As a work of art, it provokes dicussion and divides opinion, but if that’s all one looks for in art, then art is dead and has nowhere to go, having evolved into its ultimate form: trolling internet forums.

As an object lession in RTFM before playing, it’s a great success.

the creator should die in a fire.

twice.

Can’t name any, but I would be surprised if there weren’t real, or at least thought experiments describing it, equivalents going back to the 70s or 80s, on unix, etc.

The fact of the matter is that the video game audiences of today require more context than the video game audiences of the past. They want to know why things are happening. They want to know what the points are of the decisions they make are. They want their games to make them feel something.

Ironically, every question that the artist raises has been addressed and handled with far more panache and skill by video games themselves. Without any simplified “real-life consequence,” game audiences have felt the pressure of complex ethical decisions (torture or stay ethical and lose many of your powers in Fable 2), the surreal satire of the action genre’s sociopathic tendencies (the GTA series) and even the remorse of lives ended forever (the thousands that still mourn for Aeris in Final Fantasy 7).

Someone has already brought up the fact that the major question of the role of data as a cherished possession has already been answered; and once again, it was answered by video games themselves.

So finally I put my opinion in: this piece is not a quality artwork especially when compared to works that have covered the exact same ground as it has, some with bigger budgets, some with the same small budgets. The methods it employs to try and make its ethical arguments are heavy-handed and simplistic. In an attempt to “pare down” the concept of video game violence and distill it to an essential core, the artist has missed the point of video games entirely.

And at the very last, I offer this speculation: How will the artist feel when the Internet corrupts his work like so many others in the past? He has essentially written a terribly effective trojan horse malware program. A ridiculously simple hack is all that is required to strip or change the warning documentation at the beginning of the game. In an attempt to draw a simplistic analogy for the nature of murder, he may very well have empowered scores of real-world people who are real-life malicious to prey upon the unwilling.