Given the post-structuralist paths traversed during this year’s edition of Video Game Law, it just doesn’t get any more weirdly appropriate then this…Jacques Derrida’s philosophy explained through video game graphics. Surreal.
jon
Check out theVideos of Interest to Law 423 on YouTube 
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Video Game Law (423B) Open Badge Pathways | Open Badges
Video Game Law (423B) Open Badge Pathways | Open Badges
Above is a link to a nice interim report on our badges experiment by Erin Fields of UBC Library. Have compiled it so some further data should be up relatively soon.
jon
Les Simerables | Jacobin
Click on the link above to read an amazing piece from Jacobin magazine about the values, judgments and worldview expressed through the SimCity series of games. More evidence that all art is political, consciously or not.
jon
News of the Week; December 3, 2014
GAMES
1. Nintendo and Philips settle patent dispute
3. Nintendo Patents Game Boy Emulation For Use In Mobile Devices, In-Flight Entertainment
4. Target Australia removes GTA V from sale following petition
5. Let’s Talk About Ethics In Games Journalism! (Zoe Quinn)
+ The Gaming Industry’s Greatest Adversary Is Just Getting Started
+ New Feminist Frequency Video Tackles Male Privilege in Gaming
+ Video Game Reviewer Is Contacting the Mothers of Her Online Harassers
6. The Rise of Game Neuroeconomics
7. Valve launches Steam Broadcasting
8. EA not looking for big acquisitions
9. Xbox’s Japan chief resigns after bleak Xbox One sales
10. Berlin’s Ad2games raises $9 million
11. Sony backs away from FIFA sponsorship
12. ‘I Am Bread’ Is the Weirdest Video Game of 2014
13. Designing an Alien Alphabet
14. Tate Worlds: Art Reimagined for Minecraft
DIGITAL
15. The Uncertain Scope of the Public Performance Right after Aereo (Matthew Sag)
16. What Happens When Spies Can Eavesdrop on Any Conversation?
17. EU Data Protection Authority Adopts Guidelines On The Implementation Of The Right To Be Forgotten
18. Enter the Matrix: The rise of brain-computer interfaces
19. Is Internet Addiction a Real Thing?
20. Putting out a fire: inappropriate tweets result in unpaid suspension for firefighter
21. “Net Neutrality”:Why are the Bad Guys So Much Better at Naming Things?
+ AT&T Has To Walk Back Its Empty Bluff About Freezing Fiber Deployment Because Of Title II
+ A World Without Net Neutrality Already Exists
22. Media and Internet Concentration in Canada, 1984-2013
CONSTRAINTS
24. Free Speech, Facebook and Gangsta Rap (Noah Feldman)
+ Supreme Court Chief Justice Quotes Eminem in Weighing What’s a ‘True Threat’ Online
25. How Medium is trying to bring back the web we lost
26. Social media told to simplify terms and conditions
29. China to Send Filmmakers to Countryside for “Ideological Training”
+ No Joke: China’s Broadcasting Authority Bans Puns And Wordplay
jon
Week 13 – 11/26/14: “The Ethical Underpinnings of Video-Games”
Thanks to the always thoughtful Anoop Desai of EA for giving us some remarkable insights into the future of how we may game. For this final week of this years class only videos of my presentation and slides will be available. They are below.
jon
“Road to VR” article about our Oculus Rift class
Just click on the image above.
Some Reddit comments can also be found at: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2n2nqx/vrchat_ubc_law_423b_education_in_vr/ & at http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/2no4ex/vr_chat_used_to_deliver_one_of_the_first/
jon
Video-Blog News of the Week; November 26, 2014
This week marks the end of weekly video-blogs for news of the week. With classes ended will now switch to a monthly format going forward. Corporate interests and their impact on players and consumers is the theme of this episode.
jon
News of the Week; November 26, 2014
GAMES
1. Activision Blizzard Settles With Shareholders Over Vivendi Stock Repurchase Plan
3. FTC Hammers Sony For Misleading Advertising
5. ‘GamerGate’ and Gendered Hate Speech (Oxford Human Rights Hub)
+ Andrew Eisen Talks About Rating Sexism in Games Today on HuffPo Live
6. EA named one of the best places for LGBT equality
7. Boston Man Sentenced for Attempted Murder of UK Girlfriend He Met in ‘RuneScape’
8. Report: Several Counter-Strike: Go Pro Players Banned for Cheating
9. Far Cry 4 Publishers Messing With Pirates By Getting Them To Admit They Are Pirates
11. App Store removes “Free” from game descriptions
12. Right of Publicity in Video Games – How You Can Legally Include a Celebrity in Your Game
13. Latest ‘World of Warcraft’ Expansion Puts Subscriber Numbers Up Over 10 Million
14. Call of Duty series tops $10 billion in revenue
15. Bohemian Killing Explores Our Muddy Legal Systems
16. How Video Games Are Exploring Our Fear of Police Militarization
17. YouTube Briefly Shuts Down Blizzard’s Own YouTube Channel For Copyright Infringement
18. Rebooting the Legacy of a Woman Who Made Video Games for Girls
19. Why modern music owes a big debt to Japanese video games
20. The ‘Freemium’ Model Is Brilliant, But It’s Ruining My Life
21. Indies, don’t sell shares in your company – Jon Hare
DIGITAL
22. ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Should Apply Worldwide, E.U. Panel Says
24. Digital Privacy Is “The New Frontier Of Human Rights”
25. Censoring the Web Isn’t the Solution to Terrorism or Counterfeiting. It’s the Problem. (EFF)
27. Note to future self: A bid to put encrypted data into a kind of time capsule gets a kick-start
+ Belfast police to sue for all Boston College tapes
28. New Internet Monitor Report: “The Tightening Web of Russian Internet Regulation”
29. Ireland Asks EU To Support Microsoft In Legal Battle Involving Competing Jurisdictions
30. New Documents Show Thousands of Unreported Wiretaps by Canadian Cops
31. The CIA’s Review Of Glenn Greenwald’s Snowden Book Is Hilarious
32. EFF Announces ‘Let’s Encrypt’
33. ISO 27018 – Data Protection Standards for the Cloud
34. How to Explain Net Neutrality to Your Relatives: A Thanksgiving Guide
37. Netflix, Facebook, Twitter Voice Support for Google in ‘Innocence of Muslims’ Case
38. Streaming TV site Aereo files for bankruptcy, will reorganize
39. Whitney Wolfe, Other Former Tinder Employees To Launch Direct Competitor Called Bumble
41. Algorithms Are Great and All, But They Can Also Ruin Lives
42. Is car technology creating stupid drivers?
CONSTRAINTS
43. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use
44. Voltaire on the Perils of Censorship, the Freedom of the Press, and the Rewards of Reading
45. Art, Activism, and CCTV: Notes from a talk at the Digital Media Conference in Boston 10/26/2013
46. Revenue Streams: Is Spotify the music industry’s friend or its foe?
+ Spotify Doesn’t Hurt Artists: My Band Would Be Nowhere Without It
47. Why Sony’s deal to collect royalties directly from SiriusXM could be terrible news for musicians
48. Making Authorship Thrive in the Digital Age
50. Can An Algorithm Be Creative?
51. Mattel Pulls Sexist Barbie Book “I Can Be A Computer Engineer” Off Amazon
+ Dislike That Computer Engineer Barbie Book? This Tool Lets You Rewrite It
52. Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI: The rapid evolution of a wordless tongue.
53. How should television be defined nowadays?
jon
Internetting While Female: A Conversation with Anita Sarkeesian, Carolyn Petit & Katherine Cross
As #gamergate seems to be receding, here is an excellent starting point for further reflection and legitimate research. It is a panel discussion that pretty well exclusively talks about games and games culture from GaymerX2 earlier this year. It covers myriad subjects associated with sexism in games and with many of those who created a cottage industry of attack feminist critiques of games and the games industry.
jon
Hybrid Thinking
My takeaway from this TED presentation is that one day we will have the opportunity/technology to have Google or some other internet search engine planted directly into our brain. In the context of videogame law and the scheme of the course, I have a couple questions and thoughts. Will the internet be able to track what I think? We all know that the internet tracks what we search and view now. But if there is a little internet search engine planted in our brains will the information we “search” be recorded? I would assume most likely not. But if we take “hybrid thinking” and incorporate gaming into the mix, what would the outcome be then? Say we strap ourselves into an Oculus Rift and link up with our “hybrid thinking” technology, following this we go on to play a seemingly real world game of candy crush. We run out of lives and then need to make an in-game purchase, and as we all know those purchase habits are being recorded. Wouldn’t that be considered monitoring and manipulating peoples thoughts?