For Episode 7, I am joined by Dr. C. Thi Nguyen to talk about “Playtest” (Season 3, Episode 2), which premiered in 2013 and is the only Black Mirror episode that follows a straightforwardly “horror” format.
Before getting to the Episode 7 notes, I want to announce that BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS now tweets! Please follow @BMR_podcast on Twitter to keep up with all our new episode releases. If you’re enjoying the podcast so far, please also consider making a small donation on Patreon to help us offset the costs of audio editing (and keep BMR ad-free!). Here are more ways to stay connected with us:
My special guest for Episode 7 is C. Thi Nguyen (@add_hawk on Twitter), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and author of the recently-released Games: Agency as Art (OUP, 2020). Nguyen is an Assistant Editor for the popular philosophy of art blog Aesthetics for Birds and he authored the much-needed and long-overdue “Manifesto for Public Philosophy.” Formerly a food writer for The Los Angeles Times, Nguyen now spends his time writing about trust, art, games, and communities, with a particular focus on how social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.
- C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
- “Games and the art of agency” (Free version of Nguyen’s main paper on games, which contains many of the ideas in his book)
- Nguyen, “How we can understand ourselves through games”
- Leigh M. Johnson, “The Root of Fear is Madness: On Black Mirror‘s Playtest”
- Bernard Suits, “What is a game?”
- Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia
- Aristotle, Poetics
- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (selections)
- GPT-3 explained
- What is the technological singularity?
- Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
- Philip K. Dick, Ubik
- Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”
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