Tag Archives: stanford prison experiment

Fun Size Episode 78 – Video Game Dr. Mengele

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This month, we’re joined again by Dave Brouillette, and talking about the pixelized Stanford Prison Experiment that was The Sims, and how eventual boredom can turn a gamer into a cruel capricious god tormenting their own imaginary people.

We dig into real and fictionalized depictions of evil from Orson Welles in The Third Man to a documentary about former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara to the subway murder of a homeless man in the middle of a mental health crisis. Are these things an inevitable part of the human experience, or are they only inevitable because we’ve built a world around greed, competition and personal ambition that incentivizes these outcomes?

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Fun Size Episode 69 – Two Degrees From Luke Skywalker

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This month, we’re back with Sam Mulvey to get nerdier than we have for a while.

Mike takes the rough draft of his new “Bechdel Test”-esque thought experiment about media worldbuilding for a spin and tries to punch holes in it.  Are our large shared universe worlds really as large and expansive as they appear to be, or is that just an illusion to hide something much smaller and more insular?

And in probably more depth and exhaustive detail than necessary, Mike talks about his love and fascination with J.R.R. Tolkien and his Middle-earth legendarium, and Sam gets the opportunity to talk more about Frank Herbert’s Dune than he’s ever done before on the show.

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