Tag: gaming

Another Blue Moon

Remember the last blue moon? Woo boy, wasn’t that a special period?

Well, this time the blue moon just happened to be in August. Everyone started going bananas over how that one was going to be this August’s large moon, nevermind all the talk over whether it would actually be blue or not.

Just to make things clear at this point: August full moons aren’t larger than the rest of the year’s full moons, contrary to the widely believed fact (no less by yours truly until fairly recently) — the proximity cycle doesn’t coincide with the luminosity/phase cycle. In fact, it was only this May that the full moon happened to be the same day as that month’s perigee. Anyway, I digress.

Museums and archaeological sites were open for the night, couples everywhere were enjoying their romantic night out, people were outside cherishing their last days of summer wondering what was so special about this moon in particular.

In another realm, a digital one, the Scythian discovered the five sylvan sprites, fought with the Bright Moon Trigon, jammed along with Jim Guthrie, all the while feeling a hand guiding her actions. A hand belonging to a person who hadn’t had a gaming experience so moving and intense in quite some time.

If you ask me years from now what I was doing on this day of the blue moon, I’ll probably remember the Scythian’s adventures in the world of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP under the bright moon of ambiguous actuality.

I find that this experience speaks tons about how much and how quickly our digital and our physical lives have already blended… and beyond a shadow of doubt will continue to do so to spectacular, terrible, unimaginable levels.

Spoilers ahead:

Jamming with Jim Guthrie, the game’s composer:

Battling the unimaginable geometry of the Bright Moon Trigon:

Review: Digital Media Ethics

Digital Media Ethics
Digital Media Ethics by Charles Ess

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Facebook, privacy, video games (I’m writing an assignment of VGs and morality! ^^J), pornography, piracy, copyright, definitions of identity… all parts of the greater discussion on digital media ethics, options, moral frameworks (and consequently ways of tackling them) and institutional approaches showing more or less malevolent understanding of the current cyber-landscape’s true nature. There’s not much else out there on the matter and even if there was, Digital Media Ethics would still probably take the cake as the most comprehensive book on the matter out now.

One of the good things I got from it was how it really helped me understand the differences between the frameworks that exist to tackle ethical problems. Chances are each one of us, seldom with us being conscious about it, has a combination of degrees of the following:

Utilitarianism → For the greater good (ethics quantified)
Deontology → But you promised! (positive and negative human rights)
Feminist ethics → Ethics of care and emotion (stop DUALISM cartel! Logic of both/and )
Virtue ethics → Practicing excellence as a human (can’t you use your time any better?)
Confucian ethics → We are our relationships (I’m a different onion layer with everyone)

Meta-ethical frameworks:

Ethical relativism → Oh, you know, this tribe… (Hitler = Mother Teresa)
Ethical absolutism → I hold the end-all be-all truth! (Dogmatism much?)
Ethical pluralism → There must be a single truth out there… (…but all we can see are multiple interpretations of it!)

My explanations derive from Charles Ess’s very clear and easy-to-understand writing.
Another reason I like this book, perhaps the most important, is because he was the teacher for the Digital Media Ethics course I took in Aarhus University as an exchange student last autumn. It was a pleasure to take this course but now I have to have my respective assignment ready within less than two weeks. Wish me inspiration and hard work.

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