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17 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 23 DECEMBER 2018 INTERVIEW game out there by yourself, you definitely can; but if you want to use the big channels through which games are curated and marketed – like Steam or Gog – you need to share revenue. And right now, the ratios are kind of brutal, to be honest. Thirty percent goes to the in- frastructure owners, and 70% to the developer. But there are independent grassroot mar- ketplaces that offer ratios of 90/10%, trying to encourage the more 'indie' community of developers. And again, there's a political dimension to it: it ties in with arguments in favour of autonomy, self-expression, and so on. On the subject of 'community': there is also a growing international community of gamers out there, as evidenced even by the hugely successful 'Esports Festival' held in Malta recently. The Institute of Digital Gaming also organises its own events, such as the upcoming 'Malta Global Game Jam', to encourage people to make their own games. How much of a 'techy' do you have to be, to get involved in this community? How much does it all depend on programming skills, or knowing how to script code? Not much at all. It's not just a community of game-devel- opers; it's also a community of gamers, game designers, game journalists, game critics, game reviewers, and just people who are interested in gaming in gen- eral. There are video-bloggers, for instance, who post videos of themselves playing games. Or who mod existing games, and re-propose them with new content. But even within game development itself: you might have someone who is in- terested in scripting, but uses only middle-ware software... like myself. I'm only a low-level programmer. The full range of this community is incredibly broad, however: there are even 'Esport commentators', provid- ing running commentary in gaming events just like in pro- fessional, competitive sports. It's a community of all kinds of different people, and perhaps the only thing that brings them all together is a shared interest in this playful, explorative and exciting digital medium. So no, you don't have to be a techy at all. Several students enrolled in our course, for instance, have a background in philosophy. Others are more technical; but they can talk to each other; they can work together. There is common interest… You yourself specialised in Philosophy of Computer Games. Is there a natural convergence between philosophy and digital gaming? To give a practical example: MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, or single- player RPGs like Skyrim or Morrowind, immerse players in a huge, artificially created 'universes', full of cultural reference-points that were previously the domain of classic fantasy and science fiction. Will future generations be exposed to the great philosophical questions about the real universe, through the virtual universes of digital gaming? Right now, I am reading a book by a colleague of mine [Gerald Farca] called 'Playing Dystopia', about how dysto- pias – and other literary genres – can be experienced interac- tively; and how the experience changes through the different media. Through gaming, we are shaping minds in different ways: with different rhetoric, and different aesthetic possi- bilities. You mentioned Skyrim and WOW – Bethesda and Blizzard productions – and I collaborate with those and oth- er developers, as I also teach in California over the summer. From my own experience I can tell you that there is not only an interest, but also the capability of translating – or re-framing – some of the messages of world literature into those digital universes; to give rise to new forms of mythological or philo- sophical communications in a different medium. And already there is a good deal of inter- connectivity between gaming and other media: games which are influenced by movies or TV-series, or make references to classic literary texts… It works the other way round, too. Much of contemporary cinema owes its origins to video games: the recent WOW movie being a case in point… There is cultural cross-pol- lination going on, and this is very much discussed within the academic community. The next Digital Game Research Conference – which is the larg- est in its field – will be about the 'ludomix' in Japan. If you take Japan as a case study, the mix of multimedia there works more like an ecosystem, than a war for dominance of the digi- tal medium over others. It is a case of one medium feeding off the other: and this suggests that we are already starting to look at 'culture' as a multi-modal, multi-medium phenomenon. Coming back to your earlier question: digital gaming may or may not be the dominant cultural medium in future; but even in the present, it is already something that is dangerous – or at best retrograde – to ig- nore. Speaking of danger: not everyone shares the same enthusiasm for digital gaming. Parents complain about the time their children spend glued to their X-Boxes and Playstations. Gaming addiction is now a recognised psychological condition. There are even possible health and mobility concerns: are the hours we spend 'pointing and clicking' causing posture problems? Is the lack of exercise harming our health? Etc, etc. How much do these concerns affect the game development process? These issues are all justifi- able causes for concern. Peo- ple can claim as much as they want that technology is posi- tive or beneficial to us; but if there is a lesson to be learnt from the philosophy of tech- nology, it is that technologies hardly ever do what we want them to do. They might give us things, but they can also take things away. Coming back to Marshall MacLuhan: he calls technology an 'extension' of man – in the sense that it ena- bles faculties that were either undeveloped, or non-existent before – but also an 'amputa- tion' of certain other faculties. New technologies may open up brave new worlds for us to explore; but they can also cut out some aspects of what it previously meant to be human. This is true of all technolo- gies, incidentally, not just the digital revolution. With tech- nological innovation, we also create new opportunities for dissatisfaction, discontent and incapability. In the case of vir- tual reality, the obvious danger is a potential solipsism, or de- tachment from one's biological and social surroundings. It is something that science fiction has been warning us about for the past 60 or 70 years. So yes, we should always be concerned about technology. And this one in particular has its own poten- tially tragic dimensions. A deep humanistic concern there- fore has to also be part of this package. This may be another reason why this world has so much appeal to philosophers, academics and scholars. It has been argued that long- term exposure to the patterns of gameplay may even have an impact on how we think and interact in the real world. We might tend to start applying the same algorithms and routines we recognise in game worlds, to real life situations. Are video games having this effect? Do they control the player as much as, if not more, the player controls the game? There is a lot of literature about that too. Books like 'The Shallows' by Nicholas Carr, or 'What is Bad for you is Good for you' by Stephen Johnson, as well as several published stud- ies, claim that digital technolo- gies like television, the Internet and gaming are changing us in profound cognitive, behav- ioural ways. And this is not new either: in the Neolithic Age, when people first started planting crops according to the season, and having to think longer in advance than ever before… our brain structure changed. Our posture changed. Our size changed. Even the way we bore children changed. Digital technology is another instance where we become ex- tensions of our own inventions. For example, there are studies measuring the speed and spa- tial thinking aspect of intel- ligence – as opposed to con- centration, long-term memory, etc. – which suggest that peo- ple are actually becoming more intelligent in those areas. But it's a very specific type of in- telligence we are gaining. And there is a trade-off. Inevitably, we will also lose something in the process, too. New technologies may open up brave new worlds for us to explore; but they can also cut out some aspects of what it previously meant to be human PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES BIANCHI