Personalities in the Gaming Industry and Politics

[John Morrow]

I didn't mean you shouldn't boycott their products or refuse to employ them. I do mean that you as the state authority shouldn't censor their website and/or punish them unless they're inciting actual crimes (like murder). If you're a board moderator you shouldn't normally censor links to their website either, but I can see a case for removing links to holocaust-denial or pro-pedophilia websites given that those may be criminal in themselves (certainly in eg France or Germany holocaust-denial is prosecutable), the other two also if they're also illegal somewhere.

Let me see if I understand you correctly. You don't think that a state authority should censor a web site but you do think that web sites should comply with state authorities when they do censor websites without batting an eyelash?

 

[Storm Raven]

Let me see if I understand you correctly. You don't think that a state authority should censor a web site but you do think that web sites should comply with state authorities when they do censor websites without batting an eyelash?

I would think that private organizations should do what they believe is appropriate with their property, including censoring viewpoints they don't like, don't want to be associated with, don't want to promote, or simply for no reason at all.

 

[nothing to see here]

If the polling process captures it. The few polls that I've taken of the sort that get reported in the press generally asked "approve" or "disapprove" questions but never asked why. They can't capture what they don't ask. Perhaps some polls do capture more information like that (and I suspect that the internal polls of various political parties do) but it almost never gets reported in the mainstream if they do.

I don't know if you're a computer guy, but if this issue interests you, you might want to check out:

http://www.spss.com/

They are the premier manufacturers of commercial data processing software. Expensive as hell though.

Sometimes you, interestingly enough, CAN capture what you don't ask. If 60% of people support Candidate A and only 30% support Candidate B...while 70% of the people, in the same survey, are pro-widget while 30% are anti widget...you're first inclination, as candidate B would be to get more pro-widget. If however, you cross-tabulate and find that 90% of people who are pro-widget voters support your opponent, while 50% of anti-widget voters are undecided voters...it actually pays to slant towards an "anti-widget" position.

You mix and match questions and answers and get all kinds of weird and wonderful results. It really is a lot of fun.

 

[John Morrow]

This is bizarre. I dunno where you went to school, but every university I've attended has been all about "rational debate [and] discourse," not to mention "introduction to new and varied" people and ideas.

Have you ever tried to argue for a politically conservative idea in a college classroom? Let's just say that I've personally encountered plenty of students and professors who weren't "all about" rational debate and discourse and didn't want to be introduced to new and varied people and ideas and I've read about plenty more specific examples. It would be fair to point out that many of the worst abuses happen in basic writing classes taught by overzealous TAs without tenure but it would also be fair to point out that most colleges require incoming freshmen to take those classes. And as someone with an English degree asked by other students to help them pass their basic writing class after repeated failures, my advise was invariably less about actually improving their writing or thinking and was more some variation on the theme, "Figure out what the professor wants to see and give it to them." It always worked.

Or one could say that tenure results in the freedom to express ideas that may very well be unpopular with a university's administration. You know, kinda like how lifetime tenure is designed to grant the same freedom to the federal judiciary?

As you'll also notice with the judiciary, such protection only shifts the battle lines to controlling who gets to join the club and it makes that control immensely important. That's why the approval of federal judges has been consuming the Senate to a degree that even many legal scholars who lean to the left are starting to consider it unhealthy. And in the case of colleges and tenure, it's like letting the federal judiciary pick its own new members. Do you really think that would be a good thing?

I should also point out that FDR managed to find a quite effective way to force the Supreme Court to do what he wanted. (Do a Google search on the quoted phrase "a switch in time saves nine" if you don't know what I mean.)

 

[John Morrow]

Sometimes you, interestingly enough, CAN capture what you don't ask.

Ah. Gotcha. If you have the raw data, you can draw other conclusions. But why doesn't the press report more analyses like that? Or better yet, why don't they just capture that information when they do the polling?

 

[John Morrow]

I would think that private organizations should do what they believe is appropriate with their property, including censoring viewpoints they don't like, don't want to be associated with, don't want to promote, or simply for no reason at all.

Oh, I agree. But that wasn't the point I was trying to make. I was trying to square the statement "I do mean that you as the state authority shouldn't censor their website and/or punish them unless they're inciting actual crimes (like murder)." with the statement, "If you're a board moderator you shouldn't normally censor links to their website either, but I can see a case for removing links to holocaust-denial or pro-pedophilia websites given that those may be criminal in themselves (certainly in eg France or Germany holocaust-denial is prosecutable), the other two also if they're also illegal somewhere." In other words, France and Germany are doing exactly what the first sentence claims shouldn't be done but it makes sense for web sites to comply with their restrictions.

 

[eyebeams]

I certainly wouldn't dare match up my philosophical credentials against yours...and yes you are quite right to rephrase my use of 'objectivism' to empiricism (I just find objectivism a more intuitive word to somebody with a non-philosophy background).

I understand, but you have to look at how different Randing Objectivism is from empiricism.

Ad for your somewhat spirited (if ironic) defence postmodernism -- I would argue that my central point -- that the one side in this debate believes there are objective moral standards outside of context, the other doesn't. But then again my readings of Derrida are limited and Foccault, admittedly, nonexistant.

A moral argument is somewhat different. The empiricist/postmodern conflict is really between whether the choices we make in framing a moral argument, or the moral arguments we choose to have exist prior to what influences us to make them in the first place, and what weight that gives to the answers. So an empirical moral argument may be consistent, but the postmodernist would ask if it's actually relevant.

As for your charge of my pretentiousness -- my only response is that "you can't please everybody"...so please my apologies if my hazy recollections of my philosophy education offend your scholarly sensibilities.

There's nothing wrong with what you said per se; I just feel you're ascribing the wrong labels. It is possible to approach an argument in a nihilistic fashion so that nothing means anything, and this *is* a problem.

Now, to apply it to this thread:

So somebody looked at Erik Mona's blog and found that there was stuff other than game design. So:

*Is that really his problem? Did he promise to have an apolitical online presence, or divorce his views from gaming content?

*Is this a designer-side issue, when they do not choose what fans do and don't want to see in designers' blogs?

*Is this actually relevant outside of the small number of people who can't bring themselves to read the gaming parts of the blog because there might be politics?

*Are the supposed problems being brought up real problems, or theoretical ones? Are they a way of making an issue bigger than: "I personally don't like gaming and political content in the same blog," or somesuch?

* Considering the above, what was the content of this thread constructed in the generalizing, problematic tone it now has?

 

[Kanegrundar]

This is bizarre. I dunno where you went to school, but every university I've attended has been all about "rational debate [and] discourse," not to mention "introduction to new and varied" people and ideas.

I went to a state college and majored in Social Science with an emphasis on Education. I got several poor grades primarily because I didn't hold true to their political leanings. After 3 years of simply swallowing my pride and giving the professors what they wanted, I stood up for my beliefs and was promptly dealt with. Yeah, real open-minded and rational debate going on there... Sadly, my brother is going through the same thing now at a different college in North Dakota...

Kane

 

[eyebeams]

I would think that private organizations should do what they believe is appropriate with their property, including censoring viewpoints they don't like, don't want to be associated with, don't want to promote, or simply for no reason at all.

Everybody likes the part of On Liberty where you're told you can do what you want; nobody likes the part where he says you can still be told how dumb you are for doing something dumb anyway.

In short, propriety is not a moral defense, and the use of "should" in this context is deeply mistaken. Private organizations and people *may* do anything they like, but this does not mean they *ought* to make any decision they like. In the US, you may put up idiotic racist content on your website, but it's still dumb. You may direct your corporation to use its leverage against certain points of view with its media properties, but your ownership does not magically translate into moral absolution.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Okay, I'm an outsider to what seems to be largely a US debate, but it does seem that politics in the US is now so polarised that people don't distinguish between reasonably held views other than their own, and views that are totally unacceptable.

In other words, I think it's reasonable to refuse to purchase goods or services from someone who holds views that you consider to be totally unacceptable. For instance, if I found out that someone was a hard core white supremist racist who thought that the Holocaust had been a good thing - then I'm sure as hell not going to buy any of his products.

But to not buy someone's book merely because they vote for a party (a totally democratic party) other than the one you vote for - that's not only daft, but actually distructive to democracy. You shouldn't find it offensive that someone votes for a party other than your own. That's democracy. Finding out that someone's a Democrat when you're a Republican (or vice versa) should not qualify as something that "offends you" or prevents you buying their book.