I still need to quickly read it through and make some final edits, mainly because it was not drafted in sequence and indeed was restructured midway through, hence there will inevitably be some cleaning up to be done. However, before the start of June I should have a pre-production copy of the manuscript to share.

I am inviting twelve people to become pre-readers for the book, including several Only a Game stalwarts (yes Oscar, this includes you!), although at the moment I have only identified eleven of them. If you feel it is your destiny to fill the twelfth slot, feel free to let me know – fate, I have learned, is always beyond our expectations, although it is unlikely to be someone I have not been in discourse with already.

Once I get this sent out to the pre-readers, I shall be getting back into the habit of blogging on a more regular basis. My thanks to everyone for their patience in the meantime. My philosophical “trilogy” is so very nearly complete, and new chapters of my life are soon to begin.

My unlimited love to you all!

• I was on national radio yesterday, on BBC Radio 4's consumer affairs show, You and Yours, commenting on (of all things) the portrayal of disfigurement in videogames. It’s a step up from local radio, to be sure! Slightly too many 'ums' coming out of my mouth for my taste, but I guess I did fine. If you’re in the UK you can listen for the next week on BBC iPlayer. My slot is 20 minutes in, after gold traders and smart meters.
• Now less than one day’s writing (about 3,000 words) short of a first draft manuscript for Chaos Ethics! So far inside its world now that I no longer know how people usually use the word 'ethic'.
• Have a final version of my PhD materials approved by my supervisor squad now. Soon, I shall be a real fake doctor!
• After a year, the journal Games and Culture found one reviewer to provide feedback for "Implicit Game Aesthetics". Alas, I don't think they understood my paper but on the plus side I can now edit it to reduce the chance that others will also misunderstand it. In journal terms, let’s call it a win.
• Three games of Arkham Horror this weekend, all against Zhar. Result: 14 Investigators devoured. We had good fun, but it’s galling to lose so badly so many times in a row. Great to get a friend along for the last game, though – even if he was as doomed as we were!

So close to wriggling free of my obligations – expect far more frequent and regular bloggery from me this Summer!

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the Spring Review Drive – you all won a book, so that’s a pretty equitable outcome for all concerned!

Games studies has thus far been ideologically united by commitment to what can be called fiction denial. Fiction (setting, world, representations etc.) is guaged of lesser importance to rules, or of no importance whatsoever. The premise of this is expressed in multiple equivalent ways: that the setting and representations of a game are interchangeable and that only the mechanics are 'eternal' (something akin to what Raph Koster or Dan Cook occasionally suggest); that players initially engage with a game via the fiction but later this becomes unimportant (as Graeme Kirkpatrick and Jesper Juul assert); that the representation has no effect on how the player behaves (as Espen Aarseth claims). Espen gives the paradigmatic example of fiction denial when he says he wouldn't play Tomb Raider any differently if Lara Croft had a different character model. I believe him. But isn't this a fact about Espen Aarseth and not a fact about either Tomb Raider or its players?

You can read the entirety of Fiction Denial over on ihobo.com.

Here’s the best quote from Jacobson’s paper:

…the subjects are not dumbfounded by these cases so much as certain (extremely intelligent) psychologists and philosophers are, rather, stupefied by their moral theories. To be morally stupefied in this fashion is to be rendered unable to see obviously good reasons, because you are in the grip of a theory too narrow-minded to accommodate them.

Much of his criticism focuses on the way that Haidt makes wild assumptions (mostly along positivist lines), embeds these assumptions as stipulations in his thought experiments, and then draws implausible conclusions from undergraduates’ inability to reason their way out of a paper bag. As Jacobson develops within his argument, Haidt uses an extremely narrow conception of harm, and in particular ignores a great deal of salient facts about how people relate to the world symbolically, which is very different from what Haidt accuses as ‘magical thinking’.

I am disappointed with Haidt, since there was much to admire in his early work, but I have to say that the wealth of pushback his theory has produced has almost made it worthwhile. I should like to see Haidt questioned on whether (as I suspect) he had a bad experience with a professor while he was a philosophy undergraduate at Yale, and this has lead to him having a chip on his shoulder about moral philosophy. It is not a requirement that moral psychologists engage with moral philosophy (although the reverse is less defensible), but if they do choose to engage they ought to know what they are talking about. Otherwise, it is no surprise that you will end up being accused of being morally stupefied by your pet theories.

I can picture how this might come about in the depths of my biology, for what it is worth. The neurobiology of reward involves a capacity to be swayed by imagined future state, as when the gambler persists with the slot machine because they feel it is about to pay out. I wonder if this coupling of imagination and reward is the substrate of my obsessiveness – I can hold one image and pursue it to the hilt, but trying to imagine many things at once is unbridled anarchy. Perhaps those more suited to a massive parallelism in tasks imagine the situation differently – abstracting away from the incompatibility of the individual tasks to some other way of perceiving the situation. Perhaps it is simply a case of different habits  manifesting in different situations.

This principle of mental inertia seems to apply to all manner of aspects of my life, both in work and in play. I would far rather be playing one game than many, at least in the case of videogames as I seem to be more flexible with board games. It is particularly true of my work – the problems it causes me when in the midst of a book manuscript I have to apply myself to other things! So it is this week when, after three weeks of concentrating on Chaos Ethics I have to return to teaching and marking. What a savage change of focus! Once I have mastered the transition, everything will get done, but for a while I will be caught between the two and it will seem correspondingly harder to get anything done. Thus it is that I delay the bulk of the marking by applying myself to other tasks that seem less daunting. Only once my mental train is on the track of marking will I steam through it to the end. It is just the transitioning that I find hard.

I used to meditate to help silence the voices that would draw me into obsessiveness, now I simply don’t have the time to do anything but push through the endless successions of situations that hurl themselves at me like waves crashing upon the cliffs. I miss the stillness of mind that meditation would afford me, but it is far from clear how I could recover it into my bustling routine. Yet having meditated in the past, I feel calmer and more able to handle the carnage of the present. If I lost the habit of taking time to meditate, it seems I did not entirely lose the benefits of having meditated. To bring all things to a halt, to let the mental inertia hold me still instead of propel me forward – these are rare treasures indeed. Sometimes it is important to let the locomotive stand and softly hiss as all its power of steam dissipates quietly into the air, and vanishes.

Forwards: just 6 of the 42 sections of Chaos Ethics remain to be completed now. The majority of the chapters are complete, and all but one only need one section to tie them up. Although I still have a few wrinkles to iron out there is a palpable feeling that I may finally be on the home straight!

I am making my way through the manuscript for Chaos Ethics, and hope to resume blogging more seriously by May (fingers crossed). At the same time, I have certain fears that social networks have taken away too many regular players and that discussions of the kind we used to have in the heyday of Only a Game are now impossible. Your thoughts on this, surviving players, would be most welcome!

More soon!

One final copy is up for grabs, and at the moment your odds of winning would be 50% if you submitted two reviews. For more information see Win a Book in the Spring Review Drive!

• Still an excellent chance to win a book in the Spring Review Drive! There are currently only two people in the competition and there are still two books to be won, so if you think you could write a short review of one of my books there’s an exceptionally high chance of winning.
• I have resumed working on Chaos Ethics more or less full time during the University’s Easter Break. I’m turning down consultancy work until I get this one completed. Progress has been slow since the restructure derailed my momentum, but I hope to get back on track soon.
• My PhD is getting close now… I have all the materials compiled, and if all goes well I’ll be a Doctor by the middle of Summer. Not entirely sure how I feel about this, though: reading Ivan Illich leaves me very cynical when it comes to these self-certified professions.
• I’m about to apply for funding for my testosterone research… if I get it, I’ll finally be able to do some of my own research instead of waiting for other people to do it for me.
• Working on my first home-made boardgame in several years, a never-for-publication homage to the classic race game The London Game but transferred to a megatextual fantasy setting – visiting places like Tanelorn, Ulthar, Minas Tirith or The Emerald City. Incredibly good fun, it’s taken over my gaming time with my wife at the moment.

Have a great week everyone!

Descartes created a wholly original way of thinking about the self with his famous dictum “I think therefore I am”, a view of the soul as the source of personality, and of the soul as separate from the body, as something that could be not only be disassociated with the flesh but as something that could be compartmentalised. Kant’s ‘noumenal selves’ built upon this foundation, shoring up this perspective of the individual self as a source of agency and as uniquely individual and separate. Descending from this line of thought we get the modern conception of a ‘person’, which is still tied to Descartes split between mind and body, or soul and flesh. The soul has never left our understanding of who we are, for all that it now hides behind the legal mask of ‘person’. To be able to speak of beings that are persons, and other beings that are not, is to participate in the tradition that affords souls to humans and denies them to other beings – the radical break with animism that can be tied to theism and its concept of history.

For anyone who thinks we have discarded the concept of a ‘soul’, I suggest you examine the writings, games and musings of the post-humans with their fantasies of transplanting the human mind into different ‘sleeves’, Richard Morgan’s term from Altered Carbon, which is also used in the tabletop role-playing game Eclipse Phase. The way of thinking about human consciousness that is locked up in this science fiction concept of putting one mind in another body – already present even in classic Star Trek episodes such as Turnabout Intruder – is a contemporary form of afterlife mythology, for all that the pragmatics of techno-immortality becomes unconvincing upon closer inspection. It is not accidental that there is also a parallel supply of ‘body swap comedies’ that use magic to exchange conscious minds between bodies: imagined future technology and magic are equivalent, and not just for Arthur C. Clarke’s reason that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Whether we are positivists or not, we still use a concept of a soul (whether the immortal soul of the Christians or the digital souls of the post-humans) in our understanding of who we are, of what we are, and what we could be. The clearest sign of this today is in the use of the concept of a person – which although apparently grounded in legal discourse is still essentially an assertion that some beings have souls (or perhaps have more advanced souls). Talk of persons and talk of souls are the same at heart, for all that the conversations these terms appear within may differ. We believe in our special qualities as humans, and that this sets us apart in some way. Despite the continuity between humanity and other animals, we are habituated to understanding ourselves differently. There are good reasons for this, although they are not so strong as to justify setting humanity apart from other life entirely.

One key difference that helps account for the persistence of the concept of a person or a soul is our overdeveloped imagination, and the stories that this capacity generates for us constantly. Daniel Dennett talks of a ‘narrative centre of gravity’ as the basis for our sense of self, inadvertently following a line of reasoning far closer to Buddhist or Hindu philosophy than the Western tradition descending from Descartes. Descartes and Kant removed the soul from the flesh, to be sure, but they also isolated the soul as an individual. It is the quintessential achievement – and cost – of the Enlightenment to celebrate this individuality, and the concept of a person (or equivalently of a soul) lies behind it. Elsewhere in the world, the idea that we can compartmentalise who we are in this way is a strange and alien concept since, having incorporated animism into their view of the world instead of banishing it, the idea of an individual who exists in such isolation is hard to believe. How, someone outside of the person-soul construct might ask, am I supposed to separate myself from my community, my environment, my experience?

It is not a coincidence that the ancient Greek philosophers also spoke of souls – their series-culture is a part of our contemporary culture – but the Greeks had not yet given up animism, and for them everything had its own soul, it’s own good. This we have unfortunately lost sight of, as evidenced in the volume of science fiction fantasies that invest their imagination towards envisioning individual human survival after death while ignoring the ever-pressing need to imagine the survival of both the human species and the vast majority of other forms of life we share the planet with. There is no individual survival without human species survival, no human species survival without the other beings and things that make our lives possible. If you wish to imagine you can cheat death, you must begin by imagining that humanity can discover a way to survive it’s own insatiable curiosity and greed.

It is quite remarkable in this context that Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune and its sequels not only manages to tell a story of the far future of humanity in which other beings are of critical importance, but it also imagines a need to place limits on technology. Was Herbert merely simplifying the task of the futurist for the purpose of his story? Or was he sensing the newly dawning ecological moment, in itself a harkening back to far older mythologies? It is particularly striking in later Dune novels that Herbert’s ghola, the clones of the dead, are not treated as being the same person but as another person based upon those who died. There is no illusion here that you can cheat death with biotechnology. But others can cheat your death and replace you with a simulacrum – should you wish that this happens? Derek Parfit argues we have just as much reason to care for our copies as for our future selves. Perhaps. But I side with Tamar Gendler in thinking that until such monstrous technology is unleashed our personal identity is grounded in the narratives we tell of who we are now.

How do you know who you are? You learned the story of what it means to be a person from your family, who learned it from theirs, who learned what it means to have a soul from their family, and so on. You inherit the story of you from your previous series-persons, but you inherit the story of ‘who’ from the previous series-cultures that connect persons to souls. Over the intervening centuries between Descartes and now the story of ‘who’ has lost the wider sense of the community and environment that each person finds themselves within. These are not locked up in your mind, they are out there in the world – and you are only you when you are among them. Other cultures less influenced by theism have not yet lost this perspective, thankfully, and ironically some of the theistic traditions have a clearer view of this than some of their secular cultural descendents. You do not exist in isolation – how could you! – you were always a part of something else.

You are not your soul, not an isolated individual consciousness, for all that individualism proclaims otherwise. Your soul is just one drop of dew in the spider web of existence, what the Dharmic traditions call Indra’s net – an early metaphor for the sense of interconnection now being discovered (re-discovered?) by the contemporary sciences and philosophies. Where and when you are is also who you are – and it involves far more than just you. But it is you, and only you, who can make sense of this, and decide the answer the most challenging question, the question that will make all the difference in the world: not ‘who are you?’ but ‘who will you be?’

…as dumb as a bucket of fish guts, and all the more enjoyable because of it. Arcades may be dying but the arcade game is alive and well and being channelled by indie devs like Vlambeer and friends. A rare pearl amidst the endless sardines of iOS games.

You can read the entire mini-review over on ihobo.com.

Last month Sony unveiled the capabilities and controller for their new console, the PS4. The second of the three competing home consoles in the next-next generation of TV-based gaming, it gave a sense of where this market might be going. Unfortunately, where it seems to be going is ever-closer to a death spiral since the economics Sony and Microsoft have fostered are now the biggest threat these entertainment divisions face. With the noose tightening around home consoles, what could possibly save this once-proud market from collapsing inward under its own vast weight?

You can read the entirety of PS4 and the Tightening Noose over on ihobo.com.

There are still two more copies up for grabs, and at the moment the odds of winning one if you submitted a single review would be 47%, or 66% for a double review (assuming my probabilities are correct and no-one else enters). Those are great odds for winning a free book! For more information, see Win a Book in the Spring Review Drive!