Power and perception in the scandal in academia.

The Scandal in Academia is a large-scale fictional ethical case study of around 17,000 words and fourteen separate revelations. They are delivered as newspaper extracts from a newspaper reporting on an ongoing crisis at a Scottish educational institution. The scandal case as presented on the ethical issues raised, concentrating instead on providing the scenario in isolation. This paper is a companion piece to that case study, discussing the third and fourth revelations with reference to the issues raised, the mainstream media, and the formal academic literature. The discussion presented here is not intended to be exhaustive or definitive. It is instead educational context, and illustrative of the kind of discussions that ideally emerge from the effective use of the material

Musings on misconduct: a practitioner reflection on the ethical investigation of plagiarism within programming modules.

Tools for algorithmically detecting plagiarism have become very popular, but none of these tools offers an effective and reliable way to identify plagiarism within academic software development. As a result, the identification of plagiarism within programming submissions remains an issue of academic judgment. The number of submissions that come in to a large programming class can frustrate the ability to fully investigate each submission for conformance with academic norms of attribution. It is necessary for academics to investigate misconduct, but time and logistical considerations likely make it difficult, if not impossible, to ensure full coverage of all solutions. In such cases, a subset of submissions may be analyzed, and these are often the submissions that have most readily come to mind as containing suspect elements. In this paper, the authors discuss some of the issues with regards to identifying plagiarism within programming modules, and the ethical issues that these raise. The paper concludes with some personal reflections on how best to deal with the complexities so as to ensure fairer treatment for students and fairer coverage of submissions

Fuzzy ethics: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bot.

The recent death of a Volkswagen worker at the hand of a factory robot has resulted in a number of editorials and opinion pieces discussing moral responsibility and robots. In this short response piece we outline some of the wider context of this discussion, with reference to the classic ethical study the Case of the Killer Robot. We argue that there is a growing need for the field of computer ethics to consider with some urgency what it means to be a responsible moral agent when tragic events occur, and to what extent it makes sense to 'blame the robot'

Do you feel like a hero yet?

Video games have a long tradition of including elements of moral decision making within their ludic and narrative structures. While the success of these endeavours has been mixed, the systems used to express moral choices within a game have grown more popular. However, these morality systems are inherently restricted and limited by ludic and business considerations. Coupled to this is the concept of the magic circle in which games are considered to be morally discontinuous spaces where the normal rules of what actions are and are not permitted are different. Moral choices then become flattened down into mere narrative flavouring rather than a reflection of an individuals ethical makeup. Moral choices within games are thus shallow and lack the ability to truly offer us an opportunity to reflect on the actions we have taken. Rather than offering insight, they instead cheapen and simplify nuanced topics and concepts. However, several games released in the past few years have made an effort to break free of this mould by explicitly externalising moral choices. In this paper we discuss two of these games: Popes 2013 title Papers, Please and Yager Developments 201

A practitioner reflection on teaching computer ethics with case studies and psychology.

Three issues complicate teaching computer ethics in an undergraduate course. The first relates to the often technically intensive knowledge required to fully understand the complexity of real world examples. The second relates to the pedagogic expectations of students who see ethical and professional issues as of little importance to their eventual degrees. The third revolves around the fact that the official accreditation that is required of many professions is not mandatory for computing professionals, and so professional codes of conduct are optional. In this reflective discussion, we discuss these issues and the approach we have taken to resolve them. Our philosophy for teaching computer ethics revolves around the use of social psychology to illuminate the importance of the topic, and case-studies to simultaneously lower the burden of technical expertise while also incorporating hooks for the discussion of real world incidents. We discuss several psychological studies which inform our discussions, and the way in which they are delivered to overcome initial student objections to the material. We then discuss both the Case of the Killer Robot and the Scandal in Academia as case studies appropriate for inclusion in most undergraduate and postgraduate courses on ethics and professional issues

Screenshots as Photography in Gamescapes: An Annotated Psychogeography of Imaginary Places

Travel is an integral part of our lives, whether for work or leisure. Since the advent of photography, we have documented our journeys, often sharing the images with friends and family to reflect upon the experience, tell stories, or invite commentary. We often lose ourselves in digital media - film, documentary and games - particularly during times when physical travel is unavailable. In this pictorial, we explore the travels of a single player through hundreds of games, presenting annotated game screenshots as photo-documentary through gamescapes, and as a form of the New Games Journalism. We present a New Games Travelogue traversing and formulating the psychogeography of games as imaginary places, and through this process, we unveil transdisciplinary tensions in negotiating and perceiving the importance of visual knowledge in games research, encouraging other researchers to join us in this practice

All of your co-workers are gone: story, substance, and the empathic puzzler.

Narrative games such as The Walking Dead, Gone Home, Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable are difficult to situate into the general framework of game genres that are popularly, albeit informally, understood by mainstream audiences. They are too unabashedly contrarian with reference to the generally accepted definitions that the field uses”indeed, questions have been raised as to whether or not they can even truly be considered games at all. In this paper, the authors argue that these games are properly differentiated into two key categories. The Walking Dead and The Stanley Parable are branching narratives that are spiritual successors to the Choose Your Own Adventurer style game-books. Dear Esther and Gone Home are freeform narratives that are best understood as tools for generating, interrogating and integrating empathy through the exploration of characterisation through situated spatiality within an emotionally resonant environment. It is the very lack of narrative structure in any linear or branching format that argues for these to be considered as a game genre of their own”one we have termed the empathic puzzler. They are related to more engineered narrative structures, but their design offers unique opportunities for emotional reflection. This paper argues for an encompassing definition of game that is appreciative of the different intentions that may be perceived in structure and freeform narratives”that the substance of such titles is found in the largely unparalleled opportunities they present for exploring issues of choice, agency, and empathy within video games

How, not if, is the question mycologists should be asking about DNA-based typification

Fungal metabarcoding of substrates such as soil, wood, and water is uncovering an unprecedented number of fungal species that do not seem to produce tangible morphological structures and that defy our best attempts at cultivation, thus falling outside the scope of the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. The present study uses the new, ninth release of the species hypotheses of the UNITE database to show that species discovery through environmental sequencing vastly outpaces traditional, Sanger sequencing-based efforts in a strongly increasing trend over the last five years. Our findings chal-lenge the present stance of some in the mycological community - that the current situation is satisfactory and that no change is needed to "the code" - and suggest that we should be discussing not whether to allow DNA-based descriptions (typifications) of species and by extension higher ranks of fungi, but what the precise requirements for such DNA-based typifications should be. We submit a tentative list of such criteria for further discussion. The present authors hope for a revitalized and deepened discussion on DNA-based typification, because to us it seems harmful and counter-productive to intentionally deny the overwhelming majority of extant fungi a formal standing under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants

'It's only a game' -ethics, empathy and identification in game morality systems

Abstract In this paper the authors argue that games have not yet lived up to their potential in acting as compelling engines for moral or ethical reflection. Despite the prevalence of moral choice systems within games, modern titles currently lack the nuance and sophistication required to permit insight into anything meaningful regarding moral and immoral behaviour. The role games play in shaping moral outlooks is contentious and controversial. It is necessary to address this topic within a firm academic framework which we can use to understand the limits game developers have with regards to building emotionally resonant and morally complex games. To this end, the authors have reviewed the literature on the topics of morality and ethics in computer games with the intention of outlining this framework. While the narrative structure of games may offer opportunities for empathy and identification with player characters, the ludic requirements of balance serve to instantiate limits on both player agency and the viable set of actions. Within the context of games with a significant ethical component, these serve as the ideological limits within which moral context is bounded. Existing moral systems within games tend to adopt a perspective that is both binary and utilitarian, and the lack of real consequences for a player's choice imposes a shallowness on subsequent reflection. We discuss how this problem has been addressed to date within modern video games and evaluate the success of such endeavours. For games to truly meet their potential in this regard, it is necessary for them to offer something that is not present in other forms of literature. The nature of interactivity here offers some promise that players being made to enact rather than simply observe a choice will spur deeper consideration of the implications. This is predicated, however, on a sufficient level of player ownership of the actions a character takes. Current research on this topic is conflicted, and in the conclusion of the paper the authors outline a research agenda aimed at addressing this issue