Is the development of some social games unethical?

Jonathan Blow: Video Games and the Human Condition, September 27, 2010

This is a response or supplement to some key points, which Mr. Jonathan Blow delivered in a lecture  at William Marsh Rice University, Texas, United States at 2010 September 27th. He is an independent video game developer and has made the hugely successful video game Braid (XBLA, PSN, PC, Mac OS, Linux). His personal website can be found here and The Atlantic has done a profile of him here.

He is an ardent proponent of ethical game design and has been known to preach about some contemporary games as being immoral due to their mechanics in more than one or two lectures. Examples provided were World of Warcraft, FarmVille, FrontierVille and the like. A lot of scope of this lecture had been delegated to this issue and I would like to add some of my own ideas to this affair of whether such games are ethical.

Untitled / Be pavadinimo 2011

'Untitled'

You can experience this project by clicking here.

Or download it to your hard-drive here. 20 MB.

It is an art piece made in the media of video games. It is an interative virtual installation, which is designed to allow you to have a walk in a virtual urban environment. Currently, that is, during June 2012,  a branch of the Lithuanian National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum is having it on display. 

Drawings on the relation of modern man to classical arts

This is a series of drawings on approximately A1 sized paper with Chinese ink. This series dwells on the relation of modern man to the classical arts.

Is it preposterous for an old man, disfigured by a trauma at an early age during fitness training, to stand strong in a toga? He was an athlete, and still at a senior age he is a champion in his respected field - with such athletic prowess, is this an incompatible concept with the beauty of man, so prevalent in Greek antiquity? Is an adolescent's rejection of classical beauty a childish mockery, which presents a melancholic situation where unbeknownst to them, they disassimilate, supposedly, the deeper and more natural truths about themselves? Or is the heritage of those times, albeit being so highly regarded as even apotheosizing numerous philosophers, artists, mathematicians, without any use to us? If so, we therefore could brutally sever our connection with the beautiful and dramatic part of our history. We could say goodbye to Seneca, Plato, Polykleitos, Phidias and many others...