In the philosophy of technology after the empirical turn, little attention has been paid to language and its relation to technology. In this programmatic and explorative paper, it is proposed to use the later Wittgenstein, not only to pay more attention to language use in philosophy of technology, but also to rethink technology itself—at least technology in its aspect of tool, technology-in-use. This is done by outlining a working account of Wittgenstein’s view of language (...) and by then applying that account to technology—turning around Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the toolbox. Using Wittgenstein’s concepts of language games and form of life and coining the term ‘technology games’, the paper proposes and argues for a use-oriented, holistic, transcendental, social, and historical approach to technology which is empirically but also normatively sensitive, and which takes into account implicit knowledge and know-how. It gives examples of interaction with social robots to support the relevance of this project for understanding and evaluating today’s technologies, makes comparisons with authors in philosophy of technology such as Winner and Ihde, and sketches the contours of a phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology use that may help us to understand but also to gain a more critical relation to specific uses of concrete technologies in everyday contexts. Ultimately, given the holism argued for, it also promises a more critical relation to the games and forms of life technologies are embedded in—to the ways we do things. (shrink)

To reveal the mechanisms of firms’ technological strategic choices between innovation and imitation, an evolutionary game model is proposed from the perspective of the behavioral biases. First, behavioral biases such as reference point dependence, loss aversion, and probability weighting can be defined and modeled based on the prospect theory. Second, according to the firm theory, a Cournot or Stackelberg game modeled with a technology spillover effect and intellectual property protection is applied to portray the interaction between firms. Third, an (...) improved evolutionary game model is provided by incorporating behavioral biases into the framework of the decision-making process. Finally, the simulation analysis of some important factors, such as intellectual property protection, patent fees, innovation risks, decision-making attitudes, and consumers’ price preference on firms’ technological strategic choices, is presented. The corresponding results show that innovation risk is an important factor affecting the technological strategic choices of firms, increasing the intellectual property protection and the patent fee for technology transfer can effectively control the spillover effect of technology, there is a partial U-shaped relationship between the consumers’ price preference and innovation, and the behavioral biases such as reference point dependence, loss aversion, and probability weighting will change the perception of payoff and risk and will eventually induce firms to adopt the innovation strategy. (shrink)

This paper examines how young peoples’ lived experiences with personal technologies can be used to teach engineering ethics in a way which facilitates greater engagement with the subject. Engineering ethics can be challenging to teach: as a form of practical ethics, it is framed around future workplace experience in a professional setting which students are assumed to have no prior experience of. Yet the current generations of engineering students, who have been described as ‘digital natives’, do however have immersive personal (...) experience with digital technologies; and experiential learning theory describes how students learn ethics more successfully when they can draw on personal experience which give context and meaning to abstract theories. This paper reviews current teaching practices in engineering ethics; and examines young people’s engagement with technologies including cell phones, social networking sites, digital music and computer games to identify social and ethical elements of these practices which have relevance for the engineering ethics curricula. From this analysis three case studies are developed to illustrate how facets of the use of these technologies can be drawn on to teach topics including group work and communication; risk and safety; and engineering as social experimentation. Means for bridging personal experience and professional ethics when teaching these cases are discussed. The paper contributes to research and curriculum development in engineering ethics education, and to wider education research about methods of teaching ‘the net generation’. (shrink)

Persons with aphasia suffer from a loss of communication ability as a consequence of a brain injury. A small strand of research indicates effec- tiveness of dialogic interventions for communication development for persons with aphasia, but a vast amount of research studies shows its effectiveness for other target groups. In this paper, we describe the main parts of the hitherto technological development of an application named Dialogica that is (i) aimed at facilitating increased communicative participation in dialogic settings for persons (...) with aphasia and other communication disorders, (ii) based on comput- er game technology as well as on theory in dialogic education and argumenta- tion theory, and (iii) designed for mobile devices with larger screens. (shrink)

Mark Coeckelbergh’s mobilisation of Wittgensteinian language games makes an important contribution to exposing the social dimension of machine use. This commentary asks to what extent this social dimension of meaning and the wider imaginary that forms around technological objects on account of the transparency of language is also part of a technological “confidence trick”. It suggests that philosophical anthropology, especially the perspectives developed by Günther Anders and Helmut Plessner, can offer additional resources to trace and critique the wider ownership (...) structures and social relations of power that Mark Coecklebergh’s work productively exposes. It argues that language games alone cannot fully account for the hidden social relations that are habitually presented to us as abilities of “smart”, “intelligent” machines. Here a language that defamiliarizes machines, tries to make them visible by using exaggerated, pessimistic and object-oriented perspectives can perhaps help to make these power-relationships more comprehensible, “obvious” and thereby resistible and open to debate. (shrink)

International dispute resolution in general and international arbitration, in particular, is highly affected by the emergence and fast development of innovation-driven technologies. On the one hand, such technologies are cost and time-effective. To name a few, they allow online filing of a case, collecting of e-evidence and remote hearings, among others. On the other hand, they also may lead to some challenges that need to be addressed. The primary concerns comprise e-arbitration agreements and e-awards, as well as cybersecurity and data (...) protection. Therefore, this begs the question of whether such new technologies will significantly impact the dispute resolution landscape and thus become a game-changer therein. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the emergence of new technologies provides an opportunity to establish a long-lasting new standard for international arbitration. (shrink)

In The Interface Envelope, James Ash develops a series of concepts to understand how digital interfaces work to shape the spatial and temporal perception of players. Drawing upon examples from videogame design and work from post-phenomenology, speculative realism, new materialism and media theory, Ash argues that interfaces create envelopes, or localised foldings of space time, around which bodily and perceptual capacities are organised for the explicit production of economic profit. Modifying and developing Bernard Stiegler's account of psychopower and Warren Neidich's (...) account of neuropower, Ash argues the aim of interface designers and publishers is the production of envelope power. Envelope power refers to the ways that interfaces in games are designed to increase users perceptual and habitual capacities to sense difference. Examining a range of examples from specific videogames, Ash identities a series of logics that are key to producing envelope power and shows how these logics have intensified over the last thirty years. In turn, Ash suggests that the logics of interface envelopes in videogames are spreading to other types of interface. In doing so life becomes enveloped as the environments people inhabit becoming increasingly loaded with digital interfaces. Rather than simply negative, Ash develops a series of responses to the potential problematics of interface envelopes and envelope power and emphasizes their pharmacological nature. (shrink)

This issue of Christian Bioethics explores theological, metaphysical, and ethical questions surrounding emerging reproductive technologies. Narratives concerning such technologies are often manipulated via “language games.” Language games involve toying with language to ensure that one’s vision of the good gains or retains political prominence. Such games are common in academic discussions of “artificial womb” technologies. Abortion proponents, for example, are already using language to dehumanize subjects within “artificial wombs.” This is unsurprising. Were relevant subjects considered persons, then (...) abortion access (and other forms of “reproductive autonomy”) might be curtailed. Here, I show that abortion proponents’ language games often depend on dubious metaphysical claims. Second, I argue that Christians should oppose dehumanizing language games, since those games undermine “neighbor-love,” which Christians are commanded to show others. I also highlight how discussions of other technologies—such as medication abortion—are affected by confused (or manipulative) language. Ultimately, the language games I critique aim to preserve and expand the “rights” of the powerful to dehumanize, control, and kill vulnerable human beings. Since neighbor-love commands Christians to provide for “the least of these,” however, Christians must expose these manipulative language games, refute them, and resist the corrupt ideologies from which they flow. (shrink)

Reviewed work: Geoffrey Cantor; Sally Shuttleworth . Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth‐Century Periodicals. 351 pp., illus., index. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. $40 .; Louise Henson; Geoffrey Cantor; Gowan Dawson; Richard Noakes; Sally Shuttleworth; Jonathan R. Topham . Culture and Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Media. xxv + 296 pp., illus., index. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. $84.95 .; Geoffrey Cantor; Gowan Dawson; Graeme Gooday; Richard Noakes; Sally Shuttleworth; Jonathan R. Topham. Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine (...) of Nature. xi + 329 pp., illus., bibl., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75. (shrink)

The decision of the International Tennis Federation (July, 1999) to approve trials of different ball types represented a clear admission of the need for tennis to adapt to the enhanced competence of elite athletes. However, such action brings into question to what extent tennis is evolving beyond its modern appearance and how far such change is desirable. Over the last 30 years, advanced technology and athletic capability has resulted in male players having outgrown the structure of the game, which (...) can be seen as having promoted the ITF’s reaction. The need to ensure that tennis remains a challenging game for players at all levels and an exciting game for spectators appears to reflect an interest and concern for the practicecommunity of the sport. However, it is problematic to conclude that such changes are in the interests of all concerned. This article argues that any such changes to the structure of the game must be preceded with some admission about what future is sought for tennis and thus, where limits might be drawn on the changes made within the game. Furthermore, it is recognised that by invoking the ‘new balls’ proposal, a clear statement is made about what aspects of the game are considered worthy to preserve or not. This article addresses the implications of technological change for tennis, identifying upon what basis such change should take place to ensure a credible future for tennis. (shrink)

Why games? How could anyone consider action games an experimental paradigm for Cognitive Science? In 1973, as one of three strategies he proposed for advancing Cognitive Science, Allen Newell exhorted us to “accept a single complex task and do all of it.” More specifically, he told us that rather than taking an “experimental psychology as usual approach,” we should “focus on a series of experimental and theoretical studies around a single complex task” so as to demonstrate that our (...) theories of human cognition were powerful enough to explain “a genuine slab of human behavior” with the studies fitting into a detailed theoretical picture. Action games represent the type of experimental paradigm that Newell was advocating and the current state of programming expertise and laboratory equipment, along with the emergence of Big Data and naturally occurring datasets, provide the technologies and data needed to realize his vision. Action games enable us to escape from our field's regrettable focus on novice performance to develop theories that account for the full range of expertise through a twin focus on expertise sampling and longitudinal studies of simple and complex tasks. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ethical implications of video game companies employing psychologists and using psychological research in game design.,The author first argues that exploiting psychology in video games may be more ethically problematic than familiar application domains like advertising, gambling and political rhetoric. Then an overview of the effects particular types of game design may have on user behavior is provided, taking into account various findings and phenomena from behavioral psychology and behavioral economics.,Finally, the (...) author concludes that the corresponding ethical problems cannot – and should not – be addressed by means of regulation or rating systems. The author argues instead that a more promising countermeasure lies in using the same psychological research to educate gamers (children in particular) and thereby increase their capacity for meta-cognition.,The importance of this lies in the tremendous effect these behavior-modifying technologies may have upon our self-determination, well-being and social relations, as well as corresponding implications for the society. (shrink)

Preemption games are widely used to model patent races, innovation adoption and market entry problems. A previously neglected feature of these problems is that the agents’ states (e.g. R&D …rms’ technological improvements) are kept secret and stochastically change over time. We fully characterize equilibrium in preemption games where private information evolves according to Poisson processes, and provide a strategic rationale for the common wisdom that ‘big things happen fast.’ In the context of patent races we surprisingly …nd that (...) strengthening patent rights need not increase innovation disclosure. Furthermore, we clarify a basic welfare tradeo¤ between duplication costs and preemption: the former likely take place in early stages of the race, and preemption in later stages. (shrink)

Play and games are among the basic means of expression in intelligent communication, influenced by the relevant cultural environment. Games have found a natural expression in the contemporary computer era in which communications are increasingly mediated by computing technology. The widespread use of e-games results in conceptual and policy vacuums that must be examined and understood. Humans involved in design-ing, administering, selling, playing etc. computer games encounter new situations in which good and bad, right and (...) wrong, are not defined by the experience of previous generations. This article gives an account of the historical necessity of games, the development of e-games, their pros- and cons, threats and promises, focusing on the ethical awareness and attitudes of game developers. (shrink)

Historically, video games featuring content perceived as excessively violent have drawn moral criticism from an indignant (and sometimes, morally outraged) public. Defenders of violent video games have insisted that such criticisms are unwarranted, as committing acts of virtual violence against computer-controlled characters – no matter how heinous or cruel those actions would be if performed in real life – harm no actual people. In this paper, I present and critically analyze key aspects of this debate. I argue that (...) while many ethical objections to playing violent video games seem to miss their marks, there is sufficient reason to take modest steps in order to address the concerns that theorists have raised. (shrink)

Mathematical models are an important tool in the development ofsoftware technology, including programming languages and algorithms.During the last few years, a new class of such models has beendeveloped based on the notion of a mathematical game that isespecially well-suited to address the interactions between thecomponents of a system. This paper gives an introduction to thesegame-semantical models of programming languages, concentrating onmotivating the basic intuitions and putting them into context.

Increase in popularity of games like "Second Life" has contributed not only to significant changes in the development of the electronic entertainment industry. Promoting Games 2.0, the new trend of video game production that are assumed to be the virtual worlds that contain user-generated content makes both measured with a specific technological innovation, as well as a serious change in the organization of socio-cultural heritage. The article presents problems of the existing difficulties of terminology, the implications of the (...) availability of Games 2.0 for social life, the concept of leisure as work in the new economy and creative non-material and the characteristics of "Generation C". Work stresses the need for discussion on trends in the development of video games - defined as a choice between the projects’ of "socio-cultural ideology of perpetual motion" and "utopia of universal creativity". These approaches allow to identify the methodological basis for analysis of relations between the operators and users of Games 2.0, taking into account the wider social environment. ** Wzrost popularności gier typu „Second Life” przyczynił siȩ nie tylko do znacznych przemian w rozwoju branży rozrywki elektronicznej. Upowszechnianie Games 2.0, nowego nurtu produkcji gier wideo które z założenia maj¸a} stanowić wirtualne światy zawieraj¸a}ce treści tworzone przez użytkowników sprawia, że mierzymy siȩ zarówno z określon¸a} innowacj¸a} technologiczn¸a}, jak też z poważn¸a} zmian¸a} organizacji życia społeczno-kulturowego. Artykuł przedstawia problematykȩ istniej¸acych trudności terminologicznych, konsekwencje dostȩpności Games 2.0 dla życia społecznego, pojȩcie rozrywki jako pracy w nowej gospodarce niematerialnej i twórczej oraz charakterystykȩ „generacji C”. Praca podkreśla potrzebȩ dyskusji nad kierunkami rozwoju gier wideo - określanymi jako wybór miȩdzy projektami „ideologii społeczno-kulturowego perpetuum mobile” i „utopii powszechnej twórczości”. Podejścia te pozwalaj¸a na wskazanie podstaw metodologicznych do prowadzenia analiz relacji miȩdzy operatorami, a użytkownikami Games 2.0 przy uwzglȩdnieniu szerszego otoczenia społecznego. (shrink)

Beginning with his mancounters and exploring their temporality, materiality, and spatiality, the author explains in vivid detail how gaming as a gendered practice becomes possible. The author is interested in (and does really well) grounding gaming as gendered practice. Specifically, the author looks at gaming sites, humans and non-humans, infrastructures, power relations and the conditions that enables gaming a social activity. He is looking at the material conditions that make possible the phenomenological experiences and mobilities of certain kinds of subjects. (...) He connects home to gaming sites to colleges to clouds to gaming conventions and accomplishes this as a talented story-teller, which I appreciate as a scholar, reader, and teacher... Gender and the Grounds of Gaming is brilliant work, to begin with." - Ergin Bulut, author of A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry Places provided for digital game play like remote gaming setups, campus computer labs, esports arenas, and convention centers, the overall cultures of video game play, spectatorship, and production are characterized by stark gender disparities. Despite new franchises, platforms, and initiatives expanding games beyond their conventional audience of young, cis-het white men, gaming still feels off limits or unsafe for many. Gender and the Grounds of Gaming explores the physical places, any physical context in which games are played or observed, where games are played and how they contribute to the persistence of gaming's problematic gender politics. Through a series of case studies that document the gender dynamics of the various sites where video games literally take and make place, author Nicholas Taylor unpacks questions about how place matters to digital play, how issues in gaming cultures and politics are perpetuated through particular arrangements of bodies, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures. In charting the connections between place, masculinities, and play, Gender and the Grounds of Gaming makes space for marginalized perspectives, practices, and populations in gaming cultures. (shrink)

This book analyses some of the key problems explored in Paul Virilio's theorising on war and security.Virilio is one of the most challenging and provocative critics of technology, war and globalisation. While many commentators focus on the new possibilities for mobility and communication in an interconnected world, Virilio is interested in the role that technology and security play in the shaping of our bodies and how we come to see the world -- what he terms the 'logistics of (...) perception'. Security, Technology and Global Politics explores Virilio's work in this area, with each chapter using examples from popular culture -- from video games and on-line graphic novels, to films from around the world - as a starting point from which the author goes on to develop a critical engagement with Virilio's work. One of the key themes that emerge from this analysis is the importance of the idea of 'disappearance' -- the aesthetics of disappearance or the politics of disappearance. The book argues that the politics of disappearance provides a disturbing and insightful introduction to the key questions posed by politics of security in the twenty-first century.This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, political theory, sociology, political geography, cultural studies and IR in general. (shrink)

Showing remarkable insight into the relationship between language and thought, Alan Turing in 1950 proposed the Imitation Game as a proxy for the question “Can machines think?” and its meaning and practicality have been debated hotly ever since. The Imitation Game has come under criticism within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence communities with leading scientists proposing alternatives, revisions, or even that the Game be abandoned entirely. Yet Turing’s imagined conversational fragments between human and machine are rich with complex instances (...) of inference of implied information, reasoning from generalizations, and meta-reasoning, challenges AI practitioners have wrestled with since at least 1980 and continue to study. We argue that the very fact the Imitation Game is so difficult may be the very reason it shouldn’t be changed or abandoned. The semi-decidability of the game at this point hints at the possibility of a hard limit to the powers of technology. (shrink)

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 framework. This has lead into investigations about the normative nature of games—what guides the applications of rules and how those rules might be applied, interpreted, or even changed. Furthermore, they have investigated games as social practices and as forms of life. (shrink)

The genome editing technology CRISPR is described as a technological game-changer because of its flexibility and precision, and as an ethical game-changer due to its ability to engineer traits in living organisms without crossing species, avoiding a significant objection to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In salmon farming, applications of CRISPR in breeding hold the promise of handling environmental and fish welfare challenges yet require social acceptance. Adopting an empirical bioethics framework, this stakeholder interview study shows that respecting species borders (...) is important, but not decisive, for acceptance among Norwegian stakeholders. The main objections are based on moral reflections about technology use and outcomes. These reflections combine principles and pragmatic deliberations of moral costs and benefits, suggesting that CRISPR applications with environmentally and ethically significant benefits can be socially acceptable. This indicates that the game-changing potential of CRISPR relies on the characteristics of the editing and the context in which the application takes place. (shrink)

Lars von Trier's movies can be seen as a series of iterations in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma. After testing the logic of this game, at the core of which is the dilemma of cooperation or conflict, at the middle level at which an individual confronts a community up till Dogville, he has transposed the game to the level of social systems in Manderlay and the level of the minimal social unit, the couple in Anti-Christ. The story is the Oedipus (...) myth reversed and fit into the logic of the prisoner's dilemma which is, one could argue, the mathematical model of a Hobbesian world view. In that sense it could be called Von Trier's Anti-Oedipus. Moreover, this is the first film in which Von Trier fully embraces digital technologies. It is as if he as a filmmaker acts like the male protagonist in Anti-Christ, and assumes the role of the Anti-Christ in order to become a Savior, since digital technologies and special effects are aligned with 'evil' in this movie. (shrink)

Game theory is the mathematical study of strategy and conflict. It has wide applications in economics, political science, sociology, and, to some extent, in philosophy. Where rational choice theory or decision theory is concerned with individual agents facing games against nature, game theory deals with games in which all players have preference orderings over the possible outcomes of the game. This paper gives an informal introduction to the theory and a survey of applications in diverse branches of philosophy. (...) No criticism is reviewed. Game theory is shown at work in discussions about epistemological dependence, liberalism and efficiency, Hume’s concept of convention, morality and rationality, and distributive justice and egalitarianism. A guide to the literature provides hints at applications in collective intentionality, epistemology, ethics, history of philosophy, logic, philosophy of language, and political philosophy. (shrink)

Low-carbon technological innovation is the main means to develop a low-carbon economy, and network knowledge sharing and collaborative innovation is an effective model for the development of low-carbon technologies. First of all, this article adopts a decision-making experiment and evaluation laboratory method and interpretation structure model, combines the two methods, extracts the advantages of the two, and discards the shortcomings of the two, thus constructing a new optimized and upgraded interpretation structure model. We give methods to explore the main influencing (...) factors of collaborative innovation of low-carbon technologies for online knowledge sharing. Based on the industrial network knowledge sharing and cooperation network environment, the network evolution game model of network knowledge sharing knowledge collaboration is constructed to study the rewards and punishments, the profit distribution rate, the knowledge potential difference, and the parameter pairing of the network knowledge sharing cooperation network structure in the process of network knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge innovation. The influence of the network knowledge sharing cooperation strategy is obtained through simulation to change the size of the relevant parameters so that the network knowledge sharing cooperation agent chooses the network evolution game of the sharing strategy to realize the optimal evolutionary stable strategy. According to the simulation results, this article proposes suggestions from the following aspects, aiming to improve the overall knowledge synergy effect of the network knowledge sharing and cooperation network. (shrink)

The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico included innovative practices and technological knowledge of human biology. The first time that cytogenetic techniques had been applied to athletes was in the 1966 European Athletics Championship in Budapest and used on Olympic athletes for the first time in Mexico in 1968. The Genetics and Human Biology Program was created for this purpose in 1966 in close collaboration with the Local Organizing Committee, by Mexican geneticists Alfonso León de Garay and Rodolfo Félix Estrada (...) who led the project. The main objective was to study the genetic and anthropological components which determine an Olympic athlete’s abilities. This investigation studied 1,265 game participants and included family studies, cytological analyses, research on single genes, and the study of sex determination. In terms of influence beyond Mexico, this Program was significant as a site of transnational collaboration. It mobilized cognitive and financial resources, scientific practices, and material culture to set up a clinical laboratory in the Olympic Village. The Program also hosted three international seminars in Mexico City, two before the games, to calibrate clinical trials and anthropological tests. One in 1969 to analyze the results and proceed to their publication in 1974. This manuscript will focus on the PGBH to show how its work fits in the larger tapestry of post-1945 human biological studies. Also, to explore how the Olympic athlete populations studied can be considered laboratories of knowledge production or sites of cognition conceived as specific entities for scientific inquiry, standardization of medical practices, and the production or application of medicines. Finally, through the narrative of the different trajectories and collaborations of the leaders of the PGBH, this manuscript will show how contact between their scientific practices brought cytogenetics and sports together. (shrink)

Cognitive technology is an increasingly important form of technology that can deal with meaning by either replicating or simulating human cognition. Cognitive technology can make use of information technology, but it strives to go beyond mere information processing by recognizing, changing, and creating meaning. This presents us with a two-sided challenge: On the one hand, cognitive technology is challenged to ‘understand’ meaning in ordinary language. And on the other, it challenges us to rethink fundamental questions (...) of human cognition and sense-making. Both challenges demand a better understanding of the difference between the technical transformation of symbols and the understanding of meaning in the ordinary sense. After explaining the topic in relation to both the insights and the limitations of the reflections by Turing, Searle, and Heidegger, this paper primarily builds on Wittgenstein’s contributions to a better understanding of the difference between two conceptions of meaning and their implications for technical replication and simulation. The paper shows that Wittgenstein developed his early calculus account of meaning into that of language games and that language games not only come in many different varieties, but are also much more flexible than calculi. Of particular interest will be the difference between rigid and creative rule-following. Creative rule-following involves an intricate interplay of very different bodily, mental, and cultural constituents, so that its simulation is not merely a technical problem but also requires clarification of a number of profound philosophical questions. It will become clear that the challenge of cognitive technology shows up at unexpected places and that is much bigger than usually assumed. (shrink)

Throughout history, education has always been essential for humanity's justice and fundamental for the creation of a free and satisfying society with the dissemination of knowledge. Hence, in addition to the life occurrences educating people, traditional higher education methods have played an important role for a long period. However, the age of technology has changed the educational system along with the people's lifestyles to meet the continuously changing conditions. During the past twenty years, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) (...) led to the emergence of e-learning non-traditional educational methods bringing about an innovative dimension of virtual learning. With its beneficial features provided by the Internet and various technologies, this method passes the control of time and location from the tutors to the students during the learning process. Despite the entrance of online education into the students' life many years ago, the Covid-19 outbreak initiated in 2020 turned this method into the only possible way of education for almost two years. Afterward, plenty of studies investigated its effects on students' social and academic life, mostly considering its negative impacts on their mental health and motivation due to interaction issues. They also pointed out the specific problems of tactile learner students in the lack of face-to-face design courses. As an innovative solution able to be adopted, game technologies, increasing immersion of the learner in a real-world skill, and triggering motivation are one of the best methods integrated into educational systems. Known as serious games, these games, adopted by almost any domain, convey educational content along with entertainment, increasing interaction. They train or enhance a certain skill or topic to the player by immersing them. While serious games are more expanded nowadays, they are still not being played by the mass public due to people's immersiveness expectations of a game. Hence, the Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), with their emergence, increased the players' engagement and immersion with all types of virtual environments in digital games. This technology, however, evolved serious games area most, among others, by enabling the opportunity to provide a riskless and low-cost learning environment for real-world skills. In the process of suggesting serious games as a replacement for the traditional educational methods, the most important factor is being aware of their effectiveness for education. Generally, digital games, one of the world's biggest and fastest-growing industries, rely heavily on the virtual landscape, a major part of its development process. Its design demands remarkable effort, and it directly affects the whole game's characteristics. Hence, serious games, as a type of digital game, carry the same attributes. With the appearance of virtual reality technology, gaming started to gain more immersiveness and engagement with artificial elements and environments. Although virtual landscapes were always being developed since the emergence of digital games, the studies taking virtual landscapes into account are mostly using them as a tool for enhancing real spaces, not as a domain for the sake of its development. While other design domains are applying various design methodologies, it is challenging to find a standard design methodology for the design and production of virtual landscapes in the gaming industry, leading to inconsistent and low-quality results. Hence, it comes to the question of what is the virtual landscapes' role in serious games and their effect on the data comprehension rate. Since the literature lacks regarding the gradual change of the virtual landscape in serious games and the content they transmit, this thesis aims to figure out the gradual chronological evolution of the virtual landscapes in serious games. It also aims to seek how this change and the virtual reality technology invention have affected the contents transmitted by digital games and its influence on the player interaction and learning rate. To do so, in the process of this thesis, we developed, tested, and evaluated various serious games, both text-based and with 360° photos. The steps taken revealed the reluctance of the players to follow the providing educational content and their inadequacy of interaction. Hence, the thesis seeks the reasons ending to this result and the ways of increasing this learning rate. Afterward, the thesis uses a currently available but not massively used digital game classification methodology. This methodology, which is based on the principles of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, classifies the games based on their constituting virtual landscapes. Hence, the thesis considers all Steam games, one of the biggest video game digital distribution services, filtered with the 'education' tag, ending in 2531 digital games. Afterward, adding the 'game' tag the result reduced to 1102 games. Finally, with some manual filterings ignoring the irrelevant content, the final number decreased to 702. Sorting chronologically, we made an Excel database including the games' introductory information, the content they transmit, their release date, if they support HMD or not, and whether they are simulation games or not. Due to Steam's dating spectrum, our database includes games dating back from 1992 to 2020. Afterward, we classified all of these games using the virtual landscape classification methodology and generated their related codes based on their player scale, story, dimension, space shape, and interaction level. Investigating the results, they revealed some growth patterns relating to the content educated in the game, the VR technology, and the virtual landscape evolution. Adding the user reviews of Steam, we reverse engineered five of the best serious games on the database due to the digital game design methodology. This methodology divides the games' virtual environment into five layers, namely, player activity map (PAM), story layer, natural environment layer, virtual environment layer, and media layer. Reverse engineering the five best digital games ever, based on the IGN database, enabled us to compare the outcomes. Due to released data, we understand how the games' assets are distributed within the various layers of the virtual environment in the most successful games. Finally, the thesis aims to provide a framework based on these results for developing serious games to increase player interaction and enhance the learning rate. However, these results can be expanded to any virtual landscape other than only serious games' for their interaction enhancement. Currently, the landscape architecture domain only adopts the virtual landscape area as a tool for enhancing design in the real world. However, in the near future, landscape architects will perform in the virtual landscape area as a domain to be enhanced. Hence, that day, the results of this study will play an important role and will be a roadmap for generating highly interactive virtual landscapes. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur’s narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies themselves co-constitute narratives and our understanding of these narratives by configuring characters and events in a (...) meaningful temporal whole. We propose a hermeneutic framework that enables us to categorise and interpret technologies according to two hermeneutic distinctions. Firstly, we consider the extent to which technologies close in on the paradigm of the written text by assessing their capacity to actively configure characters and events into a meaningful whole; thereby introducing a linguistic aspect in the theory of technological mediation. Secondly, we consider the extent to which technologieshave the capacity to abstract from the public narrative time of actual characters and events by constructing quasi-characters and quasi-events, thereby introducing the social in our conception of technological mediation. This leads us to the outlines of a theory of narrative technologies that revolves around four hermeneutic categories. In order to show the merits of this theory, we discuss the categories by analysing paradigmatic examples of narrative technologies: the bridge, the hydroelectric power plant, video games, and electronic money. (shrink)

Rakić has serious misgivings about Wiseman's inability to frame ethical issues in the context of transcending existing realities with the aim of achieving what we believe is morally right. This inability to think beyond the present is misguided in ethics. He also criticizes Wiseman for making the unimaginative and unsubstantiated assumption that moral bioenhancement technologies have reached their zenith already. Rakić argues that MBE will become more effective in the time to come, that it ought to be optional for every (...) free individual, and that it should be directed at enhancing our motivation to act in line with how we believe we ought to act. He concedes however that the enhancement of our motivation to act morally can only be effective in a limited number of morally unambiguous cases. In response, Wiseman argues that Rakić's reflections epitomize a way of articulating MBE that is unhelpful, misguidedly optimistic, and missing the most important things needing discussion. Such reflections are based on inappropriate metaphors, a too future-oriented view detached from basic realities, and a false sense of what is possible on the global level should MBE be applied. Such ways of thinking about MBE are misguided from the outset, and indicative of the enthusiasm for a discourse in need of realignment. This should take the form of a more modest, synergistic outlook acutely aware of the inexorable limitations imposed on MBE by the internal complexity of moral goods, human agents, and the contexts in which moral action occurs. (shrink)

Video games have grown in number, variety, and consumer market penetration, encroaching more aggressively into the domestic realm. Within the home therefore, parents whose children play video games have to exercise mediation and supervision. As video games evolve, parental mediation strategies have also had to keep pace, albeit not always successfully. By transposing our appreciation of parental concerns over the historical development of video games, we propose an analytical framework identifying key affordances of video games, (...) elucidating how their evolution has distinct implications for effective parental mediation. These affordances are portability, accessibility, interactivity, identity multiplicity, sociability, and perpetuity. (shrink)

What makes video games unique as an audiovisual medium is not just that they are interactive, but that this interactivity is rule bound and goal oriented. This means that player experience, including experience of the music, is somehow shaped or structured by these characteristics. Because of its emphasis on action in perception, James Gibson’s ecological approach to psychology—particularly his concept of affordances—is well suited to theorise the role of music in player experience. In a game, players perceive the environment (...) and gameplay situations in terms of the goal-oriented actions they afford. Nondiegetic music, not tied to any place in the digital game world, can play a unique role in the structuring of these affordances. Through a series of case studies, I will show that music creates and structures situations both in the game environment (such as the appearance of enemies in Unreal) and beyond the game environment (such as the death of an avatar and the restart of a level in Super Mario Bros.). (shrink)

First drafted in 2006 and currently in version 2.1, the London Charter calls for the adoption of international standards for intellectual integrity, transparency, sustainability, and access in 3D modeling for cultural heritage. While the London Charter has been in the process of revision and distribution to the heritage community, game engines have become less expensive and more approachable. Several engines offer the ability to publish easily across operating systems, mobile devices, and the web, causing a rapid expansion in their use (...) for archeological visualization. However, the very power of game engines to create and publish immersive content poses fundamental challenges to the emphasis on data-driven visualization and transparency expressed in the London Charter. These challenges should not be suppressed, since they can prove heuristically fruitful if they are explicitly recognized and explored. This potential is illustrated by a descriptive analysis of the recreation of the House of the Prince of Naples in Pompeii by an undergraduate humanities class, which concludes that the immersive effects of engine-based visualizations are as much to be found in their creation as in their “playing.” This suggests the value of democratizing the creation of game engine content for heritage visualization beyond research visualization laboratories, as a part of undergraduate curricula in the humanities. (shrink)

There are several types of characters in video games: the main protagonist/hero, the countless non-player characters (NPCs), and persistent non-player characters (PNPCs). While there is a substantial body of research about PNPCs from a game design point of view, they have been largely ignored by the academic community from a narrative perspective. The current essay aims to evaluate whether video game playing experience has an impact on a player’s reliance on the guidance of PNPCs in game play and if (...) a higher degree of experience enables a player to have a better appreciation for the narrative qualities of PNPCs as well as their complexity as characters. (shrink)

In 2023, artificial intelligence was announced as a “game changer”—marking a rapid revolution in thinking technologies. A global debate began to emerge. By conducting a discourse analysis of 2023 US congressional testimonies and AI manifestos, we aim to map the emergence of debates over the start-up of a global governance controversy. Qualitative topical identification and semantic network analysis are deployed to identify the primary stakeholders and their contesting arguments. The resulting polylog exhibits sharp divisions among multiple, distinct pro-tech and pro-rights (...) groups. Pro-tech stakeholders emphasize innovation and economic benefits, while pro-rights groups prioritize human rights and safety. Our linguistic and semantic network analyses provide micro-level insights into the polylogue entanglements of ethics and governance. The analysis of US AI advocacy discourse furnishes a baseline of contestation from which the ongoing development of the complex arguments of AI policies can be identified and evaluated. (shrink)

Can Confucian ethics contribute to diagnosing the root causes of video games’ toxicity and formulating design requirements for redressing it? Contemporary Confucian studies on technology have not addressed these questions, although video games have become an important part of contemporary human life. This paper advances Confucian-inspired ethical studies on technologies by bringing attention to the moral dimension of this underexamined aspect of contemporary life. By focusing on League of Legends (one of the most popular toxic online multiplayer (...) games), we argue that League’s toxic environment hinders the cultivation of ren (仁), shu (恕), and he (和), but Confucian conceptual resources can inspire the formulation of at least three design recommendations against League’s toxicity. The first is to eliminate killing in the game by banking on players’ desire to express their skillfulness. The second is to include a rewatching feature to sanction toxic players with the aim of inculcating sympathy in them. The last is to add a procedure before and after each match, where players can cordially interact with each other and develop mutual respect. (shrink)

Considered a sign of the ‘coming of age’ of video games as an artistic medium, the award-winning BioShock franchise covers vast philosophical ground. _BioShock and Philosophy: Irrational Game, Rational Book _presents expert reflections by philosophers on this critically acclaimed and immersive fan-favorite. Reveals the philosophical questions raised through the artistic complexity, compelling characters and absorbing plots of this ground-breaking first-person shooter Explores what _BioShock_ teaches the gamer about gaming, and the aesthetics of video game storytelling Addresses a wide array (...) of topics including Marxism, propaganda, human enhancement technologies, political decision-making, free will, morality, feminism, transworld individuality, and vending machines in the dystopian society of Rapture Considers visionary game developer Ken Levine’s depiction of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, as well as the theories of Aristotle, de Beauvoir, Dewey, Leibniz, Marx, Plato, and others from the Hall of Philosophical Heroes. (shrink)

I offer two potential diagnoses of the behavioral norms governing post‐truth politics by comparing the view of language, communication, and truth‐telling put forward by David Lewis (extended by game theorists), and John Searle. My first goal is to specify the different ways in which Lewis, and game theorists more generally, in contrast to Searle (in the company of Paul Grice and Jurgen Habermas), go about explaining the normativity of truthfulness within a linguistic community. The main difference is that for Lewis (...) and game theorists, “truthful” signaling follows from an align- ment of interests, and deception follows from mixed motives leading to the calculation that sending false information is better for oneself. Following in the Enlightenment tradition, Searle argues that practical reasoning, which involves mastery of at least one language, requires that actors intend to communicate. This intention includes constraining the content of statements to uphold veracity conditions. After distinguishing between these two accounts, I will artic- ulate the implications for explaining, and even informing actions, constitutive of post‐truth politics. I argue that the strategic view of communication is suffi- cient neither to model everyday conversation nor to reflect a public sphere useful for democratic govern- ment. Both the pedagogy of strategic communication as cheap talk, and its concordance with new digital information technologies, challenge norms of truthful- ness that underlie modern institutions essential to an effective public sphere. (shrink)

The design, implementation, and outcome of game-based learning for learners with disabilities have not been sufficiently examined systematically. Particularly, learner-based and contextual factors, as well as the essential roles played by various stakeholders, have not been addressed when game-based learning applications are used in special education. Therefore, a systematic literature review using the Activity Theory was conducted to analyse studies about game-based learning for learners with disabilities. Content analysis of 96 studies reported relevant information with respect to each activity component— (...) subject, technology, object, rules, community, division of labour and outcome. Furthermore, this study identified existing gaps from the reviewed studies, including occasional lack of parental engagement, difficulty of standardising performance measures due to the heterogeneity of learner profiles and contradictions. Finally, recommendations were made under each activity component. The study concluded that both general and domain-specific guidelines should be created for each disability category proposed in this review to assist practitioners who wish to use game-based learning with learners with disabilities. (shrink)

The increasing body of knowledge in fields like animal ethology, biology, and technology has not necessarily led to the improvement of animal welfare. On the contrary, it has enabled humans to exploit animals more functionally and on increasing scales of magnitude. Building on approaches that stem from posthumanism and critical animal studies, we argue that instead of aiming for more general production of scientific knowledge, what is needed to counter exploitation and oppression is an increased sensitivity towards animals that (...) arises from local, partial, and ‘situated knowledges’. In the first part of this paper we articulate an argument that proposes how such knowledges can arise from the practice of game design as a form of ‘doing multispecies philosophy’. The second part of this work expands this notion with an understanding of design as a practice of configuring and prefiguring situations in which we can enter in a relationship of response and attention with other ‘selves’, in other words, with entities that are alive. To explore the practical consequences of this framework, in the third part of this paper we discuss a game design project that involves some unexpected designerly negotiations with a colony of black ants. We conclude that our wider perspective concerning notions of knowledge, design, and selves could elicit changes in our empathy towards other beings and help us develop new ideas and knowledges that favour less anthropocentric futures. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature and limits of player embodiment within digital games. We identify a convergence between everyday bodily actions and activity within digital environments, and a trend towards incorporating natural forms of movement into gaming worlds through mimetic control devices. We examine recent literature in the area of immersion and presence in digital gaming; Calleja’s (2011) recent Player Involvement Model of gaming is discussed and found to rely on a probematic notion of embodiment as 'incorporation'. We go (...) on to further reflect on the nature of player involvement in digital gaming environments by applying insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It is argued that digital embodiment differs so significantly from primordial embodiment that any idea of total immersion is simply fantasy. We subsequently argue that digital game media nonetheless provide us with unique opportunities for exploring the nature of distinctively human forms of embodiment, and so we need more complete and more reliable phenomenological descriptions of the experiences associated with computer games. (shrink)

E-games are a dramatically expanding dimension of contemporary exploitations of computing and computer network technologies - one that, thus far, has evoked much more heat among parents and politicians than light in the form of serious scholarly and philosophical analysis. We argue that e-games deserve such analysis in part because of their intrinsic philosophical interest as they raise primary philosophical questions of ontology, epistemology, human nature, the character of "gameplay," - and most especially, of ethics. We further suggest (...) that such analyses - exemplified by the articles collected here - may also contribute to resolving the larger social and political debates evoked by e-games. (shrink)

By many accounts, CRISPR gene-editing technology is revolutionizing biotechnology. It has been hailed as a scientific game changer and is being adopted at a break-neck pace. This hasty adoption has left little time for ethical reflection, and so this paper aims to begin filling that gap by exploring whether CRISPR is as much an ethical game changer as it is a biological one. By focusing on the application of CRISPR to non-human animals, I argue that CRISPR has and will (...) continue to result in significant shifts in the ethical debate landscape. For instance, the fact that many CRISPR edits are non-transgenic has important implications for the ethical debate, particularly the popular objection to genetic engineering that it objectionably involves “crossing species boundaries,” as well as the regulatory debate in the United States, where currently only transgenic organisms are officially genetically modified organisms. I also explore various impacts CRISPR may have on animal welfare, suggesting that although the improved precision of CRISPR suggests fewer unintended welfare problems in comparison to past techniques, the greater versatility means that more animals than ever will be engineered. Finally, I end my discussion of animal welfare issues by exploring the possibility of using CRISPR to directly improve animal welfare, for instance through introducing disease resistance. (shrink)