[Release Date: September 5, 2023] There are over 50 million players over the age of 50 in the USA alone and those numbers will only
Author: sher.shlomo
Shlomo Sher, Ph.D. teaches one of only two college-level courses on the Ethics of Video Games in the world. He has a dual-appointment in the Letters, Arts, and Sciences and Game Design departments at the New York Film Academy, Los Angeles. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy with an emphasis on Ethics at USC, where he also developed a series of business ethics workshops for the Marshall School of Business and was a fellow at the USC Levan Institute of Humanities and Ethics (2009-2011). Dr. Sher has also taught courses in philosophy at USC, CSU Fullerton, CSU Los Angeles, Mt. St. Mary’s University, Beijing Normal University, and East China Normal University.
[Release Date: August 22, 2023] Games are particularly fertile grounds for extremist recruitment. Why is that? What’s special about games and gaming culture that might make
[Release Date: August 1, 2023] When game companies simulate cultures in their games they usually focus on the tropes that their intended audiences have about those
[Release Date: July 18, 2023] Gaming and game development work differently for the developed global north than the developing global south. What are those differences? How
[Release Date: July 4, 2023] In a couple of recent episodes guests have mentioned concerns about battle passes. So, in this episode we decided to explore
[Release Date: June 20, 2023] What can college esport teams do to blunt harassment against female players and make esports more inclusive? Are they in a
[Release Date: June 6, 2023] How can ads for video games and for stuff in games be deceptive or manipulative? What do they need to consider
[Release Date: May 23, 2023] In this episode we explore some of the ethical issues related to kinks in video games – mostly adult ones. How
[Release Date: May 9, 2023] We’ve rarely discussed the specific category of adult games on this podcast. So, we do so here and now and honestly,
[Release Date: April 25, 2023] What should we think about when we bring sex and intimacy into video games? In this episode, we explore issues
[Release Date: April 11, 2023] How do players morally engage with games? What can user experience research and moral psychology tell us about how players experience
[Release Date: March 28, 2023] Games are supposed to be fun and playing in a historical setting or replaying historical events can be really fun. But
[Release Date: March 14, 2023] The monsters we see in video games are usually antagonists that we destroy without remorse. But what is a monster and
[Release Date: February 28, 2023] How would you make a game about a topic as important, complex, hard to talk about,, and NOT fun at all
[Release Date: February 14, 2023] Toxicity in online gaming is an incredibly complex problem to solve. Teams of moderators often seem hopelessly outmatched by the amount
[Release Date: January 31, 2023] Making money playing games on Twitch or YouTube sounds like a dream come true! But money never comes without strings
[Release Date: January 17, 2023] This is part 2 of our first two-part exploration of predatory monetization. Our guest, Elena Petrovskaya has been researching player complaints
[Release Date: January 3, 2023] When it comes to monetization in games, what do players see as misleading, unfair, or aggressive? Elena Petrovskaya asked this question
[Release Date: December 20, 2022] When a player steps into a game, often that game will have a political structure and the player’s choices in that
[Release Date: December 6, 2022] Putting in blockchain and NFTs into games and marketing that as Play to Earn promises a revolution in gaming that will
[Release Date: November 22, 2022] Most players think that loot boxes (essentially randomized rewards schemes) are a form of gambling, and many are concerned that they’ll
[Release Date: November 8, 2022] Games have been getting more and more gamblified in recent years. This has occurred both within games and in terms of
[Release Date: October 25, 2022] Players, game devs, artists, voice actors, marketing people, and everyone else that works in the game industry – even game design
[Release Date: October 11, 2022] We’re always interested in the way that video games depict us. One topic that we think has got too little attention
[Release Date: September 27, 2022] We encounter poverty in lots in games. We might play in a GTA-“ghetto” or interact with people in a “slum” using
[Release Date: August 30, 2022] Game development is often a creative collaboration among people with very different skill sets, passions, and worldviews. What does it mean
[Release Date: September 13, 2022] In esports, players trash talk, fans trash talk – even commentators trash talk! Sometimes trash talk is fun harmless banter, but other
[Release Date: August 16, 2022] When we heard that David Churchill hosts an AI competition with the Real Time Strategy game Starcraft, we were instantly fascinated.
[Release Date: August 5, 2022] Have you ever considered how gaming and game companies contribute to environmental problems like global climate change? We haven’t! At
[Release Date: July 19, 2022] Hundreds of millions of players have pirated video games. Most of them didn’t feel any guilt about it. Some even
[Release Date: July 5, 2022] We’re used to the idea of organizations that try to do good as non-profits, but what about for-profit companies – like
[Release Date: June 21, 2022] It’s hard to imagine games without AI, but having AI in games also raises a host of ethical questions involving their
[Release Date: June 7, 2022] Game companies have lawyers to tell them how to operate within the law. They have accountants and data analysts to tell
[Release Date: May 24, 2022] Video games have been accused of being addictive and making players more violent and sexist. Studies have been cited that confirm
[Release Date: May 10, 2022] Someday people may be gods – all powerful entities able to control the physics of virtual worlds and the functionalities of
[Release Date: April 26, 2022] We’ve done 40 episodes about ethics and video games and the word “God” or “Religion” never came up. How do
[Release Date: April 12, 2022] There’s lots of research going on about video games. Some of it involves product testing like VR games or the effectiveness
[Release Date: March 29, 2022] Video game transactions are a highly unusual, perhaps unique, business model. Our guest Elie Cohen essentially calls it an exploitative
[Release Date: March 15, 2022] There’s deception in Among Us and bluffing in Poker. But then there are multiplayer games where players you trusted will scam,
[Release Date: March 1, 2022] A meritocratic system is one whose “winners” are those who earn their positions through greatest talent and hard work. That
[Release Date: February 15, 2022] Do men and women see the role of fun or leisure in their life differently? How does this translate to their
[Release Date: February 1, 2022] Is it ever morally wrong to enjoy fantasizing about immoral things in video games? On the one hand, it’s just a
[Release Date: January 18, 2022] One way to think about games is as experiences tailored to give us agency – to provide us with clear
[Release Date: January 4, 2022] In ‘Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque’ you play as a Palestinian resistance fighter working to end the occupation of Palestine. It’s
[Release Date: December 21, 2021] Online multiplayer games are notorious for having hopelessly toxic environments where harassment and griefing abound. Game companies are obviously aware of
[Release Date: December 7, 2021] When and how much is it ok for one game to “borrow” elements from another game? We often think of
[Release Date: November 23, 2021] What is it to “be” a gamer? How did the gamer “identity” become both masculinized and marginalized? How has this
[Release Date: November 9, 2021] John Gibson, the (now former) CEO of Tripwire Games tweeted an opinion about a newly enacted and unpopular Texas law.
[Release Date: October 26, 2021] In our ethics news and bits episodes we grab a few recent news items that we want to chat about,
[Release Date: October 12, 2021] How can you responsibly design a game about an ongoing tragedy like the corona-19 pandemic? How can you make ANY