Friday, May 29, 2009

Preliminary Schedule

Hello all and welcome to the Ethics of Cheating in Video Games Blogspot!

To give a quick update on my progress, I am almost done going through the 3 books I received through interlibrary loan and collecting the most pertinent information from those books. I am also going to meet with my faculty sponsor tomorrow and see what he has to say about the project. For those of you who do not know my adviser, his name is Vaughn Huckfeldt and he is a professor of philosophy here at the University of South Dakota.

The second item I will post today is my temporary schedule that I will try to adhere to during this summer. We have ten weeks for U.discover so that is how I will break my schedule down.

Week 1 - Gather and collect as much information as I can find on my topic.
Week 2- Germany (Brainstorm and write out outlines in my free time).
Week 3- Germany (Brainstorm and write out outlines in my free time).
I will also start on the introduction to the 2,000 -2,500 word paper.
(On a personal note, I get to move into my new apartment when I get back from Germany!)
Week 4- I need to go to Iowa to take care of my Grandmother for a little less than a week. So after the meeting on Tuesday, I will drive to Iowa and bring all my materials with me. During this week, I will advance my progress on my paper, go through all my articles and book chapters, and highlight everything I wish to cover in my paper and on my poster.
Week 5- Write the first draft of the paper.
Week 6- Work on the Powerpoint for my poster and go through my paper.
Week 7- Continue working on the poster and the paper. Give/work on my10 min presentation to the rest of the U.Discover scholars.
Week 8-Continue working on the poster and the paper. Give/work on my10 min presentation to the rest of the U.Discover scholars.
Week 9-Finalize the poster and work on the final draft of the paper. Possibly give my10 min presentation to the rest of the U.Discover scholars.
Week 10- Present Poster on July 27th from 4-6 P.M.

Moreover, something that usually helps me personally is if I just lay out everything that needs to be done for this project, along with other tasks that will eventually tie into what I am doing.

  • Paper
    • Major Paper
      • Write out everything I find relevant to the topic into the paper.
      • Work on setting up the problem and my personal solution.
    • 2,000-2,500 Word paper
      • After the major paper is written, I will condense everything into a paper 8 to 10 sides long.
      • This is what I will use as my presentation paper.
      • It will have the most important points that I discovered from my research.
  • Poster
    • Well, I don't know exactly how I will achieve this since we have not had our poster seminar yet in the U.Discover meetings, but I do know I have to make one.
  • Work on my old Video Game Papers
    • The ultimate goal I have with this research is that I can combine everything I have done and create a substantial work on the Aesthetics and the Ethics of Cheating in Video Games. One can find all the research I have conducted on Art and Aesthetics of Video Games in my Wikispace found in the right hand column of this blog.
Until Later,

B. F. Pons

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

First Post

Hey everyone, (most likely just the other U.discover people)

My name is Brendan (Bo) Fox Pons and this is the first post of my Ethics of Cheating in Video Games blog for the U.Discover program here at USD. My main issue that I will wish to tackle with my research is the question of whether or not we can classify actions, such as cheating, in video games as ethical or not. Even though today was the first day that we have had a meeting for this program, I have already done a little research on my own and am getting more and more excited about this project as I continually find information. Before anyone accuses me of being an over-achiever, I would like to mention that I will be unfortunately gone for two of the ten weeks that we will be working on U.Discover. I simply had to make up a lot of time before we started.

So far, I have received three books from interlibrary loan and many more are on their way. I have also found numerous articles on GoogleScholar which have been useful up to now. Along with fancy articles to quote in my research paper and poster, these articles have been filled with information and terms of which I have never heard or considered. My original ethical judgement of cheating in video games was that cheating on the personal level was amoral while cheating in multiplayer and interpersonal competitive games would be deemed immoral. While this general thesis has not drastically changed, the terminology which I can phrase this position has changed. I currently hold that due to the effects of the magic circle, a state which one must follow the rules of the game and ignore the conventions of real society, cheating should be, on some level, viewed as transgressive against the integrity of the game and equally as immoral as cheating in real life, but with cheating at merely a personal level, the personal effects of cheating in games and their following ethical judgements cannot not be so easily discerned. I have also learned that ethical complications do not only occur with interpersonal competitions, such as playing Halo 3 or Call of Duty online, but cheating can also effect real-life currency. Games such as Second Life have players buy virtual currency which could then be re-transferred into real currency. When players cheat in these games, not only is one cheating in the game, but that player is also cheating in real life by acquiring money that would not be rightfully theirs. Even though this issue still fits with interpersonal relations, the real-life monetary aspect to games was one that I did not consider and that I was thankful for discovering.

Hopefully, this brief post has been semi-educational and has fostered some interest in my research,

B. F. Pons