Only a Game

Erelong Commencing

Back from the States, and with a stack of pieces on ethics and a few related topics to queue-up for the weeks to come, including Vikings vs. Murderers and The Ultimate Moral Computer. Hope you'll find something intriguing in the subjects I've chosen to explore, and I look forward to discussing these and other matters with you in the comments.

Interregnum

Off to the US with my wife and soon-to-be one year old son – our first flight with him, and it’s going to be eight hours long. (To quote Hamlet: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”) Still, once we get to the States we’ll get to introduce him to his great-grandparents in Kentucky, as well as catching up with friends in Nashville, Knoxville and Atlanta, and even a speaking gig in Savannah, GA. Back soon!

The nonsense resumes in March.

The Curtain Rustles

It’s taking a little longer to reboot my brain after the festivities but the nonsense will return on Tuesday.

My Philosophy Trilogy

Just before Imaginary Games was released, I submitted the manuscript for The Mythology of Evolution to the publisher – my thanks to everyone who helped me with this, even those who were unable to do so in the end owing to life intervening. It was a great deal of work, but also very rewarding, and I couldn’t have done it without a lot of support. I’m pleased with the resulting book, which concerns the role of imagination in science and evolutionary theory in particular, and is written in an accessible style for an intelligent but non-expert reader. Inevitably, the book also deals with the presumed conflict between science and religion, and deconstructs this into something considerably more plausible.

The third part of this trilogy of philosophy books, Chaos Ethics, is currently being researched. I have now read Aristotle’s rather dull Ethics, and have just started on Parfit’s unfeasibly long On What Matters. My reward for working through this monster is to read Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, which I bought a while back but haven’t had time to tackle. Parfit also seems to have taken a shine to Kant since Reasons and Persons, so I’m interested to read his consequentialist take on Kantian ethics. I expect to be blogging some new ethics pieces in the Gregorian New Year, so watch this space moral philosophy fans.

I’m struggling to wrangle my internet presence now that I have two blogs and three social networks (Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter) – not to mention a baby! – but I'm doing the best I can all the same. What’s really suffering right now is Google Reader, which most days I just can’t handle and I end up marking all as read blindly. I’m thinking I might have to trim this down to just the blogs I’m most strongly attached to (which probably includes yours if you’re reading this), but then again when the baby goes into full time nursery it will be a very different situation for me so perhaps I should not panic yet. Apologies to anyone whose blog I am usually active in commenting – feel free to draw my attention to anything I may have missed in the ensuing carnage of parenthood.

A new short serial on ihobo to promote Imaginary Games begins tomorrow and runs over the next three weeks – I hope to see you in the comments!

Back Soon

Taking a short break from the internet to enjoy the leaves changing colour. I'll be back in late November with some posts to promote Imaginary Games, which is out on 25 November.

Have fun everyone!

Press Play on Tape

Greetings and salutations! Welcome back to Only a Game, the blog of Chris Bateman, outsider philosopher, game designer, author and fount of verbosity.

My latest book, Imaginary Games, is released on 25 November this year, so I’ll be heavily promoting that in the near future. However, before that I’ll be leaving a chunk of November free from blogging because of the Wheel of Fortune (as I do every year), so I just have five weeks of nonsense to regale you with in the interim. There’s no rhyme or reason in what’s coming up, just a random extrusion of various thoughts and ideas.

I have finished the draft manuscript of what is now called The Mythology of Evolution, and am currently getting my final feedback on it. I expect to submit to the publisher before the end of the year, so that should be coming out in print around the Summer of 2012. I’m nervous about this one for some reason, but I think it’s come out well and has some interesting perspectives to offer.

I’m currently researching the third of this philosophy trilogy, Chaos Ethics, which will be out in 2013 or 2014. This is the ultimate payoff from the classic Ethics Campaign, although my moral philosophy has taken a few turns since then. I expect to be spending some of early 2012 revisiting some ethical issues, charting the development from relative ethics to chaos ethics, and exploring the difference between moral law and moral chaos. This book is not an attempt to define a new way of doing ethics – it’s a recognition that we were always already living moral lives where there is no perfect answer to any moral question.

For anyone waiting for the Souls in Science Fiction serial, my apologies. Although I have finished my research for this I have not had time to work on the serial, partly because of the three philosophy books and partly because of the baby. However, I am working towards a future book, probably called Digital Souls, that this will form a part of, and so I expect I will eventually write this serial – I just can’t know when.

See you in the comments!

AFK

Off to speak at Think Design Play in Utrecht on Thursday this week, and next week I’m visiting family in Devon so nothing more from me until October. As ever, I will reply to any comments that appear in my absence as soon as I get back to my desk, so feel free to share your thoughts.

Have fun while I’m away!

Six Years Old Today

Only a Game is six years old today! Yes, I can scarcely believe that six years ago I was babbling my nonsense directly into the web without a care in the world. Now writing for this blog and ihobo.com seems more like writing for a magazine I don’t get paid for, or gain any other tangible benefit for doing. How the time flies!

I’m away for almost the whole of July on five back-to-back conferences, so my comment service will be running rather slowly, but rest assured there is content queued up for the month so there’ll still be stuff to read.

O-tanjoubi omedetou gozaimasu!

Only a Game on Tour – July 2011

I am off “on tour” this July, with stops in three British cities and one in the States. Here’s my itinerary:

• 4 July: Immersion 11 Forum, London
  On the Game Changers panel
• 7 July: Film Philosophy Conference, Liverpool
  Presenting “Fictional Worlds in Films and Games”
• 8-10 July: Videogame Cultures III, Oxford
  Presenting “Prop Theory for Game Aesthetics”, 2 pm Friday
• 12-14 July: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction VI, Oxford
  Presenting “Orthodox Science Fiction and Fictional Worlds, 4 pm Wednesday.
• 18-22 July: IGDA Summit/Casual Connect, Seattle
  “Imagination and Game Design: A Philosophical Approach”, 10 am Tuesday

Happy trails!

Spring Ceasing

I’m going to take a few week's holiday from blogging, just to help clear my head. For anyone waiting for the new serial, it’s been delayed on account of the unprecedented volume of writing work that’s been falling across my desk recently. But I am working on it, and I hope it will appear later this year.

With my new relationship with Zer0 Books, everything that comes to the blog is a potential future book (I have three scheduled already!), so I am perhaps becoming a little exacting in my blog content at the moment. It’s only supposed to be a draft of my thoughts when it runs here, right? Try telling that to my mind!

Anyway, I traditionally take a short break from blogging for the Discordian New Year celebration of Havvoth Nar (today), so off I go for some spring rest and recreation. Have fun everyone!

Back soon!