recent post, Badges for Learning: Threading the Needle Between Skepticism and Evangelism, is a worthwhile overview of the current thinking on what role “badges” might play in promoting better learning. He summarizes the debate within the learning sciences over badges as the age-old conflict between Kantianism and utilitarianism and tries to strike [...]
One decade ago, Edward Castronova woke economists up to the fact that virtual worlds like Everquest contain legitimate economies, and suddenly everyone was talking about them as living economic laboratories. I’m interested in how such worlds can cast light on our political economies, and particularly the question of what’s fair and what’s just. This NPR [...]
I’m proud to announce that the book to which I’d contributed a chapter, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play is finally published! My co-author Scott Seider and I contributed the chapter, “Video Games for Prosocial Learning,” a broad overview of how video games fit in the tradition of prosocial education. (I guess it [...]
NPR’s Open Mic featured a fascinating discussion between two of my personal heroes, Will Wright and E.O. Wilson. Their overlap, naturally, was in ants, which were a personal fascination of mine since very young. I remember with great fondness that my roommates bought me SimAnt as a gift during my freshman year of college (it [...]
Interesting chat in last week’s Gamers with Jobs Conference Call instigated by a listener email on the “trend” towards moral choices in recent games (especially Infamous for PS3). The caller wondered if games should offer better rewards for “good” or “evil” choices, which generated a great discussion among the podcasters. Julian “Rabbit” Murdoch noted/complained that [...]
As war becomes increasingly virtual, will it also become increasingly inhuman and thus inhumane? PW Singer lays out issues related to this question at TED, posted recently, in which he specifically cites Grand Theft Auto as evidence that “we do things in video games we wouldn’t do face-to-face.” He quotes one soldier who specifically says, [...]
In this in-depth interview with Gamasutra (May 1), game developer Peter Molyneux explains how he approaches offering players deep moral choices: PM: What’s fascinating about it is that when we thought about good and evil, it’s so tempting to say, “Well, good is saving lives, and evil is hurting lives and killing people.” But actually, [...]
As President Obama recognized in his Open Government Directive, transparency is only the first step towards a more vibrant democracy. The bigger problem has always been fostering widespread participation. After all, one of the most vexing problems facing today’s government – regulatory capture of an agency by special interests – flourishes despite, or perhaps even [...]