philosophy
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15 Minutes of Fame: Philosophically speaking
15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, from the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about. Whoa ... Was that a book on WoW and philosophy on that display rack? Why yes, it was. World of Warcraft and Philosophy, edited by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger, has been attracting double-takes in bookstores since last fall. With selections by philosophers from all over the globe, the book covers issues topics such as ethics, economics, gender identity and metaphysics through WoW-tinted lenses. But this is no dusty, academic tome. Roleplaying, cybersex and the infamous Corrupted Blood plague are all on the menu in this lively, readable tome targeted at fans of WoW. Editor John Nordlinger is just the sort of guy you'd expect to find behind such an eclectic project. The former senior research program manager at Microsoft is California-bound, moving from work in high-tech education to studying film production at USC. We visited with John while he was in transition about some of the realities behind World of Warcraft and Philosophy.
Author of World of Warcraft and Philosophy interviewed
World of Warcraft and Philosophy got released a little while back -- it's a book by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger that examines WoW-related topics like roleplaying and the Corrupted Blood plague, and ties them into philsophical ideas and thinking. TechFlash has now posted an interview with Nordlinger, and it's a good read as well. Nordlinger says that one reason they chose to talk about World of Warcraft in this way is that it's so incredibly big -- when you have 12 million (give or take a few at this point) people playing a game with a GDP larger than some smaller nations, you're going to touch on all sorts of interesting ethical, moral, and other philosophical ideas. He says the book has been pretty popular, and a few universities are currently considering teaching courses based on the material, not only because it's interesting, but thinking about the game in this way helps improve abstract thinking in general. And perhaps most interesting, he says that reading the book could help players better make ethical and moral decisions in the game. Just ninja-ing the mount from an Onyxia raid might not mean much to you, but when you look at the bigger picture, and what those actions mean for ethics in general, Nordlinger says the book might help players "make more aware decisions, if not different decisions." Of course, in practice, trying to explain higher philosophy to ninjas might not have the desired effect, but it does seem true that exploring the higher meanings of this game and the intents of the people playing it might put a little more meaning into the pixels as well.
World of Warcraft and Philosophy now on sale
Is your raid leader Machiavellian? Is it a categorical imperative to torture that Beryl Sorceror? What would Nietzsche have thought of Leeroy Jenkins? Good questions! And now we can find out. Following in the footsteps of books dealing with philosophies in other popular game titles like Legend of Zelda, Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger recently released World of Warcraft and Philosophy. The book deals with topics like ethics, economics, gender identity, metaphysics, and more, written by philosophers and gamers alike from around the globe. Heck, even role-playing and cybering are the subject of discussion, along with the Infected Blood plague and lots of other well-known WoW topics. The reviews seem to indicate that the book's a brisk, fun read, but who knows what the game's twelve-million-strong audience will actually like or appreciate. After all, to paraphrase Yeats, Azerothians are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought. Those who do want to stack their Int, though, can pick up the book at Amazon or other bookstores now.
Natal to be 'a union' of Microsoft and Rare's philosophies
Despite having released a number of games on the platform, Rare's Xbox 360 franchises haven't had the fan following of your War Gears and your Halos -- the developer's design director, George Andreas, chalks this up to the fact that the "hardware is aimed at a different demographic, and so we've always battled against that." That is fairly true -- the hardcore Xbox 360 audience has little patience for anthropomorphic piñatas or bird-backpacked bears. However, Andreas has hope for the future -- a future which will see the introduction of Microsoft's full-body controller, Project Natal.Andreas has stated Rare's interest in the new technology before, but in a recent interview with VideoGamer.com, he further explained the studio's excitement -- "it's a union of the two philosophies of the different companies, I guess," he said. Sounds like Rare's sticking to its family-friendly roots -- we suppose that rules out the possibility of Rare's secret Natal project being Gun Murder 3: The Legend of the Lost Shoot-Blaster.
Blow confirms a few details about next project
Following the pseudo-reveal of Jonathan Blow's next "philosophical, and quiet" puzzle-exploration title, we contacted the cerebral developer to see what details we could discern about the project. He responded, and explained that he got the idea for the game a few months before the launch of Braid, but developed some trepidation about tackling "a more-expensive, harder-to-make 3D game." During those doubt-filled days, he worked on the prototype projects (such as the 2D RPG) we heard about.A few weeks ago, he began "working on the game in earnest," and is now hiring 3D artists to help realize his vision. He assumes it will be another downloadable title, but isn't sure -- it's not set to drop for two years if his team stays on schedule, and who knows what platforms will be around then? Blow said we should hear more concrete details about the title as his team begins to produce some concept art and in-game visuals. We'd suggest keeping an eye on his blog 'til then.
Blow's next project to be quiet, philosophical 'puzzle-exploration game'
With stories claiming Braid creator Jonathan Blow was working on a handful of small titles from a variety of different genres (including a 2D RPG!), we can't help but feel a bit disappointed that his next project has been confirmed to be a "puzzle-exploration game that is philosophical, and quiet, and is being made for reasons other than crass profit motive." Way to think outside of the box, Jon. (Oh, who are we kidding. It's going to be amazing.)This story comes to us by way of a pair of now hiring ads (for 3D artists, if you're interested) Blow posted on his on blog, looking for help on the aforementioned project, which he later confirmed to gaming news blog EndSights to be his next release. From what we can glean from the ads, the game will have a two-year development cycle, will place "a heavy emphasis on the way things look," and will feature a plot which will make non-philosophy majors feel very, very confused.We've contacted Blow to see if we can get any more details about the project.[Thanks, Art.]
The Queue: Waterfalls
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today. There's a bunch of good questions in today's Queue: gold cap (including a little extrapolation by yours truly), boss level hit cap design, and voicing of a certain King of Stormwind.(In my Casey Kasem voice) As for today's reading music, take a listen to the 1990's classic by TLC, Don't Go Chasin' Waterfalls. They totally turn into water elementals too, around 3:40 in the video.Outdps asked..."Is the gold cap per character or per account? Is there a gold cap for guild banks?" Bonus question: "What should the gold cap be?"
Philosopher ponders the implications of robot warfare, life with a degree in philosophy
H+, our favorite transhumanist magazine, has just published a chat with Peter Asaro, the author of a paper titled "How Just Could a Robot War Be?" In this interview (co-authored by our old friend R.U. Sirius) the gentleman from Rutgers explores the philosophical implications of things like robot civil war, robots and just war theory, and the possibilities of installing some sort of "moral agency" in the killer machines that our military increasingly relies on. But that ain't all -- the big thinkers also discuss the benefits of programming automatons to disobey (certain) orders, drop science on a certain Immanuel Kant, and more. We know you've been dying to explore the categorical imperative as it relates to the robot apocalypse -- so hit that read link to get the party started!
EVE Online developers speak about player-elected councils
The sci-fi game EVE Online is unique among the massively multiplayer online games on the market in that it has a form of player governance, which allows for a new channel of communication between the subscribers and developers -- a council of representatives of the playerbase. Players are not selected by CCP Games, the creators of EVE Online, they're actually elected by the game's subscribers themselves. Those elected form the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), delegates who represent the interests of the players and deal directly with CCP Games. It's a bold idea and certainly one that many MMO developers would shy away from, particularly in that the CSM has input into the game's development pipeline. CCP Games felt what they're doing would be of interest to other people in the industry, and gave a presentation at GDC 2009. The session was titled "The Council of Stellar Management: EVE Online Bridges Worlds for a Society". Two speakers from CCP Games presented: Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, EVE's lead economist, (also known as Dr. EyjoG) and Pétur Jóhannes Óskarsson, a researcher at CCP whose work has been integral to making the CSM a reality.
The state of nature: Philosophy applied to EVE Online
EVE Online, in short, is constant, controlled chaos. Alliances are made daily, are trained upwards, and ultimately fall. It's all just a question of when they fall that really differentiates them. Yet, amazingly, out of this controlled game of warfare comes a spark of philosophical intrigue -- the concept of state of nature.Steven Croop from the Warcry Network has written a feature article discussing the states of EVE Online's types of government versus the old philosophical concept. He theorizes that the same state of self-preservation, noted in the original philosophical concept, does make an appearance in EVE. While the state has changed from its original form (struggle for survival versus struggle to not lose expensive stuff) it still drives the individual of EVE to seek out forms of government for protection, such as corporations and alliances.Interested in the full read? Check it out over at Warcry and get your dose of philosophical goodness.
Officers' Quarters: Unchart(er)ed territory
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.It's no secret that the game we all know and love is in a period of transition. Many basic assumptions of Warcraft are changing, from the way loot is itemized, to the way buffs work, to the very nature of raiding. Amidst all this change, I decided to update the document my guild wrote to define our basic principles and guidelines. Written in 2005, it was astonishingly outdated. I guess I shouldn't have been all that surprised. Someone who stopped playing back when Blackwing Lair was the endgame would barely recognize WoW if they rolled a premade 80 on the beta servers today.We call this document our guild's philosophy. Many guilds call it their charter. However you label it, right now is a great time to reevaluate exactly what your guild is all about and what your basic rules and beliefs will be going into the next expansion.
PS3 Fanboy philosophizes on Trophy collecting
Kylie Prymus, PS3 Fanboy's resident Rene Descartes, recently polished up his Trophy collection with wax philosophical. In one of his most insightful columns to date, Prymus turns his keen analytical eye onto the recently added PS3 Trophy system, examining how the highly enviable awards (and the fairly similar Xbox 360 Achievements) are affecting the way we play and purchase modern video games. Do easily unlocked Trophies and Achievements influence the sales success of mediocre titles? Are we playing our games differently, focusing on tedious tasks in a seemingly endless carrot chase? Do large Gamerscores and impressive Trophy collections make us more popular with the opposite sex?We don't need no stinking philosophers to find the answer to that last one -- of course they do. For everything else though, check out Prymus' article -- we guarantee it'll be the brainiest game-related essay you'll read all day.
Commence chin stroking: New book mixes Zelda and Philosophy
Zelda fan Luke Cuddy was so inspired by his favorite franchise that he went one step further than scribbling down some fan-fiction: he actually compiled a book on Zelda, tied it in with his knowledge of pop philosophy, and found a publisher for it.Okay, so it's probably not going to be Sartre or anything, but if you do purchase this when it releases on November 28th, you'll be able to ponder such musings as: How does the gamer experience the game? Does Link have a will, or do gamers project their wills onto him? How does time function? Can Hyrule be seen as an ideal society? Can the game be enjoyable without winning? Deeeeep, man. And it goes without saying that there's also the perennial gamer/pseud's favorite: is Zelda art?%Gallery-29660%[Via Go Nintendo]
Ask a Lore Nerd: Faith and religion
Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, the column that answers your questions about the story and lore of the Warcraft universe. Click the Comments link below, ask your question, and blogger/columnist Alex Ziebart will answer you in a future installment!Two weeks ago, when I was going through my queue of questions, one stuck out as especially complex. Sean Riley inquired about the beliefs and practices of the various Azerothian religions. This topic really excited me as I kind of have a thing for analyzing religion and faith. I would never claim to be an authority on theology, but it's stlil something that is very interesting to me. Warcraft lore combined with theology? Yes please! Obviously this isn't really the place to analyze and debate religion, but taking time out to research the gaps in my knowledge on this particular topic was incredibly fun for me.Unforunately, I didn't have the space in that week's column to fit the answer to that question in, nor did I really have the time. It was a broad question and needed to invest a hefty amount of time into it. This one question has filled today's column, and while that may be disappointing to some that are waiting their turn, I hope it's an interesting read regardless.
Echochrome: The PSP's philosophical answer to Brain Age
For most of our younger readers, school's no longer in session in observation of the midsummer months -- though we're certain that our studious readers won't allow their minds become dull as rusty butter knives during their valuable vacation time. That's why we turn your attention to a fascinating article written by PS3 Fanboy's newest columnist, Ph.D candidate and gaming enthusiast Kylie Prymus, who examines the effect that the Escher-esque Echochrome can have on our perception of our own three-dimensional world. Prymus posits that Echochrome's unique, manipulatable 2D perspective is not only jarring when compared to the robust 3D engines we've become accustomed to seeing in most games, but it also points out the "frailty of our own perceptual apparatus", which is fundamentally two-dimensional. Those who still possess unblown minds might want to give the article a read -- if only to give you some Hawking-quality discussion material with which to impress your gaming cohorts.
Pumping Irony gets philosophical on patchers
Patchers. The upside and downside to online gaming. Sure, they bring you oodles of new content, but they can also result in wait times before you get in to play you favorite game. But did you ever stop to think about the difference in patchers across the genre? The subtle difference that's exhibited in each company's updating program, like logging in before downloading your update, or the amount of updates in a game?Pumping Irony did. That's why they sat down and looked at the patching process amongst different games and began to get philosophical on your favorite (or most hated) launching device. Is requiring a player to log in helping you with your download times? Or is it just another barrier to keep you waiting longer before you get in to play, which may offset companies getting subscribers back into action? These questions and more are described within, and it's certainly worth the read for any MMO junkie.
How Lila Dreams was able to do a lot with a little
Here at Massively, we're slowly becoming bigger and bigger fans of Lila Dreams, a tiny little MMO with some big ideas so far. The latest post over at the dev blog talks about how they made the best use of things that would normally be thought of as limitations in MMO design, and actually came out of it with more creativity than if they'd used more traditional MMO technology. The game is built in Java and Flash and is only 2D, but instead of settling for cheap animation, the designers actually used the drawback as a benefit, and designed a 2D scheme that lays down a set of bones, which can then be customized with any art that the designer wants to put in. What that means for players is customization -- the animation is designed around movement, not specific art, so lots of clothing or items or shapes can be put in their places, and the animation will still work.It also means, they say, that anyone can be designing animation, since instead of drawing frames or creating movement, you're just dragging keyframes around until they look right. The idea itself isn't necessarily new (lots of designers have used this "paper doll" philosophy, and of course letting anyone do animation doesn't guarantee that Lila Dreams will be anything special), but it's a good sign of the creativity of the Lila Dreams team that they took what most MMO developers would see as a negative (the limitations of Java and Flash), and made something interesting out of it. Can't wait to see they game they're cooking up.
On MMOs, cakes, and sand castles
Most MMO blogs that we read are very upfront about the immediacy of their concerns. Are Druids getting nerfed in the next patch or not? How soon will it be before we can finally use a Personal Armor Unit? Is Warhammer Online going to ship before it's complete? It's not every day that we scroll through our RSS reader and see a blog entry that really attempts to approach higher thinking. While we have always had a tremendous amount of respect for the bloggers over at Kill Ten Rats, we were still a tad surprised to see a post Zubon made a little over a week ago where he waxes philosophic on the illusion of permanence in the MMO genre.He questions whether accomplishing things in an MMO is like baking a cake (not a lie) or building a sand castle; they're fun enterprises, and can be very fulfilling accomplishments for their time, but their very existence is fleeting. Are our nightly accomplishments in MMOs any less transient? The ultimate answer, if you were to ask this blogger, is that everything in life is ultimately ephemeral, it's just a question of shelf-life. But then, this is the sort of talk that we'd expect to hear from somebody on the verge of quitting MMOs, which we sincerely hope isn't the case. Ephemeral or not, MMOs still let us meet and keep in touch with friends and unwind after a long day's work. There's an undeniable value in that.
A developer's comments on Philip's Second Life vision
Tateru commented on Philip's blog post about the road ahead for Second Life, and generated some interesting thoughts. She is not the only one to so comment. Nicholaz Beresford, the "mad patcher" of the Second Life client, and the man indirectly responsible for most of my current viewer configuration (I also use the visual interface patch to have a green skin, it is restful to my eyes, and they mostly work well together) has also commented.His thoughts? Well, speaking as someone with a strong daoist leaning, they make a lot of sense to me. Why do I like his patch? They focus on getting a lot of the little things right, right now. The Linden Lab developers are focussed on getting things right at some future date. Even things marked "resolved, internally fixed" on the JIRA take some time (at least a month as far as I can tell, sometimes longer) to get out of the internal fix into the main client. That means, for a month, we, the users, are still complaining, whilst the developers are saying "No problem any more." Of course there must be some delay for QA in the main client, but it seems like a way to distress the users unnecessarily. Read his thoughts, think you own, let us know. Should Linden Lab release more "bleeding edge" clients with un-QAed bug fixes so we can get that bug fix we really want at the risk of less stability?
The Art of War(craft): Alterac Valley, Part II - A Ronin's Guide to the Ice and Snow
Before we begin, let's get one thing clear: there are no armies in Alterac Valley, only mobs and rabbles and bloodthirsty riffraff who will, under the best circumstances, happen to be in the same vicinity and fight alongside you. Unless Tigole and company decide to bring back group queues to AV, you will often find yourself fighting the war with an over-sized, sometimes uncooperative PUG. In my column last week, I went over the changes made to Alterac Valley and what it meant in terms of gameplay. I had promised for this week to detail some strategy and tactics for the new AV but realized that, after logging countless hours of Alterac Valley since 2.3, in order to actually execute any manner of battle plan, you will need an army. An army the way Sun Tzu sees it; an army with a Commander; an army with will and purpose. Unfortunately, there are no armies in Alterac Valley. There are, however, drifters. Ronin, if you wish. Ronin were the masterless samurai of feudal Japan. In a game of AV, what you will have, essentially, is a band of about forty ronin doing their own thing. That said, there can be no definitive guide to playing Alterac Valley. There will be epic battles where Horde and Alliance will defend and fight raging, bloody battles on the Field of Strife, on top of towers, or beside their Captains; there will also be mindless races with no defense where all towers burn and Generals and Captains die to a frenzied mob. Both methods can win or lose games. You as a masterless warrior -- or Rogue, or Mage, or Shaman (you get the idea) -- can choose to play it either way. There are so many variables involved in Alterac Valley that it makes it almost impossible -- and unwise -- to dictate one particular course of action. While it may not be practical to write a guide for an army's incursion into the valley, it is a rather simple task to draw up some simple reminders for ronin. Because what do not change from game to game are the map's terrain and objectives. In every game of AV, there is a General and a Captain to be slain, towers to be burned, graveyards to be captured, and of course, enemies to be defeated on the field of battle. Depending on your faction, there are particular objectives that are easier to access because of the terrain. Terrain, more than anything else, will dictate the flow of your offense.
