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[Rolan7]

Nobody is positively claiming that the game is actually conscious.  The point I have been trying to make for a long time, is that the question is irrelevant.  If it appears that you are doing wrong to a conscious being, then that is wrong even if no actual wrong is really being done to anyone.  The reason I support this idea is that it works better than the alternative because it evades the need to answer ultimately unanswerable questions about what is in fact conscious.

Wrong for one's own mental health, right?
That's a pretty contentious claim.  From the studies I've seen, violent video games reduce actual violence.  Presumably they work like an outlet, rather than training.

But maaaybe that's only true when players have the emotional maturity to separate fact from fiction.  I've gotten too immersed in certain games on several occasions, to the point that I actually felt bad about making amoral choices.  That's a learning experience for *me*, since I feel bad and can examine why.  But what if I was that immersed, did an amoral thing, and didn't feel bad?  Got rewarded, even?  We do explicitly use games to teach good behaviors and train skills.

I guess what I'm saying (by "just asking questions") is that I agree with keeping certain games out of the hands of kids too young to, you know, know what death is.

[KittyTac]

Nobody is positively claiming that the game is actually conscious.  The point I have been trying to make for a long time, is that the question is irrelevant.  If it appears that you are doing wrong to a conscious being, then that is wrong even if no actual wrong is really being done to anyone.  The reason I support this idea is that it works better than the alternative because it evades the need to answer ultimately unanswerable questions about what is in fact conscious.

Wrong for one's own mental health, right?
That's a pretty contentious claim.  From the studies I've seen, violent video games reduce actual violence.  Presumably they work like an outlet, rather than training.

But maaaybe that's only true when players have the emotional maturity to separate fact from fiction.  I've gotten too immersed in certain games on several occasions, to the point that I actually felt bad about making amoral choices.  That's a learning experience for *me*, since I feel bad and can examine why.  But what if I was that immersed, did an amoral thing, and didn't feel bad?  Got rewarded, even?  We do explicitly use games to teach good behaviors and train skills.

I guess what I'm saying (by "just asking questions") is that I agree with keeping certain games out of the hands of kids too young to, you know, know what death is.

Nope! He meant morally wrong, like killing an actual human being.

[strainer]

violent video games reduce actual violence

Depends, first person shooters are used in military training to make shooting reflexive, overriding the powerful instinct to worry and delay over lethal action that was discovered caused most of the soldiers in WW2 to be effectively incapable of aiming and shooting at each other. Many of the big combat themed games and films are given assistance from arms industry because they are useful for recruiting and popularising arms spending and research. No such assistance for the gritty indie adventure This War of Mine

I expect the moral worth or cost of playing a game depends ultimately on how you play it, and the character of the game itself rests on how/if it encourages people to play it in certain aways. DF is an open book in this respect, colorful and chaotic.

dwarves are not appearances of sentient beings

Zach and Tarn have developed them to be as convincingly life like as possible. Its not possible to make them completely convincing, but they wouldn't appear or act anything like mystical creatures if not for the long and hard efforts to make them so. With a little imaginative license we can empathize with them, or else the game is just like a matrix screensaver. They are fictions, their purpose is to appear to live a story.

[scourge728]

I assume that military training shooters are different than normal fps, or atleast, from team fortress 2 and the like

[KittyTac]

dwarves are not appearances of sentient beings

Zach and Tarn have developed them to be as convincingly life like as possible. Its not possible to make them completely convincing, but they wouldn't appear or act anything like mystical creatures if not for the long and hard efforts to make them so. With a little imaginative license we can empathize with them, or else the game is just like a matrix screensaver. They are fictions, their purpose is to appear to live a story.

They are, in actuality, a letter on the screen. By that logic, using the backspace button would be genocide.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

The closest thing Bay12 has to a flamewar is an argument over philosophy that slowly transitioned to an argument about quantum physics.

Or perhaps the argument over relativity in your Asteroid game.

[Eschar]

So:
Dwarves are not sentient; however, because of the Eliza effect, does harm done to a DF character reflect/modify one's real-life view of violence?

My gut feeling is no; at the moment, though, I would be hard pressed to say why. Could someone try to?

[KittyTac]

So:
Dwarves are not sentient; however, because of the Eliza effect, does harm done to a DF character reflect/modify one's real-life view of violence?

My gut feeling is no; at the moment, though, I would be hard pressed to say why. Could someone try to?

I would probably feel something when killing a human. But not a DF human or dwarf.

[George_Chickens]

I'm not so sure. People tend to humanize and personify anything, but they are still fully aware that they do not exist and have a mental disconnect that prevents them from feeling the way they would if they were fully human and sentient.

[KittyTac]

I'm not so sure. People tend to humanize and personify anything, but they are still fully aware that they do not exist and have a mental disconnect that prevents them from feeling the way they would if they were fully human and sentient.

I don't, however. I do not grow attached to DF characters. But I do get attached to other humans.

[Reelya]

Kids traditionally played with toy soldiers and dolls and action figures and stuff, so I think they see little computer people as being in the same class of things as that. We need to expand our scope a bit and look at all forms of play if we're to understand how people relate to this particular form of play. Then we can use intuitions from other areas to inform this new one.

[KittyTac]

Yeah, a 3 year old girl ripping off a doll's head probably does NOT mean that she would do that to her brother.

[GoblinCookie]

That is... not accurate in the slightest, and still not what's being said at all. It's about using the same math, dammit. That's it. Full stop. Period. There's nothing beyond that. No additional assumptions, no hypotheticals, nothing. "The math we use to analyze quantum physics also happens to be good at analyzing consciousness". Just because two things happen to be analyzed using the same mathematics does not mean that one is necessarily required in the mechanics of the other- that's a complete failure on understanding how math works. That's like arguing that everything that operates on an inverse-square law must be the same physical mechanic.

If two things are best described using the exact same models, it rather strengthens a claim that they are the same thing. 

Wrong for one's own mental health, right?
That's a pretty contentious claim.  From the studies I've seen, violent video games reduce actual violence.  Presumably they work like an outlet, rather than training.

But maaaybe that's only true when players have the emotional maturity to separate fact from fiction.  I've gotten too immersed in certain games on several occasions, to the point that I actually felt bad about making amoral choices.  That's a learning experience for *me*, since I feel bad and can examine why.  But what if I was that immersed, did an amoral thing, and didn't feel bad?  Got rewarded, even?  We do explicitly use games to teach good behaviors and train skills.

I guess what I'm saying (by "just asking questions") is that I agree with keeping certain games out of the hands of kids too young to, you know, know what death is.

The studies says lots of different things, plus you have to conclude there really is no objective definitions to measure, how violent is hitting someone VS stabbing them VS insulting them; what if video games make people less likely to insult them but more likely to kill them, but the base probability of insulting people is far higher to begin with?   We have to think here about what makes sense, if it were not a genuine reason to think that violent media caused violence, then nobody would be motivated to invent one.  If there were however there would be every motivation from the fans of said media to deny there was.  To put it one way only one side has a motivation to be wrong and that is the side arguing there is no relationship.

In any case, I am not arguing wrong in the context of mental health.  I am arguing that it is the appearances that are ethically relevant.  I am wrong if I appear to be doing wrong (to myself), it does not matter if the appearance is illusory.

Yeah, a 3 year old girl ripping off a doll's head probably does NOT mean that she would do that to her brother.

It is reasonable however to assume that a girl that loves to rip off doll's head is more likely to rip off her brother's head than another girl that does not do this. 

[KittyTac]

That is just silly. Any proof of that? Scientific studies? I'm stubborn enough to not get converted by forum philosophers.

[GoblinCookie]

That is just silly. Any proof of that? Scientific studies? I'm stubborn enough to not get converted by forum philosophers.

Scientific studies rarely prove anything in the real world.  It is never possible to isolate anything from anything else in the real-world, hence you won't find science helps you much there.  However if you think it is silly that a person that likes pretend violence, is also likely to be a fan of actual violence then I am not sure what to say, aside from that is silly.