Introduction to Part II: Ethics and Play

Abstract

Every sort of human activity and invention is of interest to ethics. Normative theory is the part of ethics which tries to flesh out considerations and arguments about why one should act in a certain way rather than another. And such investigations encounter fresh challenges when faced with the plethora of computer gaming entities and events. Often and to a great extent, this is more broadly due to the fact that applying old regimes to new domains, or old tools to new machines, always requires some effort. But it may also be partly because there is something in the encountered phenomenon which is substantially new and not quite like anything we have faced before. In such cases, the consequences can still be anything from small scale tinkering to something like an intellectual revolution.