This somewhat stream-of-consciousness post was written in late March, begun my last day in Australia and continued on the flight home. It has been modified slightly to fit this space. Speaking of Jon and Katina, I owe you each a letter overflowing with thanks for being such incredible hosts and showing me around Sydney; my life after break was a one-two punch of conferences, and I still haven't recovered. Letters are forthcoming.
The first thing I did upon waking to the sound of parrots this morning was check my email, and found I'd gotten mail from a former WoW guildmate saying he was beginning a blog about the game. I went to read it. About three posts down, under some writeups of guild activities, it became clear that this was more generally a personal blog -- and there was a post documenting how one day recently his depression had gotten so bad recently that he'd checked himself into an emergency room.
The semester had really done a number on me, enough so that even four days at the beach had not really shaken my stress. But waking up to that email, I suddenly felt I'd been given a new life. Like I'd dodged a bullet, kinda. I cancelled my WoW account finally because I knew the trip to Australia was gonna cost more than I could really afford... the incentive to save money was more palpable than my more general dread and ennui about the game, so it was the last straw.
Now I know that at least three of the hardest-core WoW players I know are deeply, clinically depressed to the point of not leaving the house, losing jobs, threatening suicide. These are the Joneses with whom the rest of us must keep up in the game. They get the best loot and have the highest-level characters. I wanted to play with them, because they were always doing the most fun instances, and they're generally better company than the leet speakers, homophobes, and gankers who you find on the general channels. I don't think at all that the game has caused their depression -- I'm not up for those frivolous causalities -- but it's clear it is a strong magnet for those who are already depressed.
I have deep, deep misgivings about video games. I have deep misgivings about the project of using them for education. Educators and parents uniformly believe that because video games are fun and motivating, education should be grafted onto them to make education more entertaining. Meanwhile, advertisers are keen to get into video games because they know they're addictive, that they can deliver eyeballs to their clients.
What if I could develop some means of thinking which could help my depressive friends out of games? Myself as well, I guess. I don't really have the academic toolkit to take this on, and aside from it being a gut issue for me, it's not along the lines of questioning I want to follow. I don't think.
Well, I guess it's not like I think an educational MMORPG would be counterproductively addictive. I think Sesame Street is mostly a great thing, and I think educational video games would be too, if it could be shown that they were actually motivating and actually taught content -- these are minor ifs, I think, pretty easily overcome with a little effort. A big if is clearly the motivational aspect of educational games... that's been exceedingly inconsistent to date. With game industry folks generally so antagonistic to the idea (not to mention the practice) of educational gaming, and educators so ignorant of "real" gaming, it seems this gulf will not be easily bridged.
It's thinking about what critical media literacy would look like in the video game age which gets me. To as questions about where a video game comes from is to question space, and how it is created. This is also a critical literacy in the meatspace world, and to the extent that the internet is a space, it's critical literacy there too. Many questions begin to arise in such a line of inquiry -- for what audience is a video game space created? How do the elements of its creation limit or facilitate the actions of participants? What could be done differently? -- but the questions which I think are most important for me, and have certainly been the most persistent are, Why are we here? Why do some people spend so much time in video game spaces? What does it mean to become a level 60 warrior, to own a complete matching set of epic armor, to be a guild leader, to own and ride a race-unusual steed which was a gift denoting the dwarven high council's indebtedness to you for your service?
What does all this mean when Blizzard owns every last bit of that character's property, skills, and reputation, and you don't have rights to take them out of the game or change them? What if you want to pass your loot on to your children, but Blizzard won't let you if they don't keep up a subscription? What if they'd like to recoup the money you invested in the game?
What if the game gets cancelled? What if, when the U.S. makes its inevitable use of the information weapon it's been developing, all the game data is destroyed? Who are you then?
What does it mean that what you own is not unique to you -- that at least a few other people in the world have some of the same epic pieces of armor that you do? That the backstory you keep in your mind for your character will not leave any material trace not already attributed to her by the programmers unless you record it separately from the game?
In regards to the question of what does it mean to have all such property, I keep returning to the intangibility of video game property. It pleases one sense only -- sight. Well, I guess it provides sound and some minor tactile sensation as well. Video games ignore our actual bodies in the same ways computers do, and I begin to think my sister is on to something when the first thing she plans to teach her technology class is how to get up from the computer and stretch.
The physical conditions of computers and video games don't care how the hell we're shaped, how we feel physically, what we can do aside from sit and look and press buttons. They don't care which odors we find pleasant and unpleasant; a cheese you pick up may be called Stinky Blue Cheese, but you don't smell it. They don't care what our favorite foods are; nothing has any taste. The objects afforded your character in a video game don't support the attention to fine craftsmanship you might enjoy if you collected hand-tooled leather armor from a past era, or the piquant natural irregularities which you might seek out in gemstones. While the leisure objects of meatspace restore to us some of the sensations of which the workplace deprives us, the leisure objects of digital games are as flat, grey, and substanceless as an office cubicle.
I don't doubt that eventually this superficiality will be overcome. But think about what it will be like when it is. This feels like a slippery slope to the Matrix, with your head jacked into a mainframe which convincingly replicates the smell of mown grass or the physical sensation of tap dancing. Maybe this will be just fine. After all, what's the meaning of our lives in ordinary meatspace life? Entirely fabricated. Mostly socially constructed, and it's entirely possible to construct a meaningful life with others within the bounds of a MMORPG, as my depressive friends have already helped demonstrate.
What of the individual physical body? We've got to have enough to eat and shelter ourselves, pay for medical bills, get taxed so there'll be serviceable plumbing. It has been demonstrated that enough of a living to sustain a physical body can be earned by gold farming. The argument that "a person can't just waste his entire life on this, he's got to make a living" is not a means of proving that the abandonment of the physical self to the game self will never happen. Besides, at the moment many of us seem to be supporting our bodies through spending all our time in the equally ephemeral space of the Internet, anyway.
Is that all there is -- fully simulated sensory input, enough protection and nourishment to sustain the body, enough social interaction to pass? Fine, jack me in right now. I just have a couple more concerns.
Historically, we haven't done a great job of managing human sensation. We've managed the tastiness and attractiveness of food with alar, DDT, BHT, MSG, and red number five, and look where that got us. We tried to take away the pain of pregnancy with thalidomide, other pains with morphine. We tried to solve schizophrenia with electric shocks. Then there's been findings about the effects of exposure to natural light on depression.
And if you do farm enough to sustain yourself in world, what have you produced? Something which Blizzard owns, which the person you sell it to will never feel or smell or touch. Something unneccessary for survival. Something for entertainment and leisure. Either Marx's theory of alienation comes into play here, or Veblen's theory of the leisure class does; probably both. One way or another, video games serve to essentially recapitulate conditions of production, commodification, and conspicuous consumption those two men laid out for us.
Encourage my addictive, depressive friends to immerse their senses video games, and what good do we do them? I'm not even totally sure they're "entertained" anymore, and that's really the point of video games anyway. Maybe, in the same way that we've overstimulated ourselves to the point where we can't taste salt and can't tell when we're thirsty, we don't even know what's actually entertaining anymore. Maybe our incredible thirst for entertainment has been mostly manufactured, and what we really need is something else. Something which might feel a little like a need for entertainment, but is actually something else.
holy shit. I sound like Neil Motherfucking Postman.
I don't think I'm actually saying that video games are thoroughly evil and should be nipped in the bud before we all get Agent Smithed. I think we just need to think more about why we need to engage kids in schoolwork more, and whether video games and television are the solution to that particular problem. In terms of using media which are relevant to them elsewhere in their lives, I think it's a motherfucking travesty that schools have been so incredibly fucking slow to make use of other media, so yes, absolutely, bring video games into the classroom because they're another way of thinking and communicating. While you're at it, try not to ban them from using email while at school, huh? sheezus.
But using media because kids don't otherwise engage with school is a bandaid on a societal problem which goes way, way beyond high school graduation. For starters, school is completely divorced from the rest of life starting in about junior high (provided they are not on their way to a career in academics), and kids know it. Very little that they do past that point will ever be useful to them in their working lives. If you want kids to engage with school, make schools stop sucking so incredibly hard first.
Beyond that, one of the reasons school sucks so incredibly hard is that it's not preparing people to be happy, productive members of communities, it's preparing them to be commodities -- specifically, its segmented, highly supervised, routinized structure is still half-assedly preparing people to be commodity labor for industry, which isn't appropriate when most of the jobs available to our graduates are in a service economy. As commodities, they need to be measurable against simple standards and thoroughly uniform, without any rough edges which might cut away the profitable production process. The individual meanings students develop about the things they learn are ever more irrelevant. Moreover, their senses of themselves as members of the communities they live in, and their communities' senses of them are irrelevant. Packaging workers for mobility within the economy is key, as we're all expected to hold a number of jobs, possibly in different cities or even different states or countries, in the course of our lifetimes. Lack of engagement isn't peculiar to schools; ask any office worker on a Monday morning whether they feel engaged with their job.
I don't think we can solve the lack of engagement with entertainment. We need to make deeper changes to schools and other parts of our lives. We need to recognize that an overwhelming need for entertainment may be a proxy for needs for human contact and other enjoyable activities. Again, I'm not saying we should give up entertainment media completely. Obviously entertainment has always had its place. It was just more intimately connected to other activities -- weddings, harvests, town fairs, church socials, family lore, successful hunts, Saint Monday -- which used to be enjoyable, too.
* * *
My last morning in Sydney was full. Jon and I headed down to Bronte Beach for a local cafe, where the vegetarian version of Irish breakfast was superb. Homemade baked beans and way too much Turkish toast. We talked about his academic history, and my academic plans. Then we hit the beach one last time.
The surf was ferocious. I'm used to riding over or with waves, but with these it was impossible. The sand constantly gave out under my feet, leaving me scrambling to push off and get my head above the crests. Each one threw me back a good yard. My eyes got so salty they stung, and it got hard to see. Jon insisted again I needed to go under instead of over. He showed me how to duck, or dive and let the chaos stroke down your back. Again and again we went under, the surges tearing at our suits, surfacing sometimes just in time to be hit in the face by another wave, staggering around the sandbar in the fierce undertow.
We emerged with salt in our ears and eyelashes, muscles aching from the effort of resisting the pull out to sea. I sought out the changing rooms around which loitered old Australian men whose leathery bellies hung over their loose Speedos. And then it was off to the airport, with a good conversation about religion and a tour of Coogee on the way.
full, full, full.
Posted by Gus at April 24, 2006 04:56 PM