Everything in Pop Culture
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Friday, December 18th, 2009
Most negative reviews of Avatar waffle between complaining about the movie's shaky narrative execution and clichéd similarities to Dances with Wolves or any other movie that involves disenfranchised indigenous populations ever produced. These reviewers are technically correct: the movie's plotting is pretty shoddy at times, there are a lot of clichés, and the depth of characterization leaves quite a bit to be desired. But there's one thing these reviews consistently bring up that I reject: that somehow, Avatar is flawed for taking an anti-corporate, anti-military-industrial-complex stance.
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Friday, December 11th, 2009
In my daily travels on the Internets recently, I (for whatever reason I cannot remember), stumbled upon theDiscussion page for the Wikipedia article "Role-Playing Game," which is appropriately about "tabletop" role-playing games, like D&D and its many bastard children (and let's not forget its estranged albeit beloved cousin, the LARP). Little did I realize the epic battle unfolding there.
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Friday, November 27th, 2009
So last week, I was watching the November 23 episode of House, “Teamwork,” where Cameron quits the hospital because of the ethical quagmire Chase has gotten himself into over killing African dictator Dibala. Naturally, ethical quagmires get me thinking about two things: Dr. Hall's Philosophy 101 ethics class back in my undergraduate years at Stetson (he resembled the Colonel from KFC) and Dungeons & Dragons, which arguably has had a greater influence on my life than college ever had.
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Thursday, November 26th, 2009
The key to making the original nine alignments of D&D work lies in reinterpreting them. The authors of Second Edition (as I will write some day at greater length) had it right, despite their propensity for tables and disdain for a unified game mechanic. The nine alignments are indeed all we need to create a working ethical model that accommodates all the nuance of modern day role-playing—we just need to excise “Good” and “Evil” from the equation (just as Gygax originally conceived), and apply some real ethical philosophy to the game material.
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Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
My philosophy professor Dr. Hall loved the Socratic method. He wielded it against us like some kind of unflappable master fencer, his wit sharper than all ours combined, and his true intentions impenetrable to discovery. Early in the semester, he began ask us, one by one, whether we agreed with the “modern philosophers” that all our actions were determined by self-interest, or whether we sided with the “ancients” that it matters as much what we believe and intend as what we do when we try to live “the good life.” When it became my turn, it was still unclear to me what we meant by “good” in “the good life”—it seemed to me that we had taken this meaning for granted, and so I asked him how we define “good” in ethics, and he said: “The meaning of ‘good’ in morality is straightforward. When we say we are doing something morally ‘good,’ we are acting with a genuine concern for the welfare of others.”
