"How does the fun of submission fit into our pedagogy?"

People who enjoy submission in educational settings tend to end up as graduate students. At the very least, the students in an average classroom who like to be told what to do and think, and find this pleasurable and rewarding as part of the "game" of classroom life, are not the ones who need the most help.

I am deeply sympathetic to the thought behind your last question. But perhaps "wanting to encourage people to make their lives better," rather than studying what games do, is the problem? Maybe there are all kinds of situations in which games make things worse, not better, including sometimes our own lives, and yet they are still an engaging object for our attention and thought? I, for instance, have completely sworn off television -- I shudder at the thought of ever inviting it into my home again -- and yet I think that thinking about television is important in order to understand society and the world, and I also think that television is an interesting and on some level promising medium.

And just to confirm this "submission" thing doesn't have anything to do with the winged dominatrices you occasionally see chasing after warlocks of a certain persuasion

Hmmm. Hmmmm. HmmmmmmmmMMMMmmm.

Addiction. Compulsion. And why do we have these propensities? I haven't gone to the DSM or any other authority, it's all popular downtrickle from those... but I'm getting the sense that many of our species have significantly odd wiring. (Read John Ratey, Shadow Syndromes, for some of the downtrickle--but he *is* a shrink, after all.)

I've heard compulsive behaviors described as calming techniques. The baby sucks its thumb, the little girl twirls her hair around her finger (wait, I watched a woman on a panel, she was in her 20s, doing this, I'll tell you her name later, Gus)--the theory is that these are deep-wired attempts at relieving mild stress. But gone agley, because how can nail-biting, in the long run, really relieve stress?

Compulsion sometimes gets described as the habit mechanism run amok. Habits are useful, but not if our brains won't let us turn them off when we want. Games can be habit-forming? You do it because it relieves stress, and then you can't stop? Will it help to look at the stresses it relieves? Or maybe that doesn't matter...

And addiction, of course, that's so often self-medication. Makes the wonky brain feel better.

You can get a Rx for Ritalin to spur your slow-to-process-glucose frontal lobes, or you can smoke tobacco. You can drink alcohol and find relief from feelings of inhibition, and before you know it your wetware is habituated to that chemical. You can abuse Vicodin, ignoring the side-effect precaution that it "may cause euphoria" ("and that's a problem because--why, again?"), and then, darn it, you have to keep increasing your dose to get the desired effect. And then you can't get the effect no matter what, but you also can't stop taking it without prolonged pain.

Who is studying the chemical and electric brain activity of people playing games?

Hard to believe gaming would be as dire as drugs, but then our processors are so complex. If reality only takes place in the Theater of the Mind, then we may experience reality, dreams, imagination--and games--in a way that they all feel much the same. And we seek the one that feels the most "fun"? (Have any of the theorists worked on the concept of fun?)

Why do some people love rollercoasters? Scary or violent movies? Have you noticed military folk talking about how, when they come home, everything seems so flat and dull? They feel the loss of the simple life where every activity is clearly laid out in front of you, the schedule fixed, and you have Companions and a Mission, a Quest, and you go from bored waiting to insane intense adrenaline in seconds. Why do toddlers love to put their heads between their feet and look at the world upside down, and children all love to roll down hills? I guess we like to give our complicated hardware certain kinds of workouts...

Compulsion, obsession: there are people who are obsessed with mathematics, with music. Some of the great discoveries, insights, art works, grew out of some of the wonkiest brains ever.

Why do cats play? Practice for hunting and fighting, use of excess energy? Do games grab us because they exercise any skills we have, or may need, or may have needed when we roamed the frozen tundra after the woolly mammoth?

All of which would give some kind of context for games, if anyone is studying these ideas--but so what? The games are there, and people are playing them. What are we going to do about it? I'm afraid my money is on the ad people to know how to work it, better than the ed people--ad people know best how to hook our two basic motivations, fear and desire. However, they don't know how to work it to any other end than The Sale. God help us when they start to work games.

But I don't know, there's hope. Games do wear out for people. (Sometimes maybe just because there's some new hot game...) The ad people definitely wear out their welcome; seductive as advertising can be, people do say Crikey, is this someone trying to sell me something again?

And people do look for education, and even wisdom, on purpose, and the one thing humans always, always want is a story. I went to a screenwriter workshop led by David Freeman, who did have some good advice even though he was a horse's ass, but the interesting thing is, he had some game writers there, and he himself is moving his business into writing for games. So, is gaming immersing yourself in a story, for way too long and besides you can interact with it?

Do games completely not make your life better? In some way, they make our wonky brains feel better. In some way, they are a habit/compulsion that soothes, that relieves stress. They give that sense of intensity we seek... They let us play with fear, give us a quest? They are always there, ready to play when we want to, "interacting," going the way we want and then surprising us? It feels like people. If it's an RPG, it is people, right? Hard to resist, if you're a monkey-critter. The pull to the stimulus. Immersion. Submission. Addiction?

It's always a dynamic task, finding balance, trying to make room for everything we want in our lives, getting our priorities right. Keeping the games in balance with other stuff. The lifelong labor.

So--how is a submission game different from other games? And what content, what story, could it have to encourage people to make their lives better? Is it possible? Will people play it? Will they take something from it into the rest of their lives?

Lemme know when you find out! ;-D

Gus, I think you're eliding important distinctions here.

Firstly, "killing time," to my ear, is completely different from addiction. I think that you, like many active and busy people, hear the phrase "killing time" and think first of the implied opportunity cost, but the willingness to incur enormous opportunity cost is a marker of addiction, not its aim.

If you want to see what addiction really is in the context of gaming, go to a casino and watch people sit for hours on end in front of slot machines. I mean, these are the stupidest, simplest games there are, but they're utterly compelling. As much as I hate biological reductionism, it's hard to think that you need go any higher-level than neurotransmitters and pleasure centers to see what's going on here. Indeed, this shit is well-understood by slot-machine manufacturers, whose work these days comes in a wide variety of pay-out profiles to accommodate the vagaries of any particular person's dopamine pathway.

There won't be many slot machines in 100 years, of course, because this generation of people is computer-literate enough to get its dopamine fix through much prettier interfaces. But just because developers make recourse to this primitive part of our psyche and stick in colored bars that slowly fill, or butt-loads of crates to smash to find the prize, or a 1 in a billion chance on every drop to get the Godly +15 Unobtanium Clown-Shoes of Voltron, don't think that that has anything to do with gaming as it could be.

You see, Gus, the "enjoyment of giving yourself up to the game" has nothing to do with addiction; instead it's central to art itself. Art is managed experience. This is why we say that there's a magic to the movies: because you're giving over not just your eyes but your entire field of view, i.e. a huge portion of your capacity to experience.

(This, incidentally, is what's missing from your critique of advertising. We judge the success of a work of art by how well it serves us, i.e. how well-rewarded we are for giving ourself up to it. Advertising is corrosive because it also tries to manage our experience -- not only to entertain and amuse us but to control our experience of desire and anxiety -- but is in no way for us or in service to us. Advertising subverts the status of art as gift.)

The interesting thing about games is that they have to manage not only our sensory experience but our interactive experience. That's why when we talk about a game's "immersiveness," we're talking not only about whether the tree's branches wave in the wind but about whether you can collide with the tree or chop it down or carve your name into it.

And what's wonderful about games is that it's not just a matter of who can build the fastest polygon renderer or most realistic physics engine. A game exists to be played, and play requires a certain formality and thus abstraction. Abstraction is the only way to create a world that is closed and limited and yet, in a profoundly satisfying way, complete.

Anyway, you're no doubt annoyed at a layman's clumsy misstatement of ideas that were obsolete years ago, so here's a better-informed admonition: go out on a date with me. I know of a place that is rumored to have decent cheese fries, but the case cries out for an application of your scientific rigor. My correspondents didn't even discuss the layering, for the love of G*d.