League of Legends and Philosophy

Some more lovely thoughts!

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

League of Legends and Philosophy

Can a Videogame Be a Sport?

Roger Hunt

Ever since the day when Plato was a wrestler (for realz!) people of philosophical persuasion have been thinking about what counts as a “sport.” The underlying assumption is that a sport requires a kind of physical exertion, tempered by moderation, aimed at developing a sound body (ideally in which one houses a sound mind). This sentiment is prevalent in our contemporary culture, and it has certainly been capitalized upon by professional athletic associations, recreational exercise facilities, and late night television programming featuring the illustrious Chuck Norris. We contemporary folk have also added several other criteria including competition, sportsmanship, and expertise to the definition of sport. With the advent of the internet and a highly motivated video game culture, though, the definition of sport as requiring physical activity has come under attack.

Philosophers debating the meaning of sport…

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Continuum and Philosophy

Some lovely thoughts by yours truly!

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Continuum and Philosophy

The Lessons of Time Travel

By Roger Hunt

I’m willing to throw it out there that the TV show Continuum, if as successful a program as it should be, will affect our understanding of the lessons of time travel at the level of HG Wells’ TheTime Machine and Spielberg’s Back to the Future Series. Notice that I said “the lessons of time travel” rather than time travel itself. Whether or not time travel is possible, when popular media explores it, we get the opportunity to think about our effect on the future and the past’s effect on us. So, questions about time travel’s possibility aside, stories of time travel give us serious moral questions to consider.

Exactly what moral questions a time travel story raises is—perhaps ironically—dependent upon when it is written. In The Time Machine, the search for knowledge is the moral…

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