quidnunc

That was a good episode. It made me want to go and rate the podcast on itunes. Which I did after I sat through 5 minutes of itunes, icloud, quicktime updates

Yes it has been well received as far as I know. The Wikipedia page gives a false impression of legitimate criticism through false he-said-she-said balance. As to the specific question it presupposes some things about media consumption that I don't think is tenable and more likely a product of moral panic. Pinker's book goes on at great length about changes in attitudes flowing from the rights revolutions with data from surveys concomitant with the data showing reductions in violence. The idea that the (out of context) level of media violence figures here is not only contrary to the data regarding the reduction of violence but also the surveys of attitudes which flow from ideas about human (and animal) rights which makes the idea that there is some harm in unrealistic torture scenarios doubtful because we simply think it's wrong as a matter of human rights. These hypothetical harm scenarios tend to rely on a (formal or informal) passive model of consumption where mere exposure is enough to alter attitudes and "behavioral scripts" that are not only simplistic but also resting on blank slate assumptions about human nature. The ticking time bomb scenario in particular is a thought experiment which is presented in such a way to violate balance through a large disparity in harm which supposedly militates against the normal balance of human rights. Daniel Dennett has a lot to say about what is suspicious about those kinds of thought experiments in general in his last book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. But to say a Supreme Court justice like Scalia is persuaded specifically on that intuition alone is a naive view of both belief and jurisprudence. A more likely scenario is he's disposed to adduce examples which fit his (necessarily ideological) legal opinions in response to government lawyers arguing that there is an imminent threat that allows the executive to strip normal legal rights and use some forms of torture that are deemed humane (Charlie Savage had spoken at length about how insiders in the Bush administration who are experts on interrogation who think these methods are ineffective were run over by executive branch lawyering ) That isn't to say that some aspects of escalating having an opinion aren't perfectly valid criticisms (I myself hated the direction they went with Conviction - it's reminiscent of other Ubisoft series like Prince of Persia that have flirted with edginess - but I'm perfectly fine with and think there is room for other edgy and transgressive action/revenge scenarios - the movie Taken, for example - for reasons which hang on a morally valid stance in approaching and interpreting such media which isn't invalidated by the having an opinion and literalist interpretation that casts the people who make such games as unenlightened heathens)

The ticking time bomb scenario existed and had been discussed long before television shows like 24. People have been disposed to think torture is effective because they want to believe that something can be done. As to the more general idea that media like games exert negative influence on moral attitudes that's an empirical question which I think is of doubtful significance (cf Steven Pinker's recent book)

No not at all. The point was that critics aren't taking genre fiction for what it is. Anyone could point out hundreds of unrealistic things about characters in action and adventure that aren't opinionated in a way that is different from me. One aspect of violence in genre fiction is that it's typically drained of properties that would make it realistic, like suffering, so of course there is a negative reaction to torture but there has always been interrogation in Splinter Cell games that follow the same logic completely independent of torture or maiming. There's a grasping for significance in a mechanic wholly borne out of genre convention that is intentionally unrealistic (not unlike the law shows that have numerous instances of behaviour every episode that would, in the real world, lead to disciplinary hearings and disbarment)

I would argue this is an artifact of the criticism. There is a pattern of seriousness in interpretation of games which inflates the silliness in genre convention into real world parallel meaning. I think those commentators should be a little more self conscious about what they are bringing to the interpretation. I think this imposition is in part driven by a desire for games to have social and political significance thus inappropriately interpreting works in unserious genre like action as if it reflected a stance about the world we actually live in rather than an entertainment with a narrow transgressive conflict resolution.

The on topic commentary about the thesis of the book isn't that interesting. Most of the article is overly concerned with Pinker's characterizations that don't match up with his ideology of the US and multinational corporations as an evil empire. To the point where he's discussing corporate acts as if they are forms of state sponsored violence. I think there is a point to be made about how government capture and the rule of law are used to serve particular interests but Pinker's book is a general theory about violence, not justice.

He's more circumspect, investigating many different plausible causes and the problems they run into. He points out the problems with that theory although he does seem to think there's something to it as a part of a much more general civilizing process.

"Games" is one of the primary examples used in discussion about the philosophy and psychology of concepts, usually to show how it is problematic to suppose there are universal features that all elements in a category share. See Wittgenstein's family resemblances, prototype theory in psychology, etc. It's one of the more interesting topics in cognitive science. I can't think of a popular treatment other than Steven Pinker's books about language.