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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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COMPUTER GAMING AND IDENTITY…...

(Full Disclosure: I do not play computer games)

The computer gaming industry is large and growing. Millions of people around the world have alternative identities in the virtual world of their games. THE NEW ATLANTIS, “is the most instructive and insightful publication examining the many facets of the relationship between technology and culture” (Hat Tip: Mars Hill Audio) and the summer issue has a major article on the remarkable penetration of computer gaming into our culture (and others).

Video games are now a permanent part of mainstream culture, one to which people devote a considerable amount of time. According to the ESA, the average adult woman gamer plays 7.4 hours per week and the average adult man gamer, 7.6 hours. Other analysts have reported even higher rates of play: International technology analysts at IDC estimated that the average gamer (not the heavy user) spends about two and one half hours gaming every day—17.5 hours per week. And gamers have racked up years of play. In a recent speech, Douglas Lowenstein, the president of the ESA, noted that recent consumer research reports found that “66 percent of gamers between [the ages of] 18 and 25 have been playing games for at least ten years, and nearly 100 percent of gamers between 12 and 17 have been playing since [the age of] 2.” The average gamer, Lowenstein noted, has been playing for 9.5 years, and gamers older than 18 average 12 years of play. How are they making time for games? More than half claim that video game play comes largely at the expense of television viewing.

For the uninitiated, the progression of the technology is simply unvelievable

Porn star Jenna Jameson recently released Virtually Jenna, an interactive, online game using 3D technology that allows users to romp and role-play pornographically; eventually the game will allow players to insert photographs of themselves so that they can enjoy a “realistic sex simulation” with the popular porn star.

Every new technological advance has been advanced (and funded) by porn, so this isn’t meant to damn gaming because the porn industry has a foothold in it. That is simply inevitable. However, there are bigger issues - one is that what OUGHT to be real is turned into fantasy by gaming.

For the uninitiated, the gaming world, like any subculture, can be a confusing place….on the website for the video-game TV network G4, you can find instant polls like this one: “Do you enjoy WWII-themed shooters?” The answers: “1) They’re awesome. That’s my favorite war. 2) I’d prefer something more modern; 3) I’d prefer something from before that, like the Civil War or ancient China; 4) I don’t enjoy shooters, really.” It’s a far cry from The Greatest Generation. Only a cohort largely untouched by war could speak so blithely about “my favorite war.”

There is LOTS MORE—how games are driving pop culture; the combination of violence with incredible creativity and imagination; a discussion of the benefits of gaming; concerns about the moral impact on gamers; addictive qualities; a deconstruction of some of the analyses of gaming and gamers; comparisons of today’s games with those of the past; ending with a discussion of what computer games are displacing….

Today’s video games are works of creativity, technical skill, and imagination. They are, in appropriate doses, healthy and satisfying playgrounds for experimentation with different identities and exploration of different worlds. But video games carry the risk—as all amusements do—of becoming the objects on which we lavish so much time and attention that we neglect the true and lasting things around us, such as our family, our friends, and our communities. Societies get the games they deserve. But when a society claims for its games the insights, sophistication, and deeply humane wisdom that other forms of culture and community have long offered—when it places Dickens alongside Doom and replaces the family hearth with an Xbox—it is well on its way to finding something more alarming than its identity stolen. It risks becoming a society without true loves or longings, filled with individuals who find solace only in make-believe worlds where the persons they really are do not really exist.

READ the whole thing.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/17 at 07:11 AM

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