Episode 64 – Monster Ethics (with Dom Ford)

Ethics and Video Games Podcast

The monsters we see in video games are usually antagonists that we destroy without remorse. But what is a monster and are there ethical questions that arise in relation to how they’re represented? In what ways can monsters utilize racist and sexist tropes in harmful ways? Can we treat a type of monsters as a race of pure evil? And is there anything that monsters might do that is beyond the pale? We chat with Dom Ford about Monster Ethics!

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Our guest for this episode is Dom Ford - a freshly-minted PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His dissertation puts forward a method for understanding games through mythology, arguing that gameworlds instantiate particular models for understanding the world which the player then inhabits. He also works with conceptions of history and nostalgia in games and depictions of monsters.

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Hosted by Shlomo Sher, Ph.D. and Andy Ashcraft

Production by Carmen Elena Mitchell

Music and graphics by Daniel Sher