Speedrunning is a kind of ‘metagame’ involving video games. Though it does not yet have the kind of profile of multiplayer e-sports, speedrunning is fast approaching e-sports in popularity. Aside from audience numbers, however, from the perspective of the philosophy of sport and games, speedrunning is particularly interesting. To the casual player or viewer, speedrunning appears to be a highly irreverent, even pointless, way of playing games, particularly due to the incorporation of “glitches”. For many outside (...) the speedrunning community, the use of glitches appears to be cheating. For speedrunners, however, glitches are entirely within the bounds of acceptability. Because of this, however, speedrunning frequently involves sidestepping what are typically taken to be the core challenges of the game. By examining the distinction between the use of glitches and cheating in speedrunning, we can gain a greater understanding of the unique ethos of this activity; that is, we can make sense of what fundamentally constitutes speedrunning as a metagame. I argue that by understanding the code of the game not as rules but as physics, and by examining what actions are deemed impermissible by the speedrunning community – such as hardware modification and hacking – we can see that the ethos of speedrunning has three components: constitutive skills (including dexterity, memorisation and mental fortitude); a collective, fine-grained knowledge of the game and the desire to subvert the intentions of the programmers. Each of these components limits and structures the earlier ones: collective knowledge takes priority over constitutive skills, and subversion takes priority over both. These three components form the ethos that structures speedrunning as a metagame, expressing what speedrunners take to be its central aim. (shrink)

Many have offered moral objections to video games, with various critics contending that they depict and promote morally dubious attitudes and behaviour. However, few have offered moral arguments in favour of video games. In this chapter, we develop one such positive moral argument. Specifically, we argue that video games offer one of the only morally acceptable methods for acquiring some ethical knowledge. Consequently, we have (defeasible) moral reasons for creating, distributing, and playing certain morally (...) educating video games. (shrink)

The effect of violent video games is among the most widely discussed topics in media studies, and for good reason. These games are immensely popular, but many seem morally objectionable. Critics attack them for a number of reasons ranging from their capacity to teach players weapons skills to their ability to directly cause violent actions. This essay shows that many of these criticisms are misguided. Theoretical and empirical arguments against violent video games often suffer from (...) a number of significant shortcomings that make them ineffective. This essay argues that video games are defensible from the perspective of Kantian, Aristotelian, and utilitarian moral theories. (shrink)

However, people might wonder, did all Chinese students engage in school learning before the creation of electronic games? The answer is definitely no, and apart from gaming, students back in the day would skip classes to attend other activities perceived as “irrelevant” to school learning.

Can video games or the playing of such games be morally objectionable? Many attempts to justify our intuitions about the morality of certain games or game activities are either unsuccessful or fall short. This is mainly due to a normative gap between reality and virtuality that classical approaches to moral philosophy cannot bridge. I am investigating to what extent an accurate action analysis can help us to justify our intuitions that, in some cases, something is ethically (...) wrong with video games. To do so, I am using Frankfurt’s volition theory to show how virtual game actions can be evaluated based on virtue ethics. This virtue ethical assessment is compatible with Ostritsch’s (2017) endorsement view. Especially in light of the gamification of our surroundings, the question of the ethical status of video gaming is becoming more and more urgent. By arguing that a virtue ethical approach can tell us more about the ethical aspects of video gaming, I will also argue that virtue ethics (because of similar problems in these fields) is promising regarding the ethics of simulation, art, and literature. (shrink)

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel (...) back in time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to see how mental and language representations are unique from a video-game perspective, using two main criteria. First, I will posit that the level of being both an interactive work of fiction and a self-involving interactive fiction belongs to a fuzzy interval and that some works – and, therefore, some video games – are more immersive than others. Second, I will observe how propositions tie the player’s representations of the real world (...) and the game world. Starting from psychological theories of pretense in children’s make-believe games, I will then expand Nichols and Stich’s cognitive theory of pretense to include an extra layer related to the game world, i.e., player-specific representations that govern player-specific propositions. The representations dealing with the work world are the socially shared ones, while the possible-world representations, dealing with most of the game world, are player-specific and tied to unique language use. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma refers to the philosophical challenge of justifying the intuitive difference people seem to see between the moral permissibility of enacting virtual murder and the moral impermissibility of enacting virtual child molestation in video games (Luck Ethics and Information Technology, 1:31, 2009). Recently, Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 has argued that the Gamer’s Dilemma is actually an instance of a more general “paradox”, which he calls the “paradox of treating wrongdoing lightly”, and he proposes a (...) graveness resolution to this paradox. In response, we argue for four key claims. First, we accept Luck’s expansion of the Gamer’s Dilemma to be applicable to a wider set of media, but give a novel recasting of this in terms of the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far. Second, we develop a novel criticism of Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 graveness resolution to this broader paradox. Third, we argue that the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far helps to expose an implicit moralism in the Gamer’s Dilemma literature when compared to relevant nearby literatures about other forms of media. Fourth, we consider a range of non-moral, cultural and media conventions that plausibly help to dissolve the intuitive moral gap between non-sexual and sexual violence that is central to this paradox. (shrink)

Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing (...) a custom-built visual novel game (The Great Fire) with different intuitive and counter-intuitive morality meter settings. Overall, we found that players’ attitudes towards the morality meter in this game was complex, context sensitive and variable throughout gameplay and that the intuitiveness of the meter encouraged participants to treat the meter more ‘as a moral guide’ that prompts reflection and less ‘as a score’ to be engaged with reactively. (shrink)

Forty years have passed since video-games were first made widely available to the public and subsequently playing games has become a favorite past-time for many. Players continuously engage with dynamic visual displays with success contingent on the time-pressured deployment, and flexible allocation, of attention as well as precise bimanual movements. Evidence to date suggests that both brief and extensive exposure to video-game play can result in a broad range of enhancements to various cognitive faculties that generalize (...) beyond the original context. Despite promise, video-game research is host to a number of methodological issues that require addressing before progress can be made in this area. Here an effort is made to consolidate the past 30 years of literature examining the effects of video-game play on cognitive faculties and, more recently, neural systems. Future work is required to identify the mechanism that allows the act of video-game play to generate such a broad range of generalized enhancements. (shrink)

What is the difference between a game and life? Is the game really ending when we go back to our everyday activities? Or could The Sims video game not be a good representation of our existence? It is with these questions in mind that I decided to explore the interdependence that exists between our everyday cultural reality and the rhetoric manifesting itself in video games. This paper introduces some of the key concepts used in the semiotics of (...) video games and attempts to articulate them in a single frame. It is a short introduction to storyworlds, procedural rhetoric and gamespace. (shrink)

Lately in the past couple of years, there are an increasing in the normal rate of playing computer games or video games compared to the E-learning content that are introduced for the safety of our children, and the impact of the video game addictiveness that ranges from (Musculoskeletal issues, Vision problems and Obesity). Furthermore, this paper introduce an intelligent tutoring system for both parent and their children for enhancement the experience of gaming and tell us about (...) the health problems and how we can solve them, with an easy user interface that way can our children be happy and excited about the information and their health. (shrink)

Today’s everyone normal life can include a normal rate of playing computer games or video games; but what about an excessive or compulsive use of video games that impact on our life? Our kids, who usually spend a lot of time in playing video games will likely have a trouble in paying attention to their school lessons. In this paper, we introduce an expert system to help users in getting the correct diagnosis of (...) the health problem of video game addictions that range from (Musculoskeletal issues, Vision problems and Obesity). Moreover, this expert system provides information about the problem and tell us how we can solve it. SL5 Object expert system language was used to design and implement the expert system. (shrink)

This article explores the nature and theoretical import of a hitherto neglected class of fictions which we term ‘self-involving interactive fictions’. SIIFs are interactive fictions, but they differ from standard examples of interactive fictions by being, in some important sense, about those who consume them. In order to better understand the nature of SIIFs, and the ways in which they differ from other fictions, we focus primarily on the most prominent example of the category: video-game fictions. We argue that (...) appreciating the self-involving nature of video-game fictions is key to understanding various otherwise puzzling phenomena concerning the ways in which consumers respond to them. Video-game fictions are, however, far from being the only extant example of this class; and we suggest that the recent philosophical interest in video games would be better focused on the wider class of self-involving interactive fictions. (shrink)

Video-game play (particularly “action” video-games) holds exciting promise as an activity that may provide generalized enhancement to a wide range of perceptual and cognitive abilities (for review see Latham et al., 2013a). However, in this article we make the case that to assess accurately the effects of video-game play researchers must better characterize video-game experience and expertise. This requires a more precise and objective assessment of an individual's video-game history and skill level, and making (...) finer distinctions between video-games that fall under the umbrella of “action” games. Failure to consider these factors may partly be responsible for mixed findings (see Boot et al., 2011). (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma is based on the intuitions that in single-player video games fictional acts of murder are seen as morally acceptable whereas fictional acts of sexual assault are seen as morally unacceptable. Recently, it has been suggested that these intuitions may apply across different forms of media as part of a broader Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far. This study aims to empirically explore this issue by determining whether fictional murder is seen as more morally acceptable than (...) fictional sexual assault across different media types, and whether audio-visuality and the degree of agency afforded by the medium influences these judgments. An experimental survey study was developed where participants responded to imaginary fictional scenarios as part of a 2 (engages with fictional murder or fictional sexual assault) X 2 (in a high or low agency) X 2 (audio-visual or non-audio-visual medium) factorial design. It was found that fictional murder was seen to be more morally acceptable than fictional sexual assault across all media types, providing empirical support for the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far. It was also found that the audio-visuality and degree of agency influenced judgments of moral acceptability. (shrink)

Autoethnographic accounts of mental illness (MI) are sparse in academic scholarship, despite generating valuable insights into how MI can be experienced and coped with in real-life contexts. First-person accounts from men are especially lacking, possibly linked to historic trend for masculine stoicism stifling male MI discussions. Some scholarships explore video-gaming as a positive, escapist aid benefiting individuals experiencing major depressive disorder (MDD). However, no research exists presenting in-depth perspectives on possible positive effects, self-identified and articulated by actors engaging with (...) gaming to cope with MDD. This research adopts a novel qualitative perspective, representing an in-depth autoethnographic examination of my experiences playing the personal computer game DeusEx, during a period of my life where I was under treatment for MDD. My positions as both a psychologist specializing in research prioritizing feminist theory as applied to understand men, masculinities, and mental health, and someone themselves recurrently treated for MDD over longer than 22 years, construct a unique dual-positionality perspective. Explicit discussions of my MDD experiences and my experiences concerning the value of video-gaming as a positive, escapist aid during MDD are presented, alongside personal deconstructions of the lasting influences of hegemonic masculinity upon men speaking up about MI. Arguments are presented for future scholars utilizing autoethnographic methods to generate realist perspectives, normalizing mental health discussions, particularly the sharing of underrepresented male experiences. Implications for future scholarship, building upon learnings generated by this research, are developed and put forward. (shrink)

Interactions between an intelligent software agent and a human user are ubiquitous in everyday situations such as access to information, entertainment, and purchases. In such interactions, the ISA mediates the user’s access to the content, or controls some other aspect of the user experience, and is not designed to be neutral about outcomes of user choices. Like human users, ISAs are driven by goals, make autonomous decisions, and can learn from experience. Using ideas from bounded rationality, we frame these interactions (...) as instances of an ISA whose reward depends on actions performed by the user. Such agents benefit by steering the user’s behaviour towards outcomes that maximise the ISA’s utility, which may or may not be aligned with that of the user. Video games, news recommendation aggregation engines, and fitness trackers can all be instances of this general case. Our analysis facilitates distinguishing various subcases of interaction, as well as second-order effects that might include the possibility for adaptive interfaces to induce behavioural addiction, and/or change in user belief. We present these types of interaction within a conceptual framework, and review current examples of persuasive technologies and the issues that arise from their use. We argue that the nature of the feedback commonly used by learning agents to update their models and subsequent decisions could steer the behaviour of human users away from what benefits them, and in a direction that can undermine autonomy and cause further disparity between actions and goals as exemplified by addictive and compulsive behaviour. We discuss some of the ethical, social and legal implications of this technology and argue that it can sometimes exploit and reinforce weaknesses in human beings. (shrink)

In this study, we analyzed the blinking behavior of players in a video game tournament. Our aim was to test whether spontaneous blink patterns differ across levels of expertise. We used blink rate, blink duration, blink frequency, and eyelid movements represented by the Eye Aspect Ratio (EAR) to train a machine learning classifier to discriminate between different levels of expertise. Classifier performance was highly influenced by features such as the mean, standard deviation and median EAR. Moreover, further analysis suggests (...) that blinking rate and blink duration are likely to increase along with the level of expertise. We speculate this may be indicative of a reduction in cognitive load and lowered stress of expert players. In general, our results suggest that EAR and blink patterns can be used to identify different levels of expertise of video game players. (shrink)

The Gamer's Dilemma is a much-discussed issue in video game ethics which probes our seemingly conflicting intuitions about the moral acceptability of virtual murder compared to virtual child molestation. But how we approach this dilemma depends on how we frame it. With this in mind, I identify three ways the dilemma has been conceptualized: the Descriptive Gamer's Investigation, which focuses on empirically explaining the source of our intuitions; the Gamer's Puzzle, which uses the dilemma to explore and test (...) moral or metaphysical theories; and the Applied Gamer's Dilemma, which reconstructs the moral commitments underlying the intuitions to provide action-guidance. Clearly distinguishing these framings allows us to identify the distinct methodologies and criteria of success for each approach. This tripartite framework helps resolve confusions in the debate, highlights the need for experimental philosophy to test proposed resolutions, and opens space for a serious reconsideration of consequentialism. The paper thus provides conceptual clarity to move the discussion forward productively. (shrink)

The paper classifies euthanasia and discusses its typological presence in storytelling video games. It aims to illustrate the importance of experiencing simulated moral challenges in the context of gameworlds as a significantly influential, exponentially growing form of interactive media. In contrast to older works of art and media, such as film and literature, the difference should be emphasized in light of the player’s ability to make choices in video games. Although the influence of gameworld content depends (...) on the player, the experiences and knowledge gained from playing storytelling video games may influence the player’s problem-solving orientation in the landscape of difficult moral dilemmas they may encounter throughout their lives. (shrink)

Lately in the past couple of years, there are an increasing in the normal rate of playing computer games or video games compared to the E-learning content that are introduced for the safety of our children, and the impact of the video game addictiveness that ranges from (Musculoskeletal issues, Vision problems and Obesity). Furthermore, this paper introduce an intelligent tutoring system for both parent and their children for enhancement the experience of gaming and tell us about (...) the health problems and how we can solve them, with an easy user interface that way can our children be happy and excited about the information and their health. (shrink)

Twenty-two experienced action video-game players (AVGPs) and 18 non-VGPs were tested on a pen-and-paper line bisection task that was untimed. Typically, right-handers bisect lines 2 % to the left of true centre, a bias thought to reflect the dominance of the right-hemisphere for visuospatial attention. Expertise may affect this bias, with expert musicians showing no bias in line bisection performance. Our results show that experienced-AVGPs also bisect lines with no bias with their right hand and a significantly reduced bias (...) with their left hand compared to non-AVGPs. Bisections by experienced-AVGPs were also more precise than those of non-AVGPs. These findings show the cognitive proficiencies of experienced-AVGPs can generalize beyond computer based tasks, which resemble their training environment. (shrink)

Increasing behavioural evidence suggests that expert video game players (VGPs) show enhanced visual attention and visuospatial abilities, but what underlies these enhancements remains unclear. We administered the Poffenberger paradigm with concurrent electroencephalogram (EEG) recording to assess occipital N1 latencies and interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) in expert VGPs. Participants comprised 15 right-handed male expert VGPs and 16 non-VGP controls matched for age, handedness, IQ and years of education. Expert VGPs began playing before age 10, had a minimum 8 years experience, (...) and maintained playtime of at least 20 hours per week over the last 6 months. Non-VGPs had little-to-no game play experience (maximum 1.5 years). Participants responded to checkerboard stimuli presented to the left and right visual fields while 128-channel EEG was recorded. Expert VGPs responded significantly more quickly than non-VGPs. Expert VGPs also had significantly earlier occipital N1s in direct visual pathways (the hemisphere contralateral to the visual field in which the stimulus was presented). IHTT was calculated by comparing the latencies of occipital N1 components between hemispheres. No significant between-group differences in electrophysiological estimates of IHTT were found. Shorter N1 latencies may enable expert VGPs to discriminate attended visual stimuli significantly earlier than non-VGPs and contribute to faster responding in visual tasks. As successful video-game play requires precise, time pressured, bimanual motor movements in response to complex visual stimuli, which in this sample began during early childhood, these differences may reflect the experience and training involved during the development of video-game expertise, but training studies are needed to test this prediction. (shrink)

This dissertation was written for the purpose of displacing the negative stereotype of video games being deemed as ‘lowbrow’ entertainment within critical and academic circles, when in actuality the medium has the ability to tell a captivating story through a unique lens unlike the narratives that are traditionally found in a film or a novel. Most of the criticism that games have received in the humanities come from literary scholars who have denounced the medium’s attempts to adapt (...) seminal pieces of literature such as Dante’s Divine Comedy. To counter this assumption, I will be engaging with a video game that has not been marketed as a direct adaptation of the Comedy, but rather uses Dante’s writing as a source of inspiration to enhance its own ludonarrative experience. The game I will be examining in close proximity to the Comedy is the Japanese role-playing game Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne released by the studio Atlus in 2003. Nocturne is an incredibly viable case study for this investigation because it exemplifies how, through the unconventional adaptation process of transmediality, a distant text like an RPG can transform the material of a medieval poem to best fit its digital stage while still referencing its source material. In this context, I intend to establish a methodological basis for the transmedial analysis of literature and video games through the creative insight of the Comedy and Nocturne, so that new meaning can be uncovered from both texts and further research can thus commence on relative instances of ludic adaptation. (shrink)

This article criticises David Chalmers’ ‘Reality+’ by interrogating its distinction of virtual reality (VR) from 2D, non-VR video games, a distinction made on the grounds that VR is immersive and these types of video games are not because immersion is a distinct characteristic of 3D perceptually represented VR. Building on the Balcerak Jacksons’ account of ‘representational immersion’, which they acknowledge has ‘perceptual’ and ‘non-perceptual’ elements, I develop an account of ‘non-perceptual representational immersion’ and use it to (...) critique Chalmers’ treatment of VR, immersion, and video games, indirectly problematizing his central ontological claim that ‘virtual reality is genuine reality’ and the reflections he makes about future society which rest upon it. I argue that video games are rich in non-perceptual representational immersion, which includes the representation of non-perceptual information about the structure and behaviour of a virtual world and its systems, the non-perceptual cognitive states that are generated in the player by the virtual world, and the immersion which comes from the constitutively cognitive nature of the player’s engagement with the virtual world, a cognitive engagement construed in an enactive sense. These are just as crucial to the phenomenon of digital immersion as perception. Immersion generally is a much more complicated phenomenon than Chalmers allows for, and it is better conceived as taking place on a spectrum which includes both 3D and 2D experiences of virtual worlds, not as hinging on 3D perceptual representation. I use ‘immersive simulation’ games as a case study. (shrink)

This special issue of Games and Culture focuses on the intersection between video games and ethics. This introduction briefly sets out the key research questions in the research field and identifies trends in the articles included in this special issue.

Feminized AIs designed for in-home verbal assistance are often subjected to gendered verbal abuse by their users. I survey a variety of features contributing to this phenomenon—from financial incentives for businesses to build products likely to provoke gendered abuse, to the impact of such behavior on household members—and identify a potential worry for attempts to criticize the phenomenon; while critics may be tempted to argue that engaging in gendered abuse of AI increases the chances that one will direct this abuse (...) toward human beings, the recent history of attempts to connect video game violence to real-world aggression suggests that things may not be so simple. I turn to Confucian discussions of the role of ritualized social interactions both to better understand the roots of the problem and to investigate potential strategies for improvement, given a complex interplay between designers and device users. I argue that designers must grapple with the entrenched sexism in our society, at the expense of “smooth” and “seamless” user interfaces, in order to intentionally disrupt entrenched but harmful patterns of interaction, but that doing so is both consistent with and recommended by Confucian accounts of social rituals. (shrink)

Historic preservation, which is a vital act for conveying people’s understanding of the past, such as events, ideas, and places to the future, allows people to preserve history for future generations. Additionally, since the historic properties are currently concentrated in urban areas, an urban-oriented approach will contribute to the issue. Hence, public awareness is a key factor that paves the way for this conservation. Public history, a history with a public audience and special methods of representation, can serve society in (...) this regard. Historical video games, which get their game objectives from the past, can be considered a form of public history, raising people’s awareness and letting them gain historical experience. While plenty of studies focused on this content with various approaches, this study takes the topic under consideration with a player-oriented focus. The research uses the Steam video game digital distribution service database to explore the existing historical games based on their genre, player scale, dimension, VR compatibility attributes, and player rating. The database includes 1,148 games published between 2002 and 2022, filtered as historical by Steam tags and sorted by player review. For the data collection, the study uses the Octoparse web scraping tool for data extraction, and for the data analysis, it uses RapidMiner Studio data mining software. The study aims to provide a framework applicable to the development of commercially playable historical video games contributing to heritage preservation by raising public awareness in the context of public history. (shrink)

Papers, Please, by Lucas Pope (2013), explores the story of a customs inspector in the fictional political regime of Arstotzka. In this paper we explore the stories, systems and moral themes of Papers, Please in order to illustrate the systemic approach to designing videogames for moral engagement. Next, drawing on the Four Component model of ethical expertise from moral psychology, we contrast this systemic approach with the more common scripted approach. We conclude by demonstrating the different strengths and weaknesses that (...) these two approaches have when it comes to designing videogames that engage the different aspects of a player’s moral expertise. (shrink)

Both short and long-term video-game play may result in superior performance on visual and attentional tasks. To further these findings, we compared the performance of experienced male video-game players (VGPs) and non-VGPs on a Simon-task. Experienced-VGPs began playing before the age of 10, had a minimum of 8 years of experience and a minimum play time of over 20 h per week over the past 6 months. Our results reveal a significantly reduced Simon-effect in experienced-VGPs relative to non-VGPs. (...) However, this was true only for the right-responses, which typically show a greater Simon-effect than left-responses. In addition, experienced-VGPs demonstrated significantly quicker reaction times and more balanced left-versus-right-hand performance than non-VGPs. Our results suggest that experienced-VGPs can resolve response-selection conflicts more rapidly for right-responses than non-VGPs, and this may in part be underpinned by improved bimanual motor control. (shrink)

Every day, millions of people use mobile phones, play video games and surf the Internet. It is thus important to determine how technologies like these change what people think and how they behave. This is a central issue in the study of persuasive technologies. ‘Persuasive technologies’—henceforth ‘PTs’—are digital technologies, such as mobile apps, video games and virtual reality systems, that are deployed for the explicit purpose of changing attitudes and/or behaviours, without using coercion, deception or extreme (...) forms of psychological manipulation (such as hypnosis or indoctrination), and without exerting a direct (not psychologically mediated) physical effect on the brain. Typically PTs employ strategies such as prompting, information provision and encouragement... (shrink)

In this paper, we report on an experiment with The Walking Dead (TWD), which is a narrative-driven adventure game with morally charged decisions set in a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies. This study aimed to identify physiological markers of moral decisions and non-moral decisions using infrared thermal imaging (ITI). ITI is a non-invasive tool used to capture thermal variations due to blood flow in specific body regions that might be caused by sympathetic activity. Results show that moral decisions seem to (...) elicit a significant decrease in temperature in the chin region 20 seconds after participants are presented with a moral decision. However, given the small sample involved, and the lack of significance in other regions, future studies might be needed to confirm the results obtained in this work. (shrink)

Current advances in research, development and application of artificial intelligence systems have yielded a far-reaching discourse on AI ethics. In consequence, a number of ethics guidelines have been released in recent years. These guidelines comprise normative principles and recommendations aimed to harness the “disruptive” potentials of new AI technologies. Designed as a semi-systematic evaluation, this paper analyzes and compares 22 guidelines, highlighting overlaps but also omissions. As a result, I give a detailed overview of the field of AI (...) ethics. Finally, I also examine to what extent the respective ethical principles and values are implemented in the practice of research, development and application of AI systems—and how the effectiveness in the demands of AI ethics can be improved. (shrink)

Serious games are an effective method of reproducing aspects of the complex interplay between environments and stakeholders in business situations. In the game we describe here, The Sustainable Port, players experience what it is like to make decisions in such a complex environment. Their aim in the game is to grow the Port of Rotterdam while keeping economic growth in balance with sustainability goals. In this study, we assessed whether experienced Port of Rotterdam employees (PoR employees) show different psychophysiological (...) patterns, and more specifically EAR-derived features, compared to students. We did this on the assumption that physiological patterns will tell us something about how people who are familiar with the environment of the Port of Rotterdam, more specifically Port of Rotterdam employees, make decisions compared to those lacking such familiarity.Our sample consisted of 28 PoR employees and 65 students, all of whom played The Sustainable Port game and had their faces recorded with a camera. The Eye Aspect Ratio was extracted from these recordings and then from those we extracted EAR-derived features. Our results show that Port of Rotterdam employees perform better than students and that the two groups are characterized by different physiological variations in their EAR-derived features. A logistic regression model used to identify PoR employees and students obtained an F1 score of 0.62, a PR AUC score of 0.64, and a ROC AUC score of 0.70. performing significantly above baseline suggesting the effectiveness of using EAR-derived features for this task. Our interpretation was further confirmed by a pseudo-R2 score used to evaluate the goodness of fit of a logistic regression model on the entire dataset. We found that Port of Rotterdam employees had a lower variation in blink rate per minute (blinks/m) and higher variation in the root mean square difference of successive difference in blinks (RMSSD), the consecutive difference between two continuous blinks. Moreover, this study shows that our methods were robust enough to negate the effects of confounders, such as biological sex and age that affect some other studies that analyze blinks. (shrink)

In this study, we extracted facial action units (AUs) data during a Hearthstone tournament to investigate behavioural differences between expert, intermediate, and novice players. Our aim was to obtain insights into the nature of expertise and how it may be tracked using non-invasive methods such as AUs. These insights may shed light on the endogenous responses in the player and at the same time may provide information to the opponents during a competition. Our results show that player expertise may be (...) characterised by specific patterns in facial expressions. More specifically, AU17 (chin raiser), AU25 (lips apart), and AU26 (jaws drop) intensity responses during gameplay may vary according to players' expertise. Such results were obtained by training a random forest classifier to test whether we can use these three AUs alone to accurately detect players' expertise. The classifier reached 0.75 accuracy on 5-fold cross-validation, after balancing the class weights, and 0.85 after having applied the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) function. These results suggest that AUs can be effectively used to discriminate different levels of expertise in competitive video game players. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the growing problem of unwanted sexual interactions in virtual environments. It reviews the available evidence regarding the prevalence and severity of this problem. It then argues that due to the potential harms of such interactions, as well as their nonconsensual nature, there is a good prima facie argument for viewing them as serious moral wrongs. Does this prima facie argument hold up to scrutiny? After considering three major objections – the ‘it’s not real’ objection; the ‘it’s just (...) a game’ objection; and the ‘unrestricted consent’ objection – this chapter argues that it does. The chapter closes by reviewing some of the policy options available to us in addressing the problem of virtual sexual assault. (shrink)

Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the (...) medium of agency. Game-playing, then, illuminates a distinctive human capacity. We can take on ends temporarily for the sake of the experience of pursuing them. Game play shows that our agency is significantly more modular and more fluid than we might have thought. It also demonstrates our capacity to take on an inverted motivational structure. Sometimes we can take on an end for the sake of the activity of pursuing that end. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that the videogame Far Cry 2 manages to take advantage of the heroic formula so characteristic of the first-person shooter videogame genre in a way that potentially prompts players to reflect on the ethical adequacy of their own decision to immerse themselves in a fictional scenario in which they take the role of a fictional character whose behaviour primarily, if not exclusively, consists in shooting.

How do we prepare engineering students to make ethical and responsible decisions in their professional work? This paper presents an approach that enhances engineering students’ engagement with ethical reasoning by simulating decision-making in a complex scenario. The approach has two principal inspirations. The first is Anthony Weston’s scenario-based teaching. Weston’s concept of a scenario is a situation that changes in response to choices made by participants, according to an inner logic. Scenarios can dynamically explore open-ended complex problems without imposing predetermined (...) results, allowing students to apply their ethical reasoning in a more realistic fashion. The second inspiration is Thi Nguyen’s theory of games. According to Nguyen, games are the “art of agency,” meaning that they provide a structure under which some result is agreed to be valuable, along with prescribed ways of achieving that result, in a relatively low-stakes and temporary social arrangement. By playing many games, Nguyen argues, we can develop a “library of agency,” that is to say, a set of values and means to achieving them that can inform how we make high-stakes decisions in real life. Engaging with carefully designed game scenarios, then, can enable students to practice making ethical decisions within a structured framework, which unfolds in response to their choices, while their decisions are driven by some defined goal. This roleplaying game–based approach thus allows students to build their own ethical libraries of agency, in preparation for professional decision-making. The approach is illustrated using a specific example recently deployed in a seminar on engineered living materials (building materials that incorporate living tissues). The scenario uses techniques from tabletop roleplaying games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons) for outcome resolution, adventure design, and character creation. Through the game, students practice making difficult decisions in a humanitarian context. (shrink)

Increase in popularity of games like "Second Life" has contributed not only to significant changes in the development of the electronic entertainment industry. Promoting Games 2.0, the new trend of video game production that are assumed to be the virtual worlds that contain user-generated content makes both measured with a specific technological innovation, as well as a serious change in the organization of socio-cultural heritage. The article presents problems of the existing difficulties of terminology, the implications of (...) the availability of Games 2.0 for social life, the concept of leisure as work in the new economy and creative non-material and the characteristics of "Generation C". Work stresses the need for discussion on trends in the development of video games - defined as a choice between the projects’ of "socio-cultural ideology of perpetual motion" and "utopia of universal creativity". These approaches allow to identify the methodological basis for analysis of relations between the operators and users of Games 2.0, taking into account the wider social environment. ** Wzrost popularności gier typu „Second Life” przyczynił siȩ nie tylko do znacznych przemian w rozwoju branży rozrywki elektronicznej. Upowszechnianie Games 2.0, nowego nurtu produkcji gier wideo które z założenia maj¸a} stanowić wirtualne światy zawieraj¸a}ce treści tworzone przez użytkowników sprawia, że mierzymy siȩ zarówno z określon¸a} innowacj¸a} technologiczn¸a}, jak też z poważn¸a} zmian¸a} organizacji życia społeczno-kulturowego. Artykuł przedstawia problematykȩ istniej¸acych trudności terminologicznych, konsekwencje dostȩpności Games 2.0 dla życia społecznego, pojȩcie rozrywki jako pracy w nowej gospodarce niematerialnej i twórczej oraz charakterystykȩ „generacji C”. Praca podkreśla potrzebȩ dyskusji nad kierunkami rozwoju gier wideo - określanymi jako wybór miȩdzy projektami „ideologii społeczno-kulturowego perpetuum mobile” i „utopii powszechnej twórczości”. Podejścia te pozwalaj¸a na wskazanie podstaw metodologicznych do prowadzenia analiz relacji miȩdzy operatorami, a użytkownikami Games 2.0 przy uwzglȩdnieniu szerszego otoczenia społecznego. (shrink)

In this paper, we report on the development of The Sustainable Port video game, which aims to simulate the complex dynamics and decisions occurring in the present and future development of a port area considering environmental aspects (CO2 emissions) and profit. To evaluate if this game fulfills its purpose, we asked 75 students and 34 employees at the Port of Rotterdam (PoR) to play The Sustainable Port. Our results show that PoR employees score higher than students suggesting a transfer (...) between real-life experience of being an employee in the port and performance in the game. Furthermore, port participants reported that The Sustainable Port can be successfully used to start discussions about the future of the Port of Rotterdam and to raise awareness about the complexity characterizing the decision-making processes occurring in a port environment. Our results, taken together, provide evidence of the effectiveness of The Sustainable Port in simulating dynamics occurring in port development and give us optimism about future applications. (shrink)

One of the methods of teaching ethics, which has recently attracted the attention of researchers in the field of ethics and education and has a long history in Islamic teachings, is teaching through games, the main purpose of this article is to explain it in detail and examine the capacities and advantages of this method; With the difference that in this article, our focus is not on a specific type or case of games, but on the (...) absolute of collective games that do not necessarily have an ethical design. Therefore, in this article, by using inference and documental methods and using library resources, after reviewing the background of indirect methods of moral education, the game is defined and then, while enumerating a number of effective functions of the game in the moral improvement of the players, some advantages of this method over other training methods have been mentioned. Strengthening moral humility, balance between personal interest and collective interest, creating the capacity to win and finally the spirit of acceptance of failure are among the capacities of the game in moral education. (shrink)

Are acts of violence performed in virtual environments ever morally wrong, even when no other persons are affected? While some such acts surely reflect deficient moral character, I focus on the moral rightness or wrongness of acts. Typically it’s thought that, on Kant’s moral theory, an act of virtual violence is morally wrong (i.e., violate the Categorical Imperative) only if the act mistreats another person. But I argue that, on Kant’s moral theory, some acts of virtual violence can be morally (...) wrong, even when no other persons or their avatars are affected. First, I explain why many have thought that, in general on Kant’s moral theory, virtual acts affecting no other persons or their avatars can’t violate the Categorical Imperative. For there are real world acts that clearly do, but it seems that when we consider the same sorts of acts done alone in a virtual environment, they don’t violate the Categorical Imperative, because no others persons were involved. But then, how could any virtual acts like these, that affect no other persons or their avatars, violate the Categorical Imperative? I then argue that there indeed can be such cases of morally wrong virtual acts—some due to an actor’s having erroneous beliefs about morally relevant facts, and others due not to error, but to the actor’s intention leaving out morally relevant facts while immersed in a virtual environment. I conclude by considering some implications of my arguments for both our present technological context as well as the future. (shrink)

Slot machines gained a high popularity despite a specific element that could limit their appeal: non-transparency with respect to mathematical parameters. The PAR sheets, exposing the parameters of the design of slot machines and probabilities associated with the winning combinations are kept secret by game producers, and the lack of data regarding the configuration of a machine prevents people from computing probabilities and other mathematical indicators. In this article, I argue that there is no rational justification for this secrecy by (...) giving two reasons, one psychological and the other mathematical. For the latter, I show that mathematics provides us with some statistical methods of retrieving the missing data, which are essential for the numerical probability computations in slots. The slots case raises the problem of the exposure of the parametric configuration and mathematical facts of any game of chance as an ethical obligation. (shrink)

Do university ethics classes influence students’ real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their (...) assigned topic and optionally viewed a related video, then met with teaching assistants for 50-minute group discussion sections. They expressed their opinions about meat ethics and charitable giving in a follow-up questionnaire (1032 respondents after exclusions). We obtained 13,642 food purchase receipts from campus restaurants for 495 of the students, before and after the intervention. Purchase of meat products declined in the experimental group (52% of purchases of at least $4.99 contained meat before the intervention, compared to 45% after) but remained the same in the control group (52% both before and after). Ethical opinion also differed, with 43% of students in the experimental group agreeing that eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical compared to 29% in the control group. We also attempted to measure food choice using vouchers, but voucher redemption rates were low and no effect was statistically detectable. It remains unclear what aspect of instruction influenced behavior. (shrink)

Taking a quick look at game theory, rational egoism and the evolution of fairness.

Ambient assisted living technologies are increasingly presented and sold as essential smart additions to daily life and home environments that will radically transform the healthcare and wellness markets of the future. An ethical approach and a thorough understanding of all ethics in surveillance/monitoring architectures are therefore pressing. AAL poses many ethical challenges raising questions that will affect immediate acceptance and long-term usage. Furthermore, ethical issues emerge from social inequalities and their potential exacerbation by AAL, accentuating the existing access gap (...) between high-income countries and low and middle-income countries. Legal aspects mainly refer to the adherence to existing legal frameworks and cover issues related to product safety, data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and access to data by public, private, and government bodies. Successful privacy-friendly AAL applications are needed, as the pressure to bring Internet of Things devices and ones equipped with artificial intelligence quickly to market cannot overlook the fact that the environments in which AAL will operate are mostly private. The social issues focus on the impact of AAL technologies before and after their adoption. Future AAL technologies need to consider all aspects of equality such as gender, race, age and social disadvantages and avoid increasing loneliness and isolation among, e.g. older and frail people. Finally, the current power asymmetries between the target and general populations should not be underestimated nor should the discrepant needs and motivations of the target group and those developing and deploying AAL systems. Whilst AAL technologies provide promising solutions for the health and social care challenges, they are not exempt from ethical, legal and social issues. A set of ELSI guidelines is needed to integrate these factors at the research and development stage. (shrink)

Morality is traditionally understood as comprised of two components: justice and mercy. The first component, justice, the universal component of the form, is frequently seen as foundational for any moral system – which poses a challenge of explaining the second component, mercy, the particular component of content. Kantian ethics provides an example of this approach. After formulating his universalist theory of ethics in the Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals and further developing it in the Critique of practical (...) reason, he attempts to use it in order to establish the morality of mercy in the Metaphysics of morals. Yet can universal morality of justice necessitate particular ethics of mercy? Using the example of competitive games, the relations between the ethics of justice and that of mercy are demonstrated, and it is shown that the former does not lead to the latter. Moreover, the universality of the rules of moral behavior can serve as a form for blatant brutality. Analyzing the characteristics of particular morality, we can conclude that physical humanity of the moral object, perceived as such by the subject, is a required condition for mercy. Removal of object's humanity is a necessary step toward an ethical system that allows cruelty – a system that can still be based on universal moral rules. Bhagavad Gītā, on the other hand, can be seen as an example of combining nīṣkāmakarma, the formal, universal ethics of desireless action, with a variety of particular motivations originating in the nature and social context of the moral agent. (shrink)