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Showing posts from April, 2011

the state of the industry, Part I: Narrative

This post is going to be about video games. If you could care less about video games, leave the room now. Any attempt to address the state of the game industry needs to involve an clear and detailed list of the current at-large issues facing the audience of said industry: gamers. We, as gamers, as those who play and enjoy and invest in games, need to face facts and be HONEST with ourselves about what issues actually exist , about what issues actually matter , and what issues can actually be resolved . Let's start then with a list.

America: Land of the Free, Home of the resultant moral ambiguity

I've been hovering around this idea of morality and "rightness" and a kind of absolutism for a few weeks now, so I hope that you can bear with me as I continue to do so. I haven't yet been able to put a finer point on why it's a constant element on my mind, but I can tell you that, by Jove, it certainly has been coming up a lot. A lot. Of especial import today was a documentary I watched on netflix. I owe a huge debt to Netflix, as it's recently allowed me to reach unprecedented levels of both "hip" and "smarts" that had been hitherto unreachable at such a low rate, price, and convenience. I barely have time to read books because I'm so busy watching things I never knew existed! So the film was called "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*" with the asterisk cryptically stating "the side effects of being American". It's a documentary about the demonization of steroids and steroid use following a number of hi

why do you keep apologecizing

I like mad libs. If you don't know what mad libs are, they're a sort of a word game that was especially popular in the 80's, and less so in the 90's. The intrigue of this little activity came from the fact that you (the reader) were given the opportunity to obliviously insert your own choice of words (as long as it was the correct part of speech), into these pre-determined blanks. It was a play on the term "ad lib", which is short for the latin phrase ad libitum or "at one's pleasure". In a more practical sense, it used this phrase to conjugate itself with the idea of improvised comedy (also popular at the time). Some mad libs books perhaps gave you a title or a topic with which to guide you on your choice of words, but otherwise it was a laissez-faire carnivale of word soup by the time your words had been chosen (hence the "improv" part). As you read the story, you would then insert your nobly-chosen syntactic vittles when prompted an

Euthyphro's Dilemma

Recently I've been spending many of my hours listening to and reading a number of articles on STR.org (Stand to Reason), a christian apologetics website, which address various philosophical and intellectual challenges to a christian worldview. It's a cool resource, and a great way to pick your own mind and plow the fertile ground of thought for new ideas and clearer thinking. At the same time, there are a number of formidable and useful secular sources that also address these challenges in a decidedly christian-less way. Which camp do I fall into? Well, I'll let you figure that out as we go along. What I've been thinking about most recently though is the idea of "good" and "bad" (I also posted something on this a little while ago, though, admittedly, with a lot less thought and research). It's also been presented as "the problem of evil" or Euthyphro's Dilemma (a discourse by Plato, where Socrates is having a dialogue with a man n