> On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> I gotta confess, I just don't get the video game thing. It seems weird
>> and
>> alien to me. Not because of the technology, but because of the
>> solitariness
>> and alternative universe aspects of it. I'm all for the technology; I
>> can't
>> wait to go down to the Apple store sometime this weekend and pick up a
>> copy
>> of 10.4
>>
>> Doug
>
> I'm sure Dennis will jump in, but I think video games are like many
> commodities: they can encourage social connections with others (e.g.,
> massive online play) and they can encourage social isolation. Same
> thing with cars: some people spend all their time and money
> restoring their beautiful 66 Mustang and live in their own little
> world, and others join car clubs and develop friendships.
>
> Miles
---------------------------
I got to see a little bit of the video game culture when my son was in his
alienated teenage years, and that's exactly how it struck me then: as
another expression of contemporary alienation, particularly among young
single males. He wasn't a solitary gamer because we didn't encourage him to
spend his idle time alone at home. So most of his gaming took place at
friends' houses, often in dimly lit basements. I saw about as much social
interaction there as you would see in an opium den, except the kids weren't
spaced out on separate mattresses, but huddled together with glazed eyes
fixated on the screen, oblivious to each other and anyone like myself who
happened into their sanctum.
I don't see how online gaming can be any different; the screen stands in the way of what we would understand as meaningful social interaction in which the participants relate to each other rather than to an object. You could say this about television also, but at least here there are some limited exchanges during the commercial breaks and intermittently during programs, especially sports events. The focus around the game console was much more intense, both because of the interactive nature of the medium, where the participants frantically "compete" against the computer and each other to score points, as well as because of the content, which was saturated with violence, mayhem, racism, militarism, misogyny, thuggery, dismembered limbs, squirting arteries, and grotesque nightmare creatures, all of which which seemed to me redolent of the culture of fascism.
I would invarably leave after jokingly prodding my son about what time he thought he "would be climbing out of this stinking stygian pit into the bright sunny uplands outside", or some variant on that theme, but I didn't feel as casual about it as I must have sounded. He's since outgrown the video culture, and he doesn't have any particularly fond memories of the time he spent immersed in it - he identifies it with his difficult teenage years - and I don't think he would concede to it any redeeming social value. For many, including some of my son's dropout acquaintances, gaming is as serious an addiction as drugs and booze and gambling, with the same purpose in mind: escape from the harsh economic and psychological demands of life under capitalism. This is the only medium - not television, not movies, not art, not music - where I find myself sounding like Bill Bennett and the Moral Majority, but that was my experience of the gaming culture, however limited and second-hand. Perhaps I only saw the dark side, and can't appreciate it's contradictory qualities.
MG