[Daphne Dragona: “From Parasitism to Institutionalism: Risks and Tactics for game-based-art"] [Simon Penny, “Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation”] [Mary Flanagan: “Creating Critical Play”.]
I want to respond briefly to (the combination of) media theory, serious play/critical play, and relational aesthetics examining parallels between games and life. This is a thread common throughout these three readings. I’ll start with the section titled, “Why Doesn’t the Army Teach Acting.” Quote from this section: “If training in simulated worlds is productive of real-world skills, then why don’t actors who play serial killers go on to be serial killers.” This relates to the magic circle and the idea that you are aware of your willful suspension of disbelief when you engage in the parameters and rules of a game. First of all, the army does teach acting. The difference is affirmation. Here is a picture of lego Indiana Jones:
When soldiers engage in their drills and simulations, they are being affirmed by their directors to believe in the reality of their actions. Many actors for film have difficulty coping with the roles they are performing, even though their friends and collaborators in their regular lives usually do not actively try to reinforce the reality of the performed roles. Heith Ledger, playing the role of The Joker expressed in some interviews that he was feeling very depressed because of the role and having difficulty sleeping at night. Some people correlate “Joker”-related depression to his death by overdosing on anti-depressant/muscle relaxant drugs. Good actors take their roles very seriously, and it might be very difficult for an actor to play a long series of roles as drug addicts, killers, and mentally deranged characters without having side affects. Not that they would necessarily become these things, because surely they would have other influences in their lives.
People play games and consume other simulation-related media (novels, television, cinema, facebook) specifically because they are moved by these media in some way. I am well aware of the boundaries between my imagination and reality, but that doesn’t mean that one is more significant in the shaping of my personality than the other. A lot of things factor into underlying assumptions that I (and everyone else) has. I would say that my parents, teachers, and friends are the most significant factor reinforcing my perceived reality, but goddammit I am also SO PREPARED FOR THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE and that certainly didn’t come from real world factors.
I am very much against the alarmist media figures who claim that games somehow affect people more than, say, film, music, television, your parents, etc. No sane person with a stable home life is going to play Modern Warfare for a while and then go out and shoot people. They are going to gain a pretty unrealistic idea of the concept of “terrorist,” but that is reinforced by every media outlet in our country.
On a tangent, that relational aesthetics soba game was a utopianist multiculturalist fantasy game which completely ignores race studies, postcolonial theory, and identity politics and probably had less real world consequences than Halo. Games are for reals. I’ll leave it at that.
