This volume explores the intersection of virtue theory and video games. By bringing together emerging and established scholars analyzing video game ethics from a virtue-theoretical perspective, this book both fills gaps in the literature and provides a foundation for advancing discussions in the emerging field of video game ethics.
The anthology covers a wide range of topics, offering both abstract analyses of the application of virtue theory to video game ethics and practical insights into the impact of gaming on our relationships, communities, and individual self-conception. Part 1 examines the advantages and limitations of virtue ethics as a normative framework in the context of video games. Part 2 delves into specific virtues and vices that emerge during gameplay, illustrating how virtue theory can enhance our understanding of the ethical dimensions of gaming. Finally, Part 3 addresses the social dimensions of gaming, focusing on the roles of friendship, relationships, and community. It demonstrates how the unique social contexts of gaming provide interesting opportunities for cultivating virtue and vice.
Virtue Theory and Video Games is essential reading for researchers and graduate students working in virtue ethics, philosophy of games, the ethics of technology, game studies, media studies, and communication studies.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: Level Up Your Character
Part 1: The Promise and Perils of a Video Game Virtue Ethics
1. The Particular Aptitude of Virtue for Video Game Ethics
2. Don’t Play That Game: Can Simulations Inculcate Vice?
3. Would the Virtuous Gamer Virtually Murder an NPC?
4. Virtue-al Ethics?
5. XP for the Soul: Video Games, Ethical Learning, and Cognitive Tools
Part 2: Video Game Virtues and Vices
6. “Good Time to Take … Inventory”: The Need for Playfulness in the Good Life
7. Using Video Games to Cultivate Patience
8. Tryhards, Slouches, and the Seemly Gamer
9. Cheap Tactics in Competitive Gaming
10. The Moral Status of Griefing
Part 3: Gaming Friends and Community
11. Befriending Video Game Characters
12. Virtual Friendship Reconsidered: Sociality and User-Friendly Design in Gaming
13. I Thought You Were My Friend: Livestreaming, Friendships of Presence, and the Hazards of Illusory Intimacy
14. Video Games and Mourning
15. How Cosplay Can Cultivate Virtue Index
About the Author :
Sarah C. Malanowski is an instructor of philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. She specializes in the philosophy of cognitive science, biomedical ethics, and the philosophy of games. Her work has appeared in Bioethics, Synthese, Journal of Medicine & Philosophy, and Neuroethics. She is the coauthor, with Nicholas R. Baima, of Why It’s OK to Be a Gamer (Routledge 2024).
Nicholas R. Baima is an associate professor of philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. He works in ancient philosophy, ethical theory, and the philosophy of games. He is the coauthor, with Sarah C. Malanowski, of Why It’s OK to Be a Gamer (Routledge 2024) and the coauthor, with Tyler Paytas, of Plato’s Pragmatism: Rethinking the Relationship Between Ethics and Epistemology (Routledge 2021).
Review :
“This volume opens up an important new area of inquiry. It makes a strong contribution to the broad project of understanding how we should live with electronic media.”
Michael Madary, University of the Pacific, USA
