Tag: reviews

Video Games and Reality

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Philosophy of Business

There is a wonderful article linked to below on the American military operating drones by Graham Flanagan and Chris Panella

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-army-captain-says-top-drone-pilots-are-video-gamers-2025-8

Soldiers who regularly play video games are transferring those skills to flying drones, making them top pilots, a US Army captain told Business Insider.

Top Pilots!

Wow. When I was playing Pong in the early 1970’s, the idea that a video gamer might have a useful skill was very far fetched.

And yet here we are. Video games using their skills to defend the nation. Not a movie, not a cartoon but solid reality.

Here let quote some more from the article linked to above:

Transferable skills include the kind of hand-eye coordination that a gamer would have from playing with a controller and looking at a screen, which isn’t unlike flying a drone via a monitor or operating a first-person-view drone. The latter requires pilots to wear goggles similar to many of the commercially available virtual reality/augmented reality headsets. These present the world from the perspective of the camera on the drone.

Other skills include the ability to multitask, recognize patterns, maintain situational awareness, and comfortably interact with digital interfaces. Some studies have also shown that gamers have quicker reaction times and do well making decisions under pressure, potentially critical in high-stakes drone warfare.

So, the skills developed playing video games have direct practical benefits. What was once generally considered a waste of time is now in the right hands a valuable skill.

What are the business ethics implications?

At one time, it was revered wisdom that video gaming was an addictive habit that led nowhere and there was an implication that those who sold the games and wrote them were preying on the childish and weak minded among us.

That belief system, the idea that video games are an addictive and poisonous waste of time is still very much with us. I did a search on the Internet using Bing and got many, many sites claiming just that. Then I did a search on You Tube and got quite the variety of acidic anti-gaming sites that allege a dizzying variety of just awful consequences for playing these games.

(As a matter of honest disclosure, I regularly play Skyrim, Skyrim Special Edition, Fallout 4 and Civilization Five. I don’t just play them, I add online content to change the nature and form of the game. I extensively mod the first three and currently have 238 active mods on Fallout 4. It doesn’t very much look like the same game.)

Like many other elements in our culture particularly those continually changed by an evolving technology, what games are and what they mean is subject to change.

I think many individuals, both players and observers, are stuck at some point in the past.

Gaming is now divided in a wide variety of categories. There is the online novel where you live in a story and try to live it in the best way possible. The Japanese seem to write a lot of these. There is a long history of shooter games which hearken back to the very beginnings of video games, that is, the arcade machines. There are strategy games like the huge collection of Sid Meier’s Civilization games, as well as tactical and historical versions by the many copycats. And I could go on for some time, but that is another and much longer essay. The implications of this are simple, “Yes, video games can have harmful effects but they are also and often learning devices that provide real and substantial entertainment and sometimes skills.”

To further my teaching I have toyed for years with the idea of taking a gaming engine like the one in the Fallout series and writing a script in which a person searches the community for a business to build, a restaurant, a repair shop, a furniture store, etc., then has to find a location and financing, then they seek customers and eventually a positive monetary balance and a place in the community. I was planning on using real legal documents, businesses modeled on modern franchises and a litany of common business problems from employment difficulties to natural disaster to keep the story and give the flavor of reality to the game. I am firmly convinced this is how we will teach the basic concepts of business law and contracts in the near future.

In conclusion, video game skills are useful and transferable in the right circumstance. There are not too many of them right now. But technology is pushing us toward more gaming and more applications. A healthy amount of gaming might lead one to gainful employment or just useful skills.

You might get online and look at the incredible selection of video games and see if there is something that will help you build some skills or just some positive entertainment. It is a big world.

Doctor Who Ratings Disaster

On By southwerkIn business ethics

The last three Doctor Who episodes are some of the lowest rated shows in the entire history of the franchise. That is in all of the sixty years of this formerly successful show. This horrible performance is not surprising considering we went from science fiction to a promotional vehicle for alternate life styles. That’s not Doctor Who.

How about Rotten Tomatoes? A 95% score for the critics and 28% from the audience. When transgender themes are significant in a program, the critics find this novel and worthy of their approval. It’s not novel anymore and dramatic lecturing about how wonderful these lifestyles are does not make for good story telling. The intellectual bankruptcy of modern criticism is everywhere evident and any intelligent human being will rely on the audience reaction.

What should be done? The British should fire everyone and I mean everyone. Fire the showrunner, the actors, the producers, everybody, find the guy the that sweeps up at night, fire him too.

And then wait for the memory of this “entertainment” to diminish in the public mind. At least five or six years until some innocent can say “Whatever happened to Doctor Who?” And then let’s find a new actor to play the doctor, an experienced actor with gravitas and a good track record in dealing with the public (someone who doesn’t tell the audience to “touch grass”). Maybe even someone who performed Shakespeare?

Then above all we have to find good writers who know and love science fiction — and who intend to write science fiction stories that motivate good acting and entertainment. It could celebrate heroism, good deeds and honor. It could tell coherent stories that are each uniquely interesting while being related to the development of the whole. Quality writing for a change.

And if you want a quality show, no one and I mean, no one gets hired because they’re female, lesbian, bisexual or just plain nuts. Hiring is based solely on merit and if the person with merit is a white male, well, we’ll manage to deal with it.

Let’s have a Doctor Who that celebrates its tradition of the human race confronted with the vastness and complexity of space. Let’s see adventure without an unhealthy fascination and advocacy of alternate lifestyles.

James Pilant

Jesse Watters Can’t Count or Can He?

On By southwerkIn business ethics

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nearly-choked-coffee-fox-news-201830195.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jesse-watters-math-backfires_n_661ced3ce4b0f709554b39b4

Actually it may just be that he doesn’t want to. In his job as a “Newsman,” he wanted to overstate the effect of the $20 an hour California has mandated for fast food workers in some sectors. So, he implied that a single worker would make a 100,000 dollars a year on that salary. Surprisingly there was someone there who correctly stated the actual income.

So, he than claimed that a couple working fast food would earn a 100,000 dollars a year, only to once again be corrected.. Watters found the real figure of 40,000 dollars to be horribly unfair. I’m less sure about this. Let me quote a paragraph from the article:

Someone making $40,000 a year in California brings home about $32,000 after taxes, or about $2,666 a month. Meanwhile, according to Zillow, the state’s median rent sits at $2,790 a month. 

While he may believe that these workers are living lives of unearned luxury, the dollars amounts seem much less impressive against the cost of living and taxes.

Middle and lower class wages have been stagnant for about thirty-five years and the current minimum wage is pitiful. Yet, Watters and Fox News wants to portray these workers as the undeserving while portraying the owners of these huge chains as poor victims of state overreach. But the industry has been recording record profits over the last several years.

I think what the financial press is troubled most by is the empowerment and electoral clout of these workers being effective. In the past wage increases, like those in Washington State have not proven to be the disastert predicted.

And the simple fact is – paying working American a decent salary is a key element of economic growth and simple fairness.

James Alan Pilant

The Myth of Morality (via Patrick Nathan)

On By southwerkIn business ethics3 Comments

I found this an interesting review with many references to morality. Take this quote below –

Everyone agrees that The Pale King enshrines boredom. What has been glossed over, however, is how fiercely and unrepentantly American these pages are. Yes, the book expounds upon the marvels of boredom and the “heroic” nature of doing a quiet but necessary task without audience or recognition, but juxtaposed are endless descriptions of bureaucracies, American culture at its most dysfunctional, and even extended Platonian dialogues about the decline of American society, complete with terms that never fail to surface in today’s news: “liberal individualism,” “corporations,” “conservatives,” “founding fathers,” “consumer capitalism,” etc. “Americans are crazy,” one character remarks to another: “We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights but not our responsibilities.” The selfishness described here again harkens back to Wallace’s speech, in which he revealed that our “natural, hardwired default setting” is to be “deeply and literally self-centered.”

If the reference is to our ethical and moral responsibility, I quite agree. However, the “hard wired” setting to be deeply and literally self centered, is ridiculous, we are just as hard wired to be cooperative and self sacrificing. That being deeply and literally self centered is an American doctrine used to justify cruel and immoral policies and actions. If humans are self centered monsters salivating after every last moment of pleasure and every conceivable possession, than we can justify every kind of lie and cruelty in the name of social control.

Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed the review and I would like you to read it.

James Pilant

My thanks to Patrick Nathan

The Myth of Morality In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace was invited to give a commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College. Captivating, inquisitive, and in no way didactic, Wallace unveiled to them the oncoming drudgery of adult life and all its routines—certainly nothing an ambitious twenty-two year old wants to hear. But Wallace offered an alternative to mental and emotional atrophy. The liberal arts degree, he said, not only teaches us how to think … Read More

via Patrick Nathan