Resolving the gamer’s dilemma

Bartel, Christopher

doi:10.1007/s10676-011-9280-8

Cited by 49 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…However, I still wish to draw attention to how my approach can be used to at least open up a new space for discussion. Since the publication of Luck's original article, there have been several attempts to solve the dilemma (Young 2016;Ali 2015;Bartel 2012). A common trait among the proposed solutions appears to be the addition of qualifiers (adding context, to the cases).…”

Section: An Outlook For Further Implementationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing the pervert’s dilemma: a contribution to the critique of Deepfake Pornography

Öhman

2019

Ethics Inf Technol

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Recent technological innovation has made video doctoring increasingly accessible. This has given rise to Deepfake Pornography, an emerging phenomenon in which Deep Learning algorithms are used to superimpose a person's face onto a pornographic video. Although to most people, Deepfake Pornography is intuitively unethical, it seems difficult to justify this intuition without simultaneously condemning other actions that we do not ordinarily find morally objectionable, such as sexual fantasies. In the present article, I refer to this contradiction as the pervert's dilemma. I propose that the method of Levels of Abstraction, a philosophical mode of enquiry inspired by Formal Methods in computer science, can be employed to formulate at least one possible solution to the dilemma. From this perspective, the permissibility of some actions appears to depend on the degree to which they are abstracted from their natural context. I conclude that the dilemma can only be solved when considered at low levels of abstractions, when Deepfakes are situated in the macro-context of gender inequality.

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Section: An Outlook For Further Implementationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing the pervert’s dilemma: a contribution to the critique of Deepfake Pornography

Öhman

2019

Ethics Inf Technol

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“…Rami Ali writes: “a virtual act is an act which a gamer performs, using her in‐game character, on a … character in the game's virtual world” (, 267). Christopher Bartel attributes fictional acts to the player when he describes a hypothetical player as “committing an act of paedophilia in a video game” (, 11), and when he writes, “I have committed numerous violent acts in video‐game worlds” and refers to these as “my actions” (, 285). Garry Young writes that “ Postal 2 allows me to set someone on fire while they are alive, douse the flames by urinating on them, before beating them to death with my boot and a shovel” (, 2).…”

Section: The Gamer's Dilemmamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Christopher Bartel () argues that the ethical difference between VM and VP is that VP is a form of pornography which sexualizes inequality, and VM is not. One might disagree with Bartel's proposal in various ways (see, for example, Patridge and Luck and Ellerby ), but the suggestion we wish to make here is that our appeal to homomorphic representation provides an explanation of why there might be thought to be a link between pornographic representation and the ethics of VP.…”

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confidence: 99%

Players, Characters, and the Gamer's Dilemma

Bourne

2019

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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Is there any difference between playing video games in which the player's character commits murder and video games in which the player's character commits pedophilic acts? Morgan Luck's “Gamer's Dilemma” has established this question as a puzzle concerning notions of permissibility and harm. We propose that a fruitful alternative way to approach the question is through an account of aesthetic engagement. We develop an alternative to the dominant account of the relationship between players and the actions of their characters, and argue that the ethical difference between so‐called “virtual murder” and “virtual pedophilia” is to be understood in terms of the fiction‐making resources available to players. We propose that the relevant considerations for potential players to navigate concern (1) attempting to make certain characters intelligible, and (2) using aspects of oneself as resources for homomorphic representation.

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“…But certain types of images, which target particular groups—racial minorities, women, and children—do have, in the right context, such an incorrigible social meaning, and so it is wrong to enjoy them, even as fictions (Patridge, ). Christopher Bartel offers a parallel response: Virtual murder is not murder of any sort, says Bartel, but virtual pedophilia is child pornography, and so consuming it is morally wrong (Bartel, ).…”

Section: Ethics Of Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Virtual murder is not murder of any sort, says Bartel, but virtual pedophilia is child pornography, and so consuming it is morally wrong (Bartel, 2012).…”

Section: Ethics Of Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophy of games

Nguyen

2017

Philosophy Compass

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What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical subdisciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks and asked questions about the authorship of games, about the ontology of the work and its performance. Yet others, from the philosophy of sport, have focused on normative issues of fairness, rule application, and competition. The primary purpose of this article is to provide an overview of several different philosophical approaches to games and, hopefully, demonstrate the relevance and value of the different approaches to each other. Early academic attempts to cope with games tried to treat games as a subtype of narrative and to interpret games exactly as one might interpret a static, linear narrative. A faction of game studies, self‐described as “ludologists,” argued that games were a substantially novel form and could not be treated with traditional tools for narrative analysis. In traditional narrative, an audience is told and interprets the story, where in a game, the player enacts and creates the story. Since that early debate, theorists have attempted to offer more nuanced accounts of how games might achieve similar ends to more traditional texts. For example, games might be seen as a novel type of fiction, which uses interactive techniques to achieve immersion in a fictional world. Alternately, games might be seen as a new way to represent causal systems, and so a new way to criticize social and political entities. Work from contemporary analytic philosophy of art has, on the other hand, asked questions whether games could be artworks and, if so, what kind. Much of this debate has concerned the precise nature of the artwork, and the relationship between the artist and the audience. Some have claimed that the audience is a cocreator of the artwork, and so games are a uniquely unfinished and cooperative art form. Others have claimed that, instead, the audience does not help create the artwork; rather, interacting with the artwork is how an audience member appreciates the artist's finished production. Other streams of work have focused less on the game as a text or work, and more on game play as a kind of activity. One common view is that game play occurs in a “magic circle.” Inside the magic circle, players take on new roles, follow different rules, and actions have different meanings. Actions inside the magic circle do not have their usual consequences for the rest of life. Enemies of the magic circle view have claimed that the view ignores the deep integration of game life from ordinary life and point to gambling, gold farming, and the status effects of sports. Philosophers of sport, on the other hand, have approached games with an entirely different framew...

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Resolving the gamer’s dilemma

Cited by 49 publications

References 6 publications

Introducing the pervert’s dilemma: a contribution to the critique of Deepfake Pornography

Introducing the pervert’s dilemma: a contribution to the critique of Deepfake Pornography

Players, Characters, and the Gamer's Dilemma

Philosophy of games

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