Vice City Virtue: Moral Issues in Digital Game Play
2013; The Strong; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1938-0399
Autores Tópico(s)Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
ResumoVice City Virtue: Issues in Digital Game Karolien Poels and Steven Malliet, eds. Belgium: Acco, 2011. Tables, notes, references. 351 pp. $54.96 paper. ISBN: 9789033484681In June 2011, the United States Supreme Court struck down a 2005 California law banning the sale of some violent video games to minors on the grounds that there is no tradition of restricting chil- dren's access to depictions of violence in the U.S.A. That case is just one example from an ongoing debate about what schol- ars Karolien Poels and Steven Malliet, in their Vice City Virtue, call issues in digital game play (p. 21). Over the last three decades, scholars have investigated and debated the risks associated with, and the effects of playing, digital games. With this anthology, editors Poels and Malliet enter into the debate with hopes of mov- ing it beyond a narrow focus on violent game effects, while providing the kind of nuanced view of morality that enables scholars to better inform the public and policymakers.The anthology sets out to accomplish these goals by offering different perspec- tives from psychologists, philosophers, theologians, political scientists, and com- munications and cultural-studies schol- ars working within the philosophical, psychology, and gamer theory traditions (pp. 22-23). Anthologies like this one are often disjointed or difficult to navigate. editors, however, have done an admirable job arranging the multidisciplinary group of essays into four complementary parts. first part explores the philosophical study of moral- ity in digital games in a section called The Player as a (an) (a)Moral Agent (p. 31). second part, named The Psy- chology of Play (p. 107), addresses such questions as how do players process vir- tual violence and why do players cheat in online multiplayer games. third part, entitled Moral Perceptions, surveys how the public, parents, and players perceive violent game content, while the fourth part includes case studies focusing on the moral content of such games as Heavy Rain (2010) and game genres as the World War II first-person shooter.A chapter asserting that pan- ics differ from other kinds of panics also provides some necessary his- torical context to the essays. Media schol- ars Liesbet Depauw and Daniel Biltereyst do a commendable job providing a brief overview of the history of media panics, and the authors' assertion that current claims that young people are becoming more immoral, desensitized, or violent by playing digital games must be viewed within a history of media panic, is a good one. …
Referência(s)