Digiyak 3

I’ll post my comments here because I’m waiting for the final email to enact my RTH account.

I met a guy on a plane to Vancouver last summer. Actually, we were stuck sitting next to one another, so it was a forced introduction aided by several gins. Nonetheless. We spoke for hours. He was headed to the coast, from Ottawa, for a friend’s stag party.

“Your brother?” I asked.
“No.” he shook his head.
“A good friend?”
“Not really. A former colleague.” He said, after a pause. “I mean we still keep in touch, well quite often. Yes. I guess he’s a good friend.”

My seatmate seemed uncertain what kind of relationship he had with this guy. At least that’s the feeling I had from our conversation. In my mind, he must have had some meaningful connection to the person waiting for him in Vancouver – I mean he was spending a boatload of money flying 4800km to be at the guy’s stag party. I was puzzled, and I must have looked the part, because the information that followed was somewhat unsolicited.

My seatmate described to me his friendship with the man getting married in Vancouver. It seems the two were aquaintances from an old job in Ottawa, but they really formed their friendship over the years that followed online. They played video games together online.

“Really?” I said. Trying not to sound baffled.

“Yup.” said my seatmate. He and his Vancouver buddy had been flying virtual simulator planes together for years now. He almost sighed as he said this. “Not just any flying games though. We fly missions.”

“Missions?” I asked.

“Yup.” He answered. “Missions. We fly authentic World War One mission simulations.” He went on to describe the planes, the battles, the way they communicated online with headsets. He elaborated on his “setup,” and how much money he spent annually flying virtual combat simulators with his pals from his basement in Ottawa.

It was apparent to me that this guy was more than passionate about his virtual hobby. In fact, he was one of over 20 living-room Red Barons who met online, once a week, to fly virtual missions together over a digitized recreation of the Sommes, or Ypres, or wherever. They had specific roles, planes, names. They had virtual personalities that they had created online to distinguish themselves in the squadron. He described the accent he used online to be recognized by the other fighter pilots.

“Sometimes.” He explained. “There are so many of us, you can’t tell who’s who.” He proceeded to order us two more gins with his phony accent.

I found this guy fascinating. Not because of what he was doing, that was wierd to me. I was fascinated because he was so enveloped in his own personal fantasy. I mean, really, he was flying out to Vancouver to go to his virtual wing-man’s stag party. He had twenty friends that knew him by another name, whom he spoke to in a phony accent. By all accounts, he spent 8 hours a week with 20 men he never saw in person.

As we parted ways at Vancouver luggage turnstill I caught myself feeling sorry for this guy. I know, I shouldn’t have been thinking that way. I had no reason to. This was a healthy, productive, and very nice – downright affable – person. He was candid with me, and very knowledgable about his wartime history. I was just worried for him. What if he didn’t get along with his old colleague in real life? He admitted they really didn’t know each other offline. What if the other guys expected he really was Scottish? What if … well… what if they just sat inside and played video games all weekend? I had to laugh at that. If a guy flew 4800 km to play a virtual flight simulator game. Fuck me.

i just read your article on raise the hammer, interesting points! i struggle with your point re: “video games become virtual enfranchisement for a disenfranchised citizenry”. My mind can’t help but think of the differences in men and women. As a woman, I have absolutely no desire to engage in video games. Is it because I am a woman or is because am not interested in video games? Maybe I have found alternative ways of dealing with my frustrations re: not being heard. I still cannot wrap my brain around how an intelligent person that is well read and understands what is happening in the world (war) can engage in video games that are so closely related to reality. i understand that it a means of an escape however again so closely related to our reality. I guess… I can’t understand why it frightens me…?

oh and, i loved ben’s ten words he hates…my favorite was “play date”!

On women and video games:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3615278.stm

http://www.womengamers.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/games/learnmore/womeningames.mspx

Yeah way to go. I would agree with the hunter gatherer, predisposed instinct analysis. People are innately competitive and violent. That’s about all I want to say on the subject.

I think that there are some important questions to ask on video gaming, the content, the form, the marketing. I often defer to a McLuhanite perspective in these conversations – that the medium is the message, the numbing effect, technology conversion. It seems to fit. I also think it is interesting to look at video games as mini-narratives. These are incredibly potent vehicles for conveying stereotypes and normalizing behavior.

Despite what anyone says to the contrary, visual games are social-psycho influences – violent or otherwise. They do not evoke calculated physical responses. That is to say, they don’t cause people to kill. But they influence the mental equipment of individuals who come in contact with them – in various forms. The content conveys messages, about gender roles, human interaction, fetish behavior, human vices, acceptable emotional responses.

People can easily argue that video games are fantasy. That people know the difference between real and simulated values, scenarios, activities. And I don’t dispute that people know the difference.

But we have discussed the blending of fact and fiction before on this blog, and I think there is a more compelling argument to be made about the contributing influence of video games to what we consider the normal realm of human expereinces. If we distort the realm of experiences that we are allowed to have (those socially acceptable) – if we increase the cannon of human experiences to include some that are only acceptable in a fictional sense – then we muddy the moral waters. It becomes harder to differentiate the boundaries between fact and fiction. I don’t think video games are eroding our moral capacity. I do think that they can contribute to some unproductive patterns of thought.

alevo: “Yeah way to go. I would agree with the hunter gatherer, predisposed instinct analysis. People are innately competitive and violent. That’s about all I want to say on the subject.”

When I clumsily said there is a “piece of brutality” inside each of us, I was not saying that is the whole picture. Humans are also social and cooperative, as any examination of a hunter-gatherer society reveals, as well as intelligent, which together with these characteristics led to civilization.

But I don’t think it is the social and cooperative aspects that make certain video games popular any more than I think people watch football because they enjoy seeing a small group of men work together for a common purpose. Without that, teams lose games, but without the competitition and the bone-crushing hits, the sport loses ratings.

My point isn’t that people have an immutable nature that is violent and competitive and so we should just stop trying to get along and accept it. My point is any examination of the popularity of violent video games is incomplete without examining where they hook into your brain. What is it about speed, acrobatics, heights, danger and violence that is so appealing?

I agree that there is a lot of room for a thoughtful analysis of video games and plenty of important questions to be asked. I originally avoided discussing violence in video games because there is so much material on the subject already. Unfortunately a great deal of it is very simplistic.

After the Columbine High School massacre, violent video games like Doom and Wolfenstein came under criticism, along with Marilyn Manson and Rammstein, the movie The Basketball Diaries, and others. In the movie Bowling for Columbine, Moore points out the existence of a nearby Lockheed-Martin plant that manufactured parts for nuclear missiles, and goes into a montage of violence carried out or supported by the US. The point is obvious.