What are the origins of the dungeon-and-village structure of computer role-playing games, and is there some equivalent parallel to be found somewhere in the design of contemporary first person shooters? In order to explore the concept of village and dungeon, it is useful to look at the kinds of activity players undertake in the fictional worlds of games, and how that relates to the spaces of play.

You can read Dungeon and Village over at ihobo.com.

1. Every Pirated Copy is Lost Revenue

The notion persists that piracy is theft, a view I have argued against (forgery being closer in tone to the actions in question). However, the ‘theft’ fiction encourages the idea that the legal rights holder loses money with every pirated copy. It is true that some pirated copies end up in the hands of people who would otherwise have purchased the material, and these are lost sales. However, the typical pirate could not afford to buy all the material they acquire, and certainly would not purchase much (if any) of it were it not for their access to technology allowing them to acquire it without paying any per-download fees.

The majority of pirates I have spoken to are either very poor or at least lacking in wealth, and in some cases this provides their direct motive – the people concerned can’t afford to get the media legally. However, many people who engage in widespread piracy have a different kind of motivation, and may in fact view what they are doing as essentially an altruistic sharing of media that they have enjoyed with others. This perspective is based entirely on the viewpoint of the consumer, and conveniently ignores the producers of the relevant media entirely. A similar situation occurs with public transport in some cities: travellers who bought a day ticket will sometimes pass it on to a stranger when they are finished with it, viewing that exchange solely from the perspective of the lucky recipient of free travel and ignoring the loss of revenue to the operators of the transport system. Whether you think this behaviour is morally acceptable depends greatly on your own moral ideals.

Compulsive hoarding of media content is comparatively common among file-sharers, and the willingness to open this personal library to others is one of the things that sustains contemporary media piracy. I have termed the collective set of media available through file sharing the black library in reference both to it’s current illegality on the one hand and to the fact that only data changes hands not money, hence considering it a black market would be misleading. The existence of the black library is a sign that money is being lost, but it is not conclusive proof that the library itself can be held wholly responsible for that loss, and certainly the scale of the losses cannot be determined by the number of copies of a file being shared multiplied by the retail price of the associated media.

The conclusions to be reached depend upon the assumption taken into the reasoning. If sale of music media as a product is presumed, the losses are the sole responsibility of the pirates who are therefore cursed by some musicians as no better than thieves. Of course, they are a lot better than thieves in one sense since the ‘victims’ do not lose anything tangible when an illegal copy is taken, and even contribute some tangible benefits such as brand awareness (although not to a degree comparable to the presumed loss of revenue if media-as-product is assumed). That music piracy is not quite theft does not mean that it is morally permissible, however, as this is a seperate issue.

The alternative perspective, the one seldom recognised by the beneficiaries of music revenue, is that the media companies are partly responsible for the loss of revenue by pugnaciously sticking to a pricing model predicated on antiquated distribution technologies. If media corporations had recognised the potential for file sharing to revolutionise the music industry they could have offered competitive services years ago and potentially raised billions of dollars from business models such as the Open Music Model or adaptations of radio airplay payment schemes. They did not. They insisted on seeing the situation in terms of the losses implied by the older, obsolete technology. Furthermore, by forcibly cracking down on the illegal activities of pirates they entrenched the issues surrounding the black library in terms of corporations-vs-individuals, an entirely self-defeating approach that galvinises pirates into a more dedicated subculture.

It is worth remembering that if we go back a century or two, musicians were in no way dependent upon sale of recordings since the technology did not exist to do so (gramophones did not appear until the 1870s). Musicians still made a living before audio recordings – they performed concerts and were paid by the audience, or they received money from some wealthy patron. The rise of media technology in the twentieth century – including radio and television – allowed a few succesful musicians to earn astronomical revenues and become as rich as the other beneficiaries of media technology, film stars. However, the idea that musicians are entitled to earn revenue from sale of recordings is dependent upon the technology that allowed recordings to be sold. Now that the technology has dramatically changed such that infinite reproduction and deployment of recordings is trivial, we should expect the economics of music to alter dramatically.

2. You Can’t Compete with Free

A common justification for music cartels turning to legal bullying rather than new business models in the wake of file sharing is that ‘you can’t compete with free’. This argument is confused about basic economics. According to the standard perspective on pricing, competitive markets tend towards selling at or near the cost price of goods (marginal price). No vendor makes a profit selling for cost, so sellers add value in order to charge above the base cost. It doesn’t matter in this scenario whether the cost of goods is thousands of dollars or zero, you make profit by finding ways to add value or to take advantage of scarcity. As Mike Masnick suggests, saying you can’t compete with free is admitting you can’t compete at all, and vendors unable or unwilling to compete deserve to go out of business.

There’s an easy way of seeing through the ‘can’t compete with free’ error when we think in terms of pizza. There’s always free pizza in a dumpster somewhere, yet we all happily pay for pizza. Our money is courted by the added value pizza vendors offer: a choice of pizza, reliably superior quality, pizza guaranteed to be free of contaminants, pizza in 30 minutes or less (generally faster than dumpster searching) and pleasant environments in which to eat pizza. No-one thinks dumpster pizza cannot be competed against, even though it is free. 

The files in the back library aren't quite as bad as dumpster pizza, but they are often lower quality and always higher risk than legally acquired music, plus what's available is only a fraction of all the media that could be offered. Commercial music downloading services could compete with the (free) black library by offering greater choice, better and more consistent quality, files free of viruses, a hassle-free download experience and a more pleasant access environment. The black library isn’t an undefeatable commercial threat, but the early adoption of a viable business model for the new technology that media cartels simply don’t want to accept. It isn’t monetized very well, but the music industry will need to introduce monetized versions of file sharing models if they want to remain competitive in the long term. If they refuse to compete with the new technology, they deserve to go under, as I argued in File sharing and the Pony Express.

3. Piracy Hurts New Artists

Back in September 2009, Lilly Allen claimed that “for new talent... file sharing is a disaster as it’s making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge.” This view – that music piracy hurts new artists more than established musicians – makes a fundamental mistake about the old music-as-product paradigm by believing it was beneficial to new and emerging talent that albums were priced expensively.

There are, crudely speaking, three grades of musicians working in the Western world. Firstly, there are the megastars like Allen who receive considerable media attention and benefit from vast marketing spends. These superstars make orders of magnitude more income than anyone else in music, and the decline in album sales since file sharing broke has narrowed their revenue slightly. They all still earn millions of dollars from touring and particularly from the licensing of their tracks in TV, film and advertising.

Secondly, there is the middle tier of artists who have a fanbase and regular income but who lie outside of the major corporate marketing spends. Artists of this kind either tour constantly in order to make money or have another source of income (e.g. their own record label). Although the current situation has cost these artists some revenue, they had always been dependent on making money from music-as-service and have not (as far as I can ascertain) lost out greatly from the new situation, even though many are feeling the pinch as retail revenues fall.

Finally, there’s a lower tier of musicians, signed or unsigned, who have too little name recognition to be earning well and who barely scrape by as artists but stick with it because they believe in their music or because they enjoy performing. Artists on this tier receive next to no promotion, media attention or marketing spend and their albums are at best merchandise they sell at their gigs that stem their losses by a small amount. To suggest that these musicians are worse off under the effects of the new technology is extremely peculiar – if anything, some have benefited from file sharing in that their music has been heard by a wider audience who would never have discovered them otherwise. Unfortunately, there are so many artists on this tier that the boost to brand recognition has been fairly trivial. These musicians would not be better off under the old music-as-product paradigm, but they would be much better off if a reasonably monetized file sharing system such as the Open Music Model were in place.

Despite Allen’s objection, it isn't likely that file sharing has made it any harder for new acts to emerge, and indeed the music-as-product model was already toxic to the fostering of new talent. Moving forward to a music-as-service model like Open Music wouldn’t necessarily solve this issue, but it wouldn’t leave new and emerging acts any worse off, and it might in fact leave them in a better situation, since the new technology encourages consumers to listen to music by many different artists, rather than just the commercial mainstream.

4. File Sharing is Unethical

In the first of the John Peel Lectures, Pete Townsend of The Who criticized Apple’s iTunes for providing only a fraction of the services that the recording industry used to deliver to musicians. He’s right, and the idea that it is acceptable to charge prices for music files equivalent to physical distribution without any of the marketing or talent-development contribution is absolutely shocking. The cartel-set price of albums limited the number that a typical person could afford to buy, and sustaining that pricing strategy with music downloads is a scandalous abuse of the new technologies. As ever, only the already successful artists have significantly benefitted. New artists would and will benefit from a lower cost for access to music, something that sensible monetization of file sharing would provide.

Townsend, like Allen, is irate about illegal file sharing, likening the unauthorized copying of his songs to the theft of his son’s bike, an asinine comparison that is rooted in the continued predication of the music-as-product model. He states:

...if someone... pretends that something I have created should be available to them free (because creativity has less value than an hour’s work by me as a musician in a pub) I wonder what has gone wrong with human morality and social justice.

I won’t defend the ethics of pirates when it comes music – Townshend is justifiably irritated by the disrespect of musicians implied in sharing their creative output without permission or remuneration. However, the renegade librarians are not wickedly immoral so much as they are people who object to the music cartels and are taking advantage of the new software and hardware to circumvent corporate domination of music for their own, personal gain. The musicians are merely the unseen victims of this commercial rebellion, which like most ethical issues results from a clash of ideals (in this case, capitalist traditionalism versus anti-corporate ideals). It should also be noted that people are sadly lacking in willpower when faced with new technology, and the commercial sector has typically used this to their advantage by raking in cash from consumers eager to play with new gadgets. Their failure in this case reflects as badly on industry as it does on individuals.

Conversely, when it comes to Townshend’s cries in respect of “social justice”, I tend to side with the pirates. There was no social justice in the music-as-product business model, a system that favoured the few against the many, that did increasingly little to help new artists that were not pin-up friendly, and which now refuses to accept the market circumstances implied by file sharing technology and prefers to use legal bullying in order to preserve an unjust monopolistic cartel. The price of music downloads is only fractionally reduced from that of physical product despite radically reduced overheads for distribution, the evaporation of investment in talent development that Townshend observes, and the purchaser having no option for later resale to recoup some of their investment. Music publishers are gouging consumers and abusing musicians: frankly, I can understand why pirates don't want to co-operate with them, even if I also believe the pirates aren't being much fairer to the musicians.

File sharing is not inherently unethical, but the resistance to a sensible monetization scheme makes the black library what it is: outlaw file swapping. A music-as-service approach – most likely something like the Open Music Model’s monthly service fee for unlimited, DRM free music downloads – would instantly remove the immoral dimension of piracy, and with this entirely attainable possibility in mind the music industry as a whole could be claimed to share responsibility for unethical aspects of contemporary file sharing with the pirates. It is they, not the pirates, who have refused to come to terms with the market implications of new technology. They resist because it’s hard to let go of the familiar profitability of the old music-as-product model.  But the longer they cling to the older model, the worse piracy will become and the worse the situation will be for musicians. When it comes to the ethics of file sharing, both sides of the dispute bear a proportion of the blame.

Ask an average person for a word to describe dinosaurs and you’re likely to hear terms like ‘savage’, ‘vicious’ or ‘deadly’. But this is very unlikely to be an accurate description of life in the Mesozoic era – the Age of Reptiles. Certainly, there were animals alive at this time who seem to us to be terrifying monsters – both in terms of their size, and their natural weaponry. Yet if dinosaurs were really as horrific as we tend to imagine them then either their descendents, the birds, would have to be equally savage and deadly, or an unprecedentedly rapid change of behaviour must have occurred.

The problem occurs in large part because of the decidedly narrow window on the past available to us. The fossil record contains some wonderfully preserved specimens of creatures past, and often offers considerable forensic data about their demise. But this creates a distorting lens effect in our appreciation for dinosaur life by skewing our knowledge heavily towards the deaths of these animals and away from their lives. It may be the case that what we can be most confident about in terms of our knowledge of these creatures relates to their deaths (or at least those whose remains survived), but any plausible account of their lives must allow more than this.

The possible complaint that to go beyond the evidence is to indulge in pure speculation is hollow when television ‘documentaries’ concerning the lives of dinosaurs almost constantly engage in imaginative fiction (often presented as if it were empirically based). The rise of CGI animation has allowed for some terrifically entertaining shows featuring dinosaurs – but the oft-used phrase “scientists believe” is merely a way of papering over speculation, and many shows don’t even bother to admit this aspect of the presentation. Since our beliefs about dinosaurs have changed wildly over the last century – and continue to change with both fresh finds and new studies of previous fossils – the suggestion that any of these alleged documentaries presents a factual face of dinosaur life is absurd. Rather, the most dramatic stories are chosen because these shows are at their heart entertainment.

If we approach the representation of the dinosaurs from a different stance we will reach different conclusions. The common lineage of dinosaurs with the birds around today was originally conceived in the 1960s, a source of controversy in the 1970s, and a point of orthodoxy by the 1990s. Although behaviour can change in animals over very short time scales, this is largely because animal behaviour is not genetically determined but rather a confluence of response to environment, learning, and natural tendencies (which are, in part, affected by genetics). It is extremely likely that the behaviour of dinosaurs lies within a landscape of possibilities bounded by reptiles on one side and birds on the other – and we would be hard pressed to find the savagery of popular dinosaur mythology supported in that space. Even the crocodiles and alligators, which are literally dinosaurs that survived the end of the Cretaceous, are not quite as vicious as their popular image suggests.

If we consider the text book figure of dino-terror, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, palaeontologists are still not agreed as to whether this was an apex predator, like a lion, or a scavenger, like a hyaena. It is quite likely that real tyrannosaurs engaged in both active predation and scavenging of kills, which only muddies the waters, but either way, feeding was only a part of tyrannosaur life. These animals had to have bred, which means they have to have mated – their lives must have involved more than killing. The shadow sides of their lives are occasionally covered by dinosaur media – T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous represents a tyrannosaur mother caring for her offspring, for instance – but it is generally downplayed in favour of their more dramatic role as a murderous monster.

What’s more, even accepting tyrannosaurs preyed upon hadrosaurs and cerotopsians doesn’t justify treating them as more vicious or savage than big cats that prey on grazing animals today. In many respects, the relationships between herbivorous dinosaurs and their carnivorous predators seems highly likely to parallel contemporary relationships between herbivorous mammals and their predators. Thus what we observe of the lion’s hunt of the zebra or the wolf pack’s hunt of a deer may well be behavioural prototypes of cretaceous hunts by tyrannosaurs and (say) velociraptors  respectively. Yet ask someone on the street which is more vicious or savage, a lion or a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and they are far more likely to choose the latter – without any empirical justification.

Predatory dinosaurs feel like monsters to us for much the same reason sharks do – a disturbing collection of teeth, a diet of meat and a worrying excess of scale that allows us to imagine ourselves as ill-fated prey. Yet in both cases, the lives of these animals were or are more rich and varied than a focus on hunting and feeding suggests. The portrayal of these animals in the popular media – both in documentaries and elsewhere – distorts our understanding of their lives with a lens effect that is every bit as slanted as our view of the world when seen through the eyes of our news services. We are often aware of this lens effect, but we are never immune to it.

Nintendo has already put its cards on the table – now gamers are waiting to see how Sony and Microsoft can trump them. But what controllers will the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 ship with? To answer this question, we need to look at the economic challenges facing the two console manufacturers who are fighting fiercely for the loyalty of the diehard gamers.

Read The Controller Crisis Facing Sony and Microsoft over on ihobo.com today.

For centuries, discussion of ethics has focussed upon the idea of the moral law – a set of rules or criteria that dictate what is permissible or required. This debate has been substantially focussed on two battlefronts: firstly, the long and pointless dispute between advocates of a duty approach (deontology or Kantian ethics) and an outcome-focussed approach (Consequentialism). Secondly, the more recent conflict between all ethical beliefs and the deep suspicion that there is no moral law (Nihilism). The former disagreement has been fruitful but misguided, while the latter has become deeply counter productive.

As I have argued previously, disputes between different moral approaches fall down when they presume that morality must be (or ideally must be) dictated by one system. Just as a mathematical formula can be expressed in many different forms and still be equivalent, moral statements are largely transformable between different views. The oldest form of morality, virtue ethics, expresses ethical thought from the perspective of the person acting, while Kant's duty ethics express the same concepts in terms of rules or rights affecting the actions that can be taken. Both can also be expressed in terms of outcomes in what is termed Consequentialist ethics. Each perspective has advantages and disadvantages. For instance, outcome ethics comes closest to a mathematical expression, duty ethics is the easiest to render as verbal laws, and virtue ethics is the most intuitive and easiest to teach. Conversely, virtue ethics is difficult to formalize, duty ethics can be inflexible, and outcome ethics risk a dehumanizing obsession with numbers.

The tiff between different approaches (which boils down to 'my ethics are closer to the good than yours') is a sideshow, however. The main event of the last century has been the challenge foreshadowed by Nietzsche: can any kind of ethics be sustained in the wake of the collapse of our horizons. We now recognise that different cultural circumstances lead to different ways of life, and different conclusions about moral concerns – and this seems to catastrophically undermine the concept of a viable moral law. The resulting crisis can be expressed in a simple question: if there is no single, true ethical system, can there be ethics at all? Terrified by this possibility, even secular ethicists like Derek Parfit have felt a powerful need to defend the idea of a moral law, and have mounted impressive arguments in it's defence.

Yet this rally to the cause of moral law, while admirable, has been misguided. Nihilism is not a plausible scenario, since it cannot be the case that an absence of absolutes disproves morality absolutely. The oxymoronic confidence of the Nihilist mirrors the premature certainty of the law ethicist: morality, it has been presumed, must be like logic: some things are true and others false. However, even logic is dependent upon premises, and we are not bound to accept the presuppositions of either moral law or its nihilistic mirror image. Morality could be more like fractal mathematics – a variegated moral landscape in which not everything is possible or permissible, but which supports a diversity of ethical possibilities.

We live amidst a moral chaos, and it is perhaps time to accept the merits of chaos ethics. Moral law has been valuable – our human rights agreements descend from Kant's duty ethics, and could not have come about otherwise. But just as a non-foundationalist stance in epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) has provided a valuable new perspective on our understanding of the world, a non-foundationalist approach to ethics can take us into new and interesting moral spaces.

Moral chaos is not a monster to be slain, but a possibility to be explored. Neither is this a new occurrence: the competing claims of alternative moral laws were already a clue that the ethical endeavour might not be resolved in unity. Moral law is invaluable – we have enough common ground to allow for substantial agreement. But moral chaos is also valuable – it protects us from what Feyerabend called 'the Tyranny of Truth', and allows for a freedom that can be threatened by narrow conceptions of truth and value. To truly benefit from the potential for good our imagination grants us, we must learn to strike a balance between moral law and moral chaos. This is not a new way of life, but an ancient wisdom we somehow came to forget.

This year I'll be working towards my first book of moral philosophy, Chaos Ethics. I hope you'll join in the discussions here in the Game as I explore the issues.

The opening image is Black Chaos by Marilyn Myrlrea, which I found here. As ever, no copyright infringement was intended and I will take the image down if asked.

However, I can still wish Pagans a Happy Solstice, Zoroastrians a Happy Yalda, Jews a Happy Hannukah, Mahayana Buddhists a Happy New Year, Christians (both religious and cultural) a Merry Christmas, African-Americans a Happy Kwanzaa, and a very Merry Swik to everyone else! As for myself, I am turning forty on 1st January, so if I survive the festivities I'll see you all on the other side of this meaningless numeric milestone. Have fun!

Only a Game will return in January with yet more nonsense.

Could games be the ultimate artworks? I've heard this view advanced on two distinct but related grounds. Firstly, there is the argument that because the player of game has the experience happen directly for them, games are superior works of art to other media like films and books where the experience is second hand. The trouble with this is that the reasons why we esteem art have very little to do with whether the relevant experiences happen to us directly or not – if this were not the case, Shakespeare could only truly be appreciated by actors performing his plays, not by the audience. It may well be the case that in assessing games as artworks our direct participation is vital – but this is an artefact of how games work as artworks, not an argument that games must be superior artworks.

You can read the whole of Stories and Games (3): Experiencing Fiction over on ihobo.com.

Much of the usual furore over money goes to how much any individual entity can have, which entities are allowed to have it, and how much will be taken away from them under what circumstances. “They have too much money”, is a complaint oft heard from those who have very little of it. However, the current consensus on money is that wealth should be unlimited – indeed, against this the only ideal seriously offered is to abolish money (despite its obvious convenience for mediating otherwise complicated exchanges of goods and services). Money can be owned by individuals or groups of humans, and each is taxed by the government of their host nations according to schemes that vary somewhat around the world. Taxation, rather than limitation, is the universally implemented response to the accumulation of wealth – to the extent that any attempt to apply solid limits would be interpreted as a particularly draconian tax.

Money, therefore, flows between organisations and individuals, and out into governments (the only organisations permitted not only to tax, but to enforce taxation as mandatory). Small amounts cycle between individuals and the organisations that both employ and supply the necessities and luxuries of life. Large amounts are exchanged between organisations – indeed, the extremes of wealth are only to be found in proximity to the giant corporations – both the organisations and the individuals involved with them deal in scales of finance that are all but unimaginable to the person contriving to make ends meet from day to day. It is the very nature of the numeric value representation that money depends upon that it takes large quantities of money to generate further large quantities.

There is a sense in which there are actually two kinds of money in the world: the day-to-day money we are all familiar with that might be called cash for convenience, and the large sums of money required to create or control organisations capable of generating more money, which is called capital. The same abstraction is at the root of both, but the scales involved change the meaning of that money, much as a bacterial colony and a human are incomparable entities even though they are both at root collections of biologically similar cells. The vast majority of people deal only with cash, and never have any significant quantity of capital – although those who become cash-rich can afford to buy shares in organisations and thus tap into the profits of capital. A small minority of people deal only with capital, and thus never have to think about issues in terms of cash. The struggle of a typical family to feed, clothe and shelter themselves is an alien world to anyone whose feet are firmly planted in the world of capital.

Ethics is concerned with the clash of ideals, and the conflicting moral concepts in the context of money are equality and freedom. On the one hand, the fiscal conservative ethic demands the freedom to make and own as much as is humanly possible. Against this, the egalitarian liberal ethic demands a standard of equality in respect of wealth, a position that suffers from an ill-defined concept of fairness. It is not that no viable definition of what is fair can be derived, but rather that there are so many possible approaches and it is not clear how we can adjudicate such a cacophony of ideals. In respect to these two ideals, it should not be thought that the cash class all ascribe to the ideal of equality since a great many prefer the ideal of freedom, not least because it better defends against unfair taxation: this is the sometimes unnoticed reason so many in the cash-class vote Republican in the United States.

Despite it being primarily a concern for advocates of the equality ideal, the sense that the distribution of wealth is inequitable is widespread, although the intensity of outrage is extremely variable. However, there is no consensus about what should be done about this situation, and even if there were it would be difficult to drive political processes that aimed to affect the rich supply of money that flows from corporations to both governments (as tax) and politicians (as campaign contributions). Raising corporation taxes in any given nation means little when there are so many alternative bases of operations the organisation might relocate to, and no politician is keen to back plans to stab their biggest contributors with a tax knife.

Marx felt intensely the injustice of wealth inequality, and believed (it seems incorrectly) that a strong identification with the ideals of fairness among the poorest workers would drive a revolution leading inevitably to a future fair world. This was misguided. The anger of the poor in the face of the rich certainly drove violent uprisings in many nations, but it led only to a consolidation of capital by the state that allowed for particularly vicious totalitarian regimes. The consequence of spreading all money out equally across the world would be to create very rich citizens of poor nations and very poor citizens of rich nations; it’s not at all clear this leads to a better world. While other ideals of fairness may prove viable in respect of money, the Marxist ideal is largely judged to have failed.

The political philosopher John Rawls had an alternative ideal for equality of money, whereby individual nations would exchange sums of money between their citizens in schemes resembling national taxation, but with all funds exchanged solely between private citizens. In response to this proposal, Robert Nozick developed philosophical arguments that demonstrated the implausibility of maintaining this kind of wealth exchange. Using an example involving the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, Nozick argued that if we start from a fair distribution of wealth, someone like Chamberlain that many people are willing to pay to watch will immediately acquire large sums of money. To say that this new situation is unjust is problematic: people freely paid money to Chamberlain, are they not allowed to decide how their money is spent? Nozick argues that patterned distributions of wealth are problematic since “liberty upsets patterns” and similarly patterns destroy liberty. The argument between these two philosophers serves to illustrate my key point that the ethics of money concerns a clash between the ideals of equality (Rawls) and the ideals of freedom (Nozick).

Accepting Nozick’s arguments and rejecting Rawls’, we are faced with an inevitable variation in the wealth of individuals, but this does not mean that there are not alternative approaches to the equality problem that might be applied. The extent of the gulf between the world of capital and the world of cash happens because the capital class make money from their holdings and investments while the cash class must labour to earn cash. One long-term solution to this inequity could be having labour earn not only cash but also shares in equity. If the worker employed by a corporation automatically earns (small) shares in the capital its employer embodies, the disparity between the cash and capital classes can be gradually eroded over generations, although admittedly there is still some element of lottery since companies do fail and disappear, in which case everybody with shares loses out whether they are investors or employees.

Under a system such as this, investors must accept a dilution of their returns – proponents of financial freedom will likely object. But the potential narrowing of the wealth disparity could be highly appealing to proponents of financial equality, and might be worth fighting for. The real benefit of this system, however, is that it gives workers influence over the management of the company that employs them, thus disrupting the feudal pattern that modern capitalism still embodies (the randomly noble-born having been replaced with the randomly wealthy-born at the top of the pile). Although the workers might collectively own only a few percent of the company stock, it could be a decisive margin in boardroom voting, and at the very least puts the voice of the employed into a process where it is usually excluded. Expanding this scheme to its logical limits, this would also mean that banks might function like building societies or other mutual financial organisations – the money people have saved in a bank would entitle them to a share of that bank, and a voice in its activities.

The bastion of the capital class, investment companies, would largely escape this kind of process – but there is at least one situation in which the ideal of equality might infiltrate these capital funds: the bailout. When governments step in to rescue ailing financial institutions, it should not be on empty rhetorical grounds such as the company being “too big to fail” but as a purchase of equity. A billion dollar bailout should purchase billion dollar equity, and if the company is not willing to grant this stake it should be allowed to die. As economist Alan Greenspan has charged: “If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big.”

We live at a time when moral outrage towards the capital class is greater than ever. This is not simply envious anger at the rich, since for the most part the superstars of movies, music and sports are not the target of this ire. It is bankers and investment executives who earn vast sums of money even when their companies fail who are the subject of this contemporary righteous rage. The ideals of freedom cannot adequately defend against the ideals of equality in such cases, and indeed may even by aligned in some cases. It is thus more important than ever before that citizens hold their representatives accountable for decisions made in respect of the capital class. This is not easy – especially when all political parties necessarily pander to the ultra-rich. But the state is the only weapon the cash class have against the capital class, and popular opinion can lead political change when it is sufficiently strong. ‘No taxation without representation’, the saying goes. Perhaps we should now add ‘No bailout without equity’ to the chants of the discontented.

For Michael Mouse, who suggested this topic three years ago.

Why are games fun, and are they fun in different ways to films and books? This can be a tricky question to explore since a great many of the games that get the most attention are actually part film and part game – they switch between interactive sections of gameplay and non-interactive movies. As I argued last week, those movies are still a kind of game, but they are a different kind of game and a different kind of art.

You can read the whole of Stories and Games (2): The Emotions of Play over on ihobo.com.

I recently began my ascent of the mountain that is Parfit’s 1,400 page monster On What Matters, which commences with a long and detailed discussion of why subjective accounts of reasons are wrong, and why objective accounts of reasons are right. In essence, Parfit says that to have a reason to do something is to have circumstances in which anyone who was rational would act in that way. Therefore that you like chocolate is not a reason to eat chocolate (according to Parfit), but that we desire pleasant experiences is a reason – indeed, the reason – to eat chocolate, assuming you like it. 

While developing his arguments, Parfit gives a great example of how one can behave rationally and yet still fail catastrophically:

Suppose that, while walking in some desert, you have disturbed and angered a poisonous snake. You believe that, to save your life, you must run away. In fact you must stand still, since this snake will attack only moving targets. Given your false belief, it would be irrational for you to stand still. You ought rationally to run away.

He notes that this is not what we ought to do in the “decisive-reason-implying sense” yet it is still rational to run away in this scenario. This discrepancy – between the rational behaviour of the individual and the objective reasons that apply – is interesting to me even though I don’t make use of either true or false beliefs in my own philosophy. For me, true and false are artefacts of the system we call logic, and connecting real world situations to logic always involves passing through fiction. The failure to recognise this can occasionally lead to some serious philosophical errors, and although Parfit’s mind is razor sharp, his faith in objectivity sometimes blinds him to this important disconnect between theory and experience.

As an example, consider Parfit’s stated attitude towards smoking:

…suppose that, unless I stop smoking, I shall die much younger, losing many years of happy life. According to all plausible objective theories, this fact gives me a decisive reason to want to try to stop smoking.

Assuming (on the basis of his comments elsewhere) Parfit really believes that it is a fact that smokers “die younger losing many years of happy life” then it is only a reason to stop smoking if the many years of happy life are more important to the smoker than smoking itself. I don’t think Parfit really considers whether there might be reasons for smoking other than it being an ongoing addictive habit. (No smoker starts smoking because it is addictive – they have other reasons – in the conventional sense – for doing so).

In his earlier Reasons and Persons, Parfit advances a fascinating perspective based on Thomas Nagel’s idea of a serial person. Who you are in different parts of your life is a different serial person – so, for instance, Chris Bateman before he read Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (the first book of philosophy he read) was a different serial person to Chris Bateman afterwards, or Chris Bateman after he had his first philosophy book published. This account of serial persons is one of the many interesting perspectives offered in Reasons and Persons.

Parfit argues that we might have duties to our future serial persons, and that the responsibility of later serial persons to the actions of their earlier selves might be obviated. Different people will have different responses to these two different-but-related claims. Personally, I think it is problematic to suggest, as Parfit apparently would, that we should not smoke because we have a duty to our future serial person selves. (Although my wife, who is a nurse, thinks this is an interesting way to argue for better health choices). I would suggest that it is part of the quintessential nature of youth to be stupid and reckless, and part of the nature of later life to come to terms with the consequences of this carelessness. The freedom of youth is not worth sacrificing for extended life expectancy. For non-hypothetical people, quality of life is more important than quantity.

Parfit’s reasons are disembodied from real life in a way that I find troublesome. It is true that on average smokers die younger. Statistics vary, but it’s not atypical to claim smokers die between 60-70 years of age, while non-smokers life to 70-95 years of age. That’s a big discrepancy – if your interest is how many years of life expectancy you rack up. It might give you Parfitian-style objective reasons to not smoke, but that doesn’t mean it gives you reasons to not smoke. As Bill Hicks joked in 1991: “They proved that if you quit smoking, it will prolong your life. What they haven't proved is that a prolonged life is a good thing. I haven't seen the stats on that yet!”

If we compare the angry snake thought experiment to the situation of a typical young smoker, we get something particularly interesting. The young smoker knows cigarettes are bad for their health (that’s precisely what makes them cool for some people, and why ‘Death’ brand cigarettes enjoyed a market) but they believe that smoking at the current time – to be cool, to enjoy the relaxing hit of nicotine, to fit-in etc – is worth the cost to their future selves. This might well be a false belief. But in parallel to the angry snake example, it is still rational for these people to smoke provided they have a justification for doing so that they believe outweighs the negative health effects.

Parfit is explicit about this. Using an example concerning a hypothetical person who believes that smoking will extend their life because they know someone who smoked until they were aged 100, he observes:

I want to smoke only because I enjoy living, and I believe that smoking will prolong my life. Does the irrationality of my believe make my desire to smoke irrational? It is best, I suggest, to answer No. ... Given my belief that smoking will protect my health, my desire to smoke is rational. I am wanting what, if my belief were true, I would have strong reasons to want.

Thus, on Parfit's account of rationality, smokers with justifications for their habit are rational, whatever the nature of that justification. The only exceptions would be justifications that were, in themselves, contradictory e.g. wanting to smoke because you believed smoking would damage your health when you had no reason to want worse health. (Parfit still says that we should still claim that smokers are "being irrational" but suggests it is the smokers' beliefs that are irrational, not their desire to smoke, nor their actions in smoking).

My goal in sharing this account is not to give smokers or young people a green card to behave recklessly (ha! as if they needed my blessing in the first place!), but merely to point out that life is a precious gift and you spoil any present by offering it with strings attached. Possible future consequences are worth considering, but (contra Parfit) they do not necessarily provide decisive reasons for acting one way or another. Many people who don’t smoke live long and happy lives; many people who don’t smoke live long and miserable lives. Smoking shortens both scenarios – but this is only a bad thing for the people in the first case, and no-one can know the circumstances of their future until they get there. Parfit may believe there are decisive reasons not to smoke, but on his own account smokers who can justify their habit are at least acting rationally. This is perhaps more than they can hope to hear from most philosophers.

Can games be art, and should we care either way? Every culture respects some activities and objects as 'art', and grants to these a certain esteem that is entirely apart from their practical uses. Art, as Oscar Wilde suggested, is quite useless, but nonetheless great art, good art, and even interesting art attracts a lot of attention, a lot of praise and criticism, and a lot of money. The question of whether games can be art is usually treated in one of two ways – often dismissively by presuming either they must be art (Santiago) or they can't be art (Ebert). In my book Imaginary Games I take another path: the question of whether games can be art is misguided, because all art is a kind of game. To understand why this is so, there's no better place to start than looking at the relationship between games and stories.

You can read the whole of Stories and Games (1): Art over on ihobo.com.

By the way, I desperately need some reviews of the book on Amazon, so anyone who’s read it I’d appreciate your support in this regard. Thanks in advance!

The third part of this trilogy of philosophy books, Chaos Ethics, is currently being researched. I have now read Aristotle’s rather dull Ethics, and have just started on Parfit’s unfeasibly long On What Matters. My reward for working through this monster is to read Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, which I bought a while back but haven’t had time to tackle. Parfit also seems to have taken a shine to Kant since Reasons and Persons, so I’m interested to read his consequentialist take on Kantian ethics. I expect to be blogging some new ethics pieces in the Gregorian New Year, so watch this space moral philosophy fans.

I’m struggling to wrangle my internet presence now that I have two blogs and three social networks (Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter) – not to mention a baby! – but I'm doing the best I can all the same. What’s really suffering right now is Google Reader, which most days I just can’t handle and I end up marking all as read blindly. I’m thinking I might have to trim this down to just the blogs I’m most strongly attached to (which probably includes yours if you’re reading this), but then again when the baby goes into full time nursery it will be a very different situation for me so perhaps I should not panic yet. Apologies to anyone whose blog I am usually active in commenting – feel free to draw my attention to anything I may have missed in the ensuing carnage of parenthood.

A new short serial on ihobo to promote Imaginary Games begins tomorrow and runs over the next three weeks – I hope to see you in the comments!

In a rather bizarre situation, there are apparently 8 used copies of the book for sale with prices ranging from $14.95 (+$3.99 shipping) to an astonishing $51.47 (+$3.99 shipping), and conditions varying from ‘Very Good’ to ‘Like New’. Since a quick look at the publisher’s stock records shows that as of writing the only copies in circulation are my author copies, these vendors must either be slightly underselling or radically overselling copies of a book they don’t actually possess. Wild.

I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate my thanks to everyone who has supported this project over the years. Despite being impressed with my proposal, many reputable publishers turned me down on the grounds that they didn’t believe such an odd topic could sell even 500 copies (the exact figure quoted by one such publisher). I hope to prove that there are in fact gamers out in the world with an interest in philosophy – and philosophers with an interest in games – and that the question of whether games qualify for the cultural esteem denoted by the term ‘art’ is one that matters to a great many of us.

Imaginary Games is available from all good booksellers now.