Ethics and Video Games Podcast

In 2005 Atomic Games decided to do what no other game company to date had done: to produce a major-release game about a real battle in an ongoing war.  They spent 4 years making it, but they're announcement about soon to be released game led to angry public outcry.  Their distributor backed up.  The game and the company that made it were done.  That game, "6 Days in Fallujah", serves as an excelle...

Knowledge is power, and in the era of Big Data video game companies have a whole lot of information, which they can potentially use to manipulate players in order to cash in on them.  We discuss how they might do this through dynamic reward schemes, how far this information asymmetry may go, and whether players have the ability to fight back and level the playing field. ---------------------------...

Games are traditionally thought of as acting like magic circles.  When we enter the game, we enter the magic circle and leave the real world behind.  In our first podcast we explore how the magic circle idea can help us think about fairness and cheating in video games, how this way of thinking was challenged by a brilliant scheme from the chaotic world of Eve Online in 2005, and how this relates t...

The Ethics and Video Games podcast is dedicated to investigating the intersection and relationships between video games and ethics.  We explore controversial ethical issues about video games (e.g. what should be censored), in video games (e.g. what counts as cheating), and in video game design (e.g. what works to make a game morally interesting). --------------------------- JOIN THE ETHICS AND VID...