Ethics: April 2008 Archive Page

Naomi Alderman (Guardian):

[S]ometimes I admire the beautifully-rendered star-filled sky, and sometimes I drive the in-game car into a lamp-post, just to see what happens. It is play, just like "cops and robbers", just like daydreaming, just like writing a novel.

I'm not a big fan of driving games, and the longest stretches of game-playing time I have are when I'm watching my kids play games on a different computer, so I'm not likely to get much time to invest in this game. Nevertheless, it does sound very impressive, and I'm looking forward to what the modding community might be able to make of it.

Imagine that, since childhood, you've been a fan of a now-obscure genre of computer games called interactive fiction. Imagine that, since 1999, you've kept a weblog.

Imagine that, since 2003, you've taught journalism and new media courses, in which you have introduced students to weblogs and interactive fiction (among other topics, of course). 

Recently, after about five years of on-and-off research, you published an article that included archival material about the first interactive fiction game, Colossal Cave Adventure.  Thanks to the kindness of innumerable e-mail contacts, you have been able to study the source code -- recovered from a 30-year-old backup tape -- that had been considered lost. 

Imagine that you're now in the middle of teaching a unit on the materiality and persistence of digital culture, to a class that consists mostly of upper-level journalism students who have been blogging academically for years.  You've recently assigned Espen Aarseth's close reading of Infocom's interactive fiction work Deadline, and you just finished going through Matt Kirchenbaum's detailed forensic analysis of a 5 1/4 floppy disk containing the interactive fiction game Mystery House. 

And imagine that someone (not you) gets ahold of some archival material from Infocom. More than just some archival material, a complete copy of the company's networked hard drive, bristling with e-mails, production notes, source code, and demo files.

Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry.

The problem with a "what do you think about this", or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until it's all died down to give a summary thanks and move on. Fulop instead begins a conversation and ultimately a quasi-interview/roundtable masquerading as a poll.

A web-based forum (in this case, AtariAge) is no longer imbued with the limitations of bulletin board systems; multiple simultaneous posters are a breeze, images can be embedded into discussions, and the software allows for instantaneous restructuring of the postings to satisfy a linear or threaded regard. While in many ways this is a positive set of innovations, it also brings along with it potential for flamewars and flare-ups to immediately consume the parties involved. There is no waiting period. There is an abundance of meta-discussion due to the non-scarce resource of access. There is a lower barrier to entry with commercial and societal interests in lowering the barrier even further. This is the modern environment and it's the way it is.

So saying that there were an average of 4.4 posts an hour is not all that helpful, in fact; you have no idea of the distribution of the messages. Since people can be writing multiple additions simultaneously, the forum can actually "breathe" in a manner not unlike a bellows or chamber in an engine; with posts queuing up in great numbers and blasting across the message base in waves.

The WashPo ruminates on the social significance of the activities of the brain-eating collegiate undead.

The 2005 inaugural Zombies game drew about 70 Goucher students. Since then, as many as 200 have played, making it one of the most popular student activities -- even though it's not an official student activity -- among the school's roughly 1,500 students. The game has spread to other campuses, with thousands of students playing this month at Cornell University, Penn State University, Bowling Green State University and the University of Maryland, among others.

But as Zombies' popularity has grown, criticism of it has grown, too -- especially since last April, when a severely disturbed English major named Seung Hui Cho armed himself with two semiautomatic handguns and killed 33 people, including himself, at Virginia Tech University. In the immediate wake of that shooting, Humans vs. Zombies became controversial, raising a collegiate version of the prevailing question of our time: What is the balance between security and freedom? And it prompts another fascinating question: What can a group of young people learn about one

The abstract from a psychology conference presentation that argues World of Warcraft lowers the anger levels of players is getting a lot of attention online.  The term "sex" (which appears in the title paired with "violence") seems to mean "gender" in the abstract, so the title may be a bit misleading. I haven't heard from anyone who attended the conference presentation, and neither have I read the full study.

Sex and violence and playing games: reduced levels of anger after violent online play
Jane Barnett, Mark Coulson, Nigel Foreman, Middlesex University

Objectives: This study had two main aims. First, to explore the types of anger-causing scenarios experienced when playing WoW. Second, to identify the state emotions experienced before and after the anger-causing scenarios, as a function of sex and personality.

Design: Male and female WoW players (aged between 12 and 83 years) provided examples of anger-causing scenarios they experienced while playing the game (these scenarios formed the World of Warcraft Questionnaire: WoWQ). These scenarios plus other questionnaires examining anger, aggression, and personality, were administered as an online survey. Respondents completed state and trait mood measures, played WoW for a minimum of two hours, and then completed the state measures again. Participants also reported situations ingame that had made them feel angry or aggressive.

Method: Participants were recruited using the official WoW gaming forums. The forum post provided players with a link that took them to the introductory page of the survey. The final number of respondents was 292.

Results: Principal components analyses found a structure identifying four main anger-causing themes in WoW. Correlational and regression analyses examined the relationships between these WoW scenarios, and the emotional and personality constructs of participants. Mixed ANOVAs examined differences between male and female state moods before and after playing WoW. Results suggest that although online gamers are more likely to feel calm or tired after playing, the post-WoW mood state is dependent on sex, age, and personality.

Conclusions: The identification of a specific gamer personality type helped to outline the possible benefits and risks of these individuals who play video games. A standardised questionnaire was developed to examine the concepts investigated in this research, i.e. how anger and aggression vary as a function of personality, sex, and age, in gamers and non-gamers. This study improved the understanding of and the ability to respond effectively to public health threats that arise from playing computer games, and encouraged more responsible communication regarding these issues.

Someone is going to use this incident as evidence to support the claim that social networking websites are dangerous.

Lindsay's father said the teens attacked her to make a video that might become popular on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. But the mother of one of the girls arrested said Lindsay had provoked the other teens by threatening and insulting them on the MySpace social-networking Web site.

Teenagers use social networking websites. Teenagers commit crimes. As more teens use social networking websites, more teens who use social networking websites will commit crimes. No matter who started what, nobody deserves to be beaten up for a half hour.  But look on the bright side... thanks to the hubris of whoever posted the video to YouTube, the lawyers for the defense will have a much, much harder time in court.

Last year, I enjoyed reading In the Clickstream, a speculative blog-based thinkpiece from Mike Edwards, who teaches composition at the U.S. Military Academy. With Mike, I participated in a workshop at the 4Cs, where I got to meet two majors who are also composition instructors.  Both my brother and sister work for defense contractors, and I grew up just outside Washington D.C., so I'm not a stranger to the culture of the defense industry, but it was a very interesting experience hearing military instructors talk about their experiences teaching literature and composition officers-in-training.  One of the many things I picked up at this conference was some cultural context to help me to interpret this piece from Wired:

Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad. 

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.

The Smoking Gun has this snarky story... I've changed the inline links so that they point to The Smoking Gun, rather than to the photos the article mentions about):

A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy, claiming that the web giant's popular "Street View" mapping feature has made a photo of their home available to online searchers. Aaron and Christine Boring accuse Google of an "intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion" of their seclusion and privacy since they live on a street that is "clearly marked with a 'Private Road' sign," according to a lawsuit the couple filed this week in Allegheny County's Court of Common Pleas. A copy of the April 2 complaint can be found below. According to the Borings, they purchased their Oakridge Lane home in late-2006 for "a considerable sum of money," noting that a "major component of their purchase decision was a desire for privacy." But when Pittsburgh was added last October to the roster of cities covered by Google's "Street View" feature, the Borings allege, their "private information was made known to the public," causing them "mental suffering" and diminishing the value of their home (which cost the couple $163,000, according to property records). The Borings are seeking in excess of $25,000 in damages and want a court order directing Google to destroy images of their home. Click here for some photos of the Boring property, which is now even easier to locate via Google Maps, since the plaintiffs included their home address on the lawsuit's first page. And while they are litigating, perhaps the Borings should consider suing Allegheny County's Office of Property Assessments, which includes a photo of their home (which was built in 1916 and sits on 1.82 acres) on its web site. Here's a screen grab. (8 pages)