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On the Worthlessness of Game Academics

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On the Worthlessness of Game Academics

Unread postby icycalm » 14 Mar 2010 21:56

This is the title of an upcoming article. One of the points I make in this article (more precisely: a piece of evidence I advance to support my claim that these people and their entire output are worthless) is that their personal websites are without exception terrible. Ugly, drab, mirthless, discussing for the most part only crappy games that no one would care to even play, let alone read other people's comments on -- or when they do happen to talk about a decent game they always somehow manage to make it sound boring.

And this is the gist of all this: these people are so fucking dumb and worthless THAT THEY CAN MAKE EVEN VIDEOGAMES APPEAR BORING.

And here is a short list of some of their fucking terrible sites:

http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/
http://bbrathwaite.wordpress.com/
http://blog.avantgame.com/
http://www.erasmatazz.com/
http://ludicwr.ath.cx/
http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/
http://differentgaming.blogspot.com/
http://www.raphkoster.com/
http://www.game-research.com/
http://www.edery.org/
http://www.ai-blog.net/
http://www.brainygamer.com/
http://www.bogost.com/
http://www.gameinmind.com/
http://simonferrari.com/
http://gamedesignadvance.com/
http://livingepic.blogspot.com/
http://www.gamestudies.org/
http://gametheoryonline.com/
http://www.critical-distance.com/

EXCEPTION: http://www.designer-notes.com/


Feel free to post more links of such sites if you know any, and I will add them to the original list. There's like a billion of them out there.

I figure that if people spend even half an hour or so going through these links they'll be much better prepared to listen to what I have to say in my article.

Note also that this thread will also be relevant to the discussion.
Last edited by icycalm on 13 Oct 2011 21:32, edited 5 times in total.
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Unread postby Choking » 15 Mar 2010 08:47

http://www.brainygamer.com/

This guy has a podcast, too. Leigh Alexander is a frequent guest, no less!
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Mar 2010 18:15

I am not at all surprised: that little promiscuous cunt is everywhere -- she would probably come on here too if I asked her. And in fact, what with her androgynous bastard child contributing to Insomnia these days, I might even do so.
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Unread postby amadeus » 19 Mar 2010 00:09

http://www.bogost.com/

Came to my attention with this post, a reaction to GDC 2010. It is however a promotion for his own games with 'serious' content. Just listen to this:

My games have addressed food safety and agribusiness, consumerism, personal debt, the global petroleum market, pandemic flu, wind energy, and even the politics of nutrition, the very subject of CTO Chopra's announcement.


However
Yet, I am not thrilled. I am not encouraged. I am distressed and I am embarrassed.


Followed by an all-time high
The real promise of games as educational and political tools is in their ability to demonstrate the complexity and interconnectedness of issues. Games, like all media, can't ever really change behavior; a game about nutrition won't magically turn a player healthy, just as a game about criminality won't magically turn a player delinquent.


But of course
This in mind, I offered to share the lessons, good and ill, that we learned from making Fatworld, a game funded by the Independent Television Service about the politics of nutrition. Fatworld has issues, but to my knowledge it is the best example of a game that really tries to deal with the issues the First Lady's health campaign promises to tackle.


No wonder that it made kotaku.com as a guest comment.
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Unread postby icycalm » 21 Mar 2010 06:06

I tried to read that article. I can figure out plasma physics, quantum mechanics and cutting-edge philosophy, but I honestly have no idea what he is talking about. What does he even want? I'll make a wild guess and say that he is asking for money.
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Unread postby icycalm » 21 Mar 2010 06:07

WTF is up with an entire paragraph about corn syrup at the end? WTF does corn syrup have to do with videogames for christsake?
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Unread postby amadeus » 21 Mar 2010 10:31

Well my guess is, he wants those sweeteners out of the food since they are an obesity factor. And he seems to think that video games should try to take the sweeteners out (WTF?). However, which wormhole he wants to use in order to achieve it, remains unclear.

It may very well be money. Because, as he says himself, even though his games suck, he has now found the light and knows what to do. But – he won't tell you. Unless the government gives him, instead of Sony, some of that taxpayers' money. After all he has earned it, doesn't he? Just look at what he is:

I am a videogame researcher, critic, and designer, as well as an author and an entrepreneur. I am a professor at Georgia Tech (a university), a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame studio), and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).

http://www.bogost.com/about/about_me.shtml

A video game researcher. Big time.

I also hate GDC. Makes the news outlets post bullshit as 'news' and is the main event for the creeps of the 'industry'. And all the gamers feel suddenly enlightened, as one can gather from the comments to his rubbish.
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Mar 2010 12:58

Here's an exception to the rule, Soren Johnson's blog:

http://www.designer-notes.com/

He worked on the design of Civilization IV -- i.e. not only a real game, but hands down the best fucking game ever. So he knows his stuff -- in comparison to everyone else linked in this thread so far, who has either never had anything to do with game design, or has only "worked" on ludicrous abortions of non-games and screensavers, and moreover knows nothing about science, philosophy, or anything of the real world whatever.

Now Johnson doesn't know anything about science or philosophy either, nor does he seem interested in finding out, but at least he attempts, in his own way, to approach these problems in the most structured and rigorous way he can -- instead of generating randomized text interspersed with the latest stupid buzzwords like everyone else. To be sure, this is still a long way off from MY kind of seriousness and rigorousness, but it is at least the best I've so far seen anyone get. He even, in a couple of points, approaches the points I will analyze in some of my upcoming essays, as in this article for example:

Turn-Based vs. Real-Time
http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=151

... though, again, he fails to get to the bottom of things, and moreover fails to tie up each article -- the conclusions, that is to say, arrived at in each article -- with every other.

And of course he also commits tremendous blunders from time to time like everyone else, or falls into traps like "meaning", etc.

But like I said: he is by far the best of a wretched, worthless lot.
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Unread postby recoil » 27 Mar 2010 01:47

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Unread postby icycalm » 27 Mar 2010 16:14

He also posted it on one of those pseudo-highbrow review sites:

http://www.gamecritics.com/matthew-kapl ... s-good-for

The comments in both pages are more interesting than the article -- a sure sign that the author has either failed in whatever he was trying to achieve, or that that thing was not really worth achieving in the first place.

Lurker wrote:The site's not obscure. Icycalm aka Alex Kierkegaard - the handle for the owner of the forum, post, and site that you linked - is pretty well known and very infamous in certain game circles. Anyone that's had to deal with him in any serious capacity does not forget him. Hell, he isn't just infamous, he's actively blacklisted by a lot of people that know what he's about.

I actually encourage you to check out some of his front page articles sometime or dig deeper into the forum if you get a chance. It's a trip, I tell you. This wasn't just some random post you were linked to.


Raigan Burns wrote:I feel like this article is based on a complete misreading of insomnia.ac; maybe it's not clear in that one post, but in general the author definitely *does* think that writing about games is important, and approaching them with intellectual rigour is a worthwhile pursuit and makes a difference.

What he's complaining about isn't *that* the academics exist, it's that he feels they are inept; he's not claiming that the idea of game studies is stupid, he's claiming that the people currently engaging in game studies are stupid. At least this is my impression.


Simon Ferrari wrote:I think it's somewhat intellectually dishonest, and beneath you, to tack this extended discussion of game scholars onto the event of coming across Insomnia for your first time. Here are some things:

1) Insomnia is not obscure; most people who read about games even five inches outside their own social circle read it regularly, 95% out of self-loathing for continuing to read and the other 5% because sometimes it publishes something you haven't read before.

2) The idea that Icycalm is reacting to anything you might personally be feeling is rather absurd. He doesn't care about academia. He's not on Twitter. He's not an outsider struggling to get in. There's one thing Icycalm dislikes, and it's people who don't write exactly how he wants them to, exactly where he wants them to--on his forums.

3) That list on the forum post isn't even a list of academics. He's not even paying enough attention to the sites he lists and the blogrolls each contains to make either a complete or a consistent list. I get that you hint at some kind of elbow-rubbing between designers and academics that creates a de facto game scholar class that cuts across both professions... but that has nothing to do with the fact that Icy is just being sloppy here.

I love you, Matt, but you're projecting someplace you really don't want to project into.


Simon Ferrari wrote:To reiterate, the only issue I had with the piece was that it mentioned Insomnia. Insomnia is a completely different issue with absolutely no relation to our work as scholars.

Here's what I would suggest about Insomnia and it's name. In order to understand anything about that site and the people who post there, you need to:

1) Read it at night, by yourself.
2) Read all of it, over an extended period of time, while in various emotional states.
3) Read the books that Icycalm draws from, and decide for yourself how well he's synthesized their prose styles and ideas with the pursuit of analyzing games. Of course, most academics already HAVE read these (Baudrillard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein). You're just not used to reading shit on the Internet by people who are attempting to actually think about videogames and human beings through the lenses of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and simulacra.


I thoroughly enjoyed this particular comment:

Eugene Nikos wrote:I'm going to limit myself to pointing out the most flawed passages of this terrible response you have written. It took me a while to read it because you kept going off on tangents.

>If you don't want to visit it, I don't blame you, but let me sum up

Unfortunately your summary has little to do with the forum post, though it is correct until the last eight words. Fortunately, you don't even address this strawman, choosing instead to ramble on about the intricacies of being a gaming scholar.

>By extension, there is no single "goal" or "driving force" behind a discipline like game studies. Everyone brings something to the table. Generalizing like the aforementioned forum poster gets you nowhere.

It is only generalisations that get you somewhere. You even stated the contrapositive of that in the first sentence so really this entire passage is a reductio ad absurdum.

>He simply doesn't grasp the fallacious nature of his argument. ... All I know is that you have to be severely pissed off in order to write that sort of screed.

This is a projection, showing your own thought process, which has nothing to do with him. If my guess is correct, he wrote that post with a nice grin on his face.

>Perhaps the malcontent forum poster was wrong to attack blogs

Here your reading comprehension and analysis skills fail you. First of all, Mr. Kierkegaard was not attacking the blogs -- he was attacking the game academics in general. The blogs are merely EXAMPLES, or in his words "evidence I advance to support my claim that these people and their entire output are worthless". Second of all, your portrait of him as a "forum poster" is quite cunning but unfortunately, fails to the point of hilarity. Yes indeed, he does submit forum posts on forum software. Why not go even further, call him a "Keyboard user", hell go through his website and figure out he's also a "Game player", "Skier", "Basketballer", et cetera, et cetera. If I had to describe him in one word, it would be "Philosopher". However, I don't need to: he has a name after all!

>but the point is well taken as to the general inaccessibility of much of the disciplinary conversation in academic and professional circles.

You're giving yourself FAR too much credit, we understand you perfectly -- you're asking for more money with every article you post. Here, I will quote a single passage from your essay which betrays this mindset:

>Jerks and heroes, the lot of them. The primary difference, naturally, is that scholars--underpaid as they are in the humanities

You'd do well to go through Mr. Kierkegaard's website and reading essays by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.


When even your commenters are wiping the floor with you, you just know it's time to find a new hobby, lol. But I'd like to pick his face up and wipe the floor a little bit more with it, because it's not quite clean enough for my tastes.

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:Why is it called Insomnia, by the way?


Yeah, I guess only someone who is genuinely passionate about games would be able to figure this out -- which group it seems excludes people like you.

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:And why is "Icy" the primary poster in every subforum there?


Because it's my fuckin' website stoopid. Why are YOU the primary poster in every page of YOUR blog?

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:not that I was really trying; to an outsider, it just looks like a few posts on a forum that's rather barren


What is barren here is YOUR BRAIN -- that is why my forum seems barren to you. Not to mention that compared with the "barenness" of my forum your blog looks like A VACUUM, lol.

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:It certainly *seems* small.


It's certainly bigger than any forum YOU will ever manage to create. And it's by no means the only thing about me that's bigger than you. Ask your mum for details.

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:But you have to admit, the rhetoric in which we engage can be very intimidating.


lol. If by "intimidating" you mean "retarded", yeah, very much so.

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:and I think that it can heighten the sense that *we* don't know what we're doing from time to time.


Yes, your retarded rhetoric certainly "heightens the sense" that you do not have a fucking clue what the fuck it is you are doing. We can at least agree on that.

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:Is that a personal feeling? No, not at all. I say as much. I, for one, love the "life of the mind."


The life of the stupid mind, maybe. Because as regards the life of the mind proper, you know nothing about it -- if someone were to try to talk to you about it it would even seem to you like a fable.

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:But is it wrong to ask questions of accessibility of the writing and ideas?


It's not an issue of "accessibility of ideas", moron -- for that to have been an issue you would have to actually HAVE ideas. But you don't have any! All you are doing is vomiting bullshit that doesn't even make any sense! So it's not a matter of your ideas not being accessible -- it's a matter of your non-ideas being non-sensical.

And as long as I am taking care of this fool I might as well deal with one of his jerkoff little friends:

Simon Ferrari wrote:As far as intellectual interests go, I have a lot of common with Icycalm. I just don't have the time or the energy to try to engage him in the game he's designed on his forums and with his persona.


What the fuck do my forums or my "persona" have to do with anything, retard? Just go ahead and admit that you have nothing to say and be done with it. If you HAD something to say you would already have said it -- what the fuck do you have that worthless blog of yours for anyway?

Simon Ferrari wrote:Read the books that Icycalm draws from, and decide for yourself how well he's synthesized their prose styles and ideas with the pursuit of analyzing games.


I have synthesized ideas, yes, but not "prose styles". When you synthesize prose styles you become a dull and awkward imitator, like for instance all the people linked in this thread's opening post. My style, on the other hand, is unique and inimitable -- there's nothing "synthesized" about it whatsoever.

Simon Ferrari wrote:Of course, most academics already HAVE read these (Baudrillard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein).


lol, that's a good one. Would these be the same "academics" who think that basketball is art and that videogames can exhibit emergent behavior?

Simon Ferrari wrote:To reiterate, the only issue I had with the piece was that it mentioned Insomnia. Insomnia is a completely different issue with absolutely no relation to our work as scholars.


You'd just love to convince yourself of that, wouldn't you? But then you go to your worthless little blog and vomit nonsense like this:

Simon Ferrari wrote:My thesis proposes a model by which games, which are “half-real” according to theorist Jesper Juul


http://simonferrari.com/2010/03/12/save ... s-defense/

... and everyone with a brain -- with a "half-brain" even! -- simply laughs at you and right away places you -- not with the scholars -- but with the pseudo-scholars, where you belong.

Have a nice day, bitches.
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Unread postby icycalm » 27 Mar 2010 21:44

He deleted Eugene's reply and closed down the comments. Game academics, gentlemen.

I hear that he takes up his first teaching position this coming fall. My suggestion to him: You better start praying that there are no Insomnia readers among your students, lol. It could prove rather awkward trying to shut them up.
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Unread postby icycalm » 28 Mar 2010 04:44

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Unread postby icycalm » 28 Mar 2010 20:26

http://twitter.com/GameinMind/status/11206971940

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:Just ordered 16 works on continental philosophy @ $220 on Amazon. Ouch.


lol, much good will they do to you. Especially if they really are works ON philosophy instead of works OF philosophy. Better for you go back to chirping and twittering about me with your little friends. In the long term, this will prove to be a far more valuable contribution to mankind than any kind of botched attempt on your part to engage with philosophy.

http://twitter.com/simonFerrari/status/11155992404

Simon Ferrari wrote:I've read everything on the site. I'm genuinely interested in either the delusion (if he's real) or the humor (if not) of it.


He would like us to think that he read THE ENTIRE FUCKING SITE only because he is interested in the "delusion" or the "humor". Yet the only delusion here is clearly HIS, by convincing himself that he read THE ENTIRE FUCKING SITE for the "delusion" and the "humor". -- And this, too, is the only humor.

http://twitter.com/charlesjpratt/status/11156164653

Charles J Pratt wrote:I have to say, I've been getting a little tired of the shtick lately. Doesn't seem like he's saying anything new these days.


Imagine what kind of a gigantic moron he has to be to read my latest essay and come out of it saying that I "don't have anything new to say". Who HAS anything new to say, then? YOU perhaps, moron? With your retarded Canabalt review where you claim that to "role-play" Canabalt you have to fucking cosplay the main character? You fucking weaboo retard.

http://twitter.com/nightdreamer/status/11189712883

nightdreamer wrote:See? What did I tell you, these people in insomnia are losers of the highest order, who happen to be intelligent. Worst combo.


Yes, this is the worst combo. The best I guess would have to be STUPID LOSERS, like all of you people.

So yeah, KEEP TWITTERING ABOUT ME, LOSERS!


Zarathustra wrote:They think about you a great deal with their narrow souls -- you are always suspicious to them. Everything that is thought about a great deal is finally thought suspicious.


http://insomnia.ac/essays/of_the_flies_ ... ket-place/
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Unread postby NighAligned » 28 Mar 2010 21:21

http://www.gameinmind.com/game-in-mind/ ... thing.html

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:I'm not sorry that I started off the post by mentioning the insecure manchild known to some as "Icycalm." Quite frankly, I don't care how many people in the design-scholarship end of game studies know about him; the guy is obviously outside the conversation...


http://twitter.com/GameinMind/status/11206971940

Matthew G Kaplan wrote:Just ordered 16 works on continental philosophy @ $220 on Amazon. Ouch.


This is hilarious. He supposedly doesn't care about an "insecure manchild outside the conversation", but suddenly Mr. Intimidating Rhetoric felt the urge to buy sixteen works on continental philosophy at once. lol, I've been an avid reader of Insomnia for over a year now, and even I have only bought two Baudrillard books so far.
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Mar 2010 01:53

These people are truly astonishing, aren't they? If someone had told me, before I began using the internet, that people of this kind exist, I would simply not have believed him.

How can you bear to live every day with such incurable falsity and self-conceit? How can you look at yourself every day in the mirror without the most profound, most tormenting self-disgust?

Baudrillard called it Radical Exoticism. The psychological processes which make people like them possible will simply forever remain incomprehensible to people like us. And vice versa of course.
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Mar 2010 02:06

How do you explain to people like him, for example, that "the conversation" is mere chatter that is forgotten almost as soon as it is written. To be outside the conversation is a privilege! In Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's, and even in Baudrillard's time, there were plenty of conversations going on as well. And yet what do we have left of them today? -- Only Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Baudrillard, of course!
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Mar 2010 02:15

icycalm wrote:To be outside the conversation is a privilege!


Nietzsche wrote:... for philosophy is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow --
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Mar 2010 02:50

One must try to understand exactly what I mean by "privilege" -- it is by no means a manner of speaking: I mean it literally. The fact that I am entirely financially independent, that I do not have to answer to anyone for anything, that no one controls in the slightest what I write or don't write, WHEN I write or don't write -- that I can take as much time as I want to think and to study, even an entire year if I want to, or more -- without writing anything at all -- whereas all these miserable little pseudo-scholars are forced to scribble a certain number of publications every year, regardless of whether they actually have anything to say -- forced also to read EVERYONE ELSE'S wretched scribblings, so as not to fall behind in "the conversation" -- forced to give lectures, to attend these insufferable conferences in which nothing worthwhile takes place, to hobnob with all these idiots, all these slimy little scumbags who spend their entire lives "networking" and maneuvering for position -- freedom from all this, that is what I call a privilege, without which any genuine accomplishment in philosophy is quite simply impossible.

Look up the lives of all the greatest philosophers. They all enjoyed the same privilege.

A privilege, by the way, which I had to fight for. -- And this, too, was part of my apprenticeship in philosophy.
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Unread postby icycalm » 01 Apr 2010 22:26

This is the guy who has read the entire site:

http://simonferrari.com/2010/03/31/hill ... tasy-xiii/

Simon Ferrari wrote:Games are numbers


Which goes to show once more that it makes no difference what you read if you are retarded. There is a saying where I come from which says the same thing, but more eloquently lol: "It doesn't matter how much you wash the nigger -- you are only wasting your soap." (It rhymes in Greek...)
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Unread postby icycalm » 01 Apr 2010 22:51

Bogost, Ian Bogost:

http://www.bogost.com/writing/videogame ... mess.shtml

Ian Bogost wrote:All of these units of being exist simultaneously with, yet independently from one another.


He says lol, that for example lol, a videogame cartridge and the code it contains EXIST INDEPENDENTLY FROM ONE ANOTHER lol.

Like, ON DIFFERENT PLANES OF EXISTENCE LOL.

Ian Bogost wrote:There is no one "real" E.T., be it the structure, characterization, and events of a narrative, nor the code that produces it, nor anything in between.


There is no one "real" videogame, lol.

And this is his conclusion, lol, after several thousand words and several dozen retarded .jpg images:

Ian Bogost wrote:Videogames are a mess. A mess we don't need to keep trying to clean up, if it were even possible to do so.


THEY ARE A MESS BECAUSE OF FACKEN RETARDS LIKE YOU WHO VOMIT BILLIONS OF WORDS AND IN THE END TURN AROUND AND SAY THAT "EVERYTHING IS A MESS AND NOTHING CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT".

In conclusion: It doesn't matter how much you wash the nigger, etc.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Apr 2010 17:46

Whoever is excited to get my books into their hands should be thankful to these people. Writing books is a very boring exercise and that's why I've been putting off mine for like ever, but the disgust these people generate in me is pushing me to write faster than I otherwise would, just so in order to get rid of it. I simply want to smash them. So I am going to like lock myself up in my apartment for a week and finish that goddamn book. By the time I am done they'll be scared to go anywhere near a keyboard.
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Unread postby icycalm » 06 Apr 2010 06:05

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/guide_to_ ... /prologue/

This is merely an opening salvo, which happened to coincide with my discussion of Recap as a scholar. The real attack -- and coupe de grace -- is coming soon.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Apr 2010 00:50

A humorous interlude.

Image

End of humorous interlude.
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Unread postby icycalm » 21 Jul 2010 15:55

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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Oct 2010 13:18

Posted by a moron in the "off-topic" forum, so I am moving it here:

subhumansockpuppet wrote:The game in mind blog will be abandoned/deleted soon according to its creator Matthew Kaplan.

I'll spare you the nitty gritty details; let's just say that since February I have been at a place in my life that is conducive neither to writing nor meaningful contribution to the larger conversation.


I think the articles were pointless moralising. For example:

http://www.gameinmind.com/game-in-mind/ ... -nazi.html

It doesn't talk about

-how aesthetics affects game experience (is it more fun playing on the 'evil' team?)

-whether mini games which 'make players throw dead babies into mass graves, incinerate human beings in ovens, or shoot Jewish, gypsy, or homosexual prisoners on command' could still be fun.

-whether playing games can affect your view of the world (ie. could they be used for propaganda)

All he tries to talk about is 'is it immoral to play games?' He doesn't answer that question at all - just concludes that playing games could offend other people. Which is like saying 'playing games is immoral' is one possible answer to the question. Well duh. I think he has avoided taking a position on whether things you do in the simulacrum affects your character:

But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.


The only thing he is sure about is that Nazis are bad and still much worse than the Taliban.

I think morality is meaningless in games (or at best the relevant morality relates to a cooperative strategy to win or self imposed restrictions to maximize enjoyment). So M. Kaplan never contributed with his waffle. Anyone agree?


Duh.
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