Depending on whose numbers you look at, gaming is now a 30 billion dollar industry that is rapidly growing and evolving worldwide. These emergent and pervasive games are not only major cultural forces and ontological worlds that we inhabit, they are also ethical phenomenathat demand our ethical attention and our ethical scrutiny. Some questions that I am thinking about:
- What makes games ethical phenomena?
- Does the game design process present new ethical issues to be explored and developed?
- What kinds of ethical issues and moral responsibilities are raised by gaming technologies?
- How can we think about the relationships between games and the good life for individuals as well as for cultural quality more broadly?
Assuming that we come to know ourselves through our experiences, then what might your gaming experiences (or lack thereof) teach you about yourself? What might be revealed about your ethical being-in-the-world in-interaction-with the technological? How are you bethinged by technological things thinging (simultaneously dependent upon, indifferent to, immersed in and inhabited by technology)?
We are all members of one human family, sharing one fragile home within a vast infinity of technological possibilities. When you rewind back through gaming’s world history, what do you see? Fast forward to the future: will we look back with dignity or with indignity for what gaming technologies are, how they evolved and how we made them to be?
//PJ