Gaming communities can be a lovely place of bonding and encouragement. However, and in no contradiction to the former, they can also be excluding, pervaded by extremism, and profoundly hostile towards anything ‘different’. Why is that so and what can we do about it? – Those are the questions we ask Dr. Rachel Kowert, renowned…
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From Assassin’s Creed to Civilization and from The Oregon Trail to Valiant Hearts—video games are profoundly fascinated with history. But how can we analyse those representations of history without simply ‘fact checking’ the games? We are joined by the historian and long-running high school teacher Dr. Jeremiah McCall for a conversation about his framework of…
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This is one of our monthly plus episodes. You can access it by subscribing to Studying Pixels Plus. You will then receive an individual plus feed that you can add to your favourite podcast app. It is so easy to be wrong! Especially in academic discourse, it is important to watch out for logical fallacies that…
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This is one of our monthly plus episodes. You can access it by subscribing to Studying Pixels Plus. You will then receive an individual plus feed that you can add to your favourite podcast app. Writing a BA thesis can seem daunting. It is, after all, the longest, comprehensive academic work you have had to write…
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Video games have repeatedly intersected with fake news. Whether it is the absurd claim that Hideo Kojima assassinated the former prime minister Shinzo Abe, the deliberate use footage from Arma 3 by Russian media, or the mishaps of CNN and BBC who included video game footage in news reporting. We discuss these cases and many…
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Most of us have done it at some point, possibly without any awareness of the harm it might cause. After all, piracy has for a long time been an integral part of video game culture. To discuss whether there is any moral angel from which piracy can be justified, we collaborate with Shlomo Sher, Philosophy…
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Men must be strong, show little emotion, and speak with violence—that is an exceedingly common trope in video games, referred to as hypermasculinity. We explore the concept of hypermasculinity to then focus on games that subvert or deconstruct it. Shownotes Measuring a macho personality constellation (Donald L. Mosher and Mark Sirkin) Walking, Talking and Playing…
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Do we have a moral obligation towards virtual characters? Or do games threaten to corrupt our understanding of virtue? Time to continue our conversation about violence in video games; this time with Markus Schulzke’s Defending the Morality of Violent Video Games. In our side quests, we then talk about France trying to maintain the purity of…
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This is one of our monthly plus episodes. You can access it by subscribing to Studying Pixels Plus. You will then receive an individual plus feed that you can add to your favourite podcast app. Attending a conference can be inspiring, productive, and potentially change your future. However, it can also be exhausting, confusing, and even…
Read MoreThe list of controversies revolving around violence in video games is long. But is there anything morally wrong with explicit violence in games? And moreover, where does our the apprehension towards violence in games come from? Join us for a reading of David I. Waddington’s Locating the Wrongness in Ultra-Violent Video Games. In our side…
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