More Reading and Responding, and exciting idea from my book report

The article that might be most important for us is the one entitled “The Meaningless of Ritual”. At first I thought that perhaps his very obvious conclusion was a bit of a cop out, a lazy way to get out of thinking about the issues of ritual. Upon reading his work though it seems he has thought about this and has looked at the evidence and made this conclusion. Why is this important in our study of ritual, religion, and virtual reality? Because I feel that it is a call to re-focus not on some meta-idea of ritual and what it means in virtual reality but to get into the nitty gritty and look at specific instances and see how traditional ritual interacts with virtual reality. Just because “ritual” as an overarching schemata is meaningless, it does not follow that individual rituals are meaningless.

The First Person article regarding Facade was interesting because having attempted the actual product, the article made much more sense. I could see where the ideas they were focusing on where implemented and I could also see the limitations they were mentioning cropping up. Most interesting to me was the idea that the player was supposed to come with an expectation of an intense emotional experience and they would watch this scenario unfold for 20 minutes. I, on the other hand, came in with the expectation of poking and prodding the system and seeing how stilted and laughably poor the “dynamic” dialogue would be. I feel a sizable chunk of the internet invites that sort of wry, cynical, “just-for-kicks” approach to its content and I wonder what a shift to more “serious” forms of entertainment on the internet might mean. Or if the culture of the internet will make it inherently hostile to such things as “cyberdramas”

My book report offered little in the way of truly exciting ideas, unfortunately. It was a broad overview of  a topic I am a slightly familiar with and so some of its “revelations” like “gamers are not lonely nerds” are not new to me. It did make me realize just how social online gaming can be and how integral social networks can be to “success” or just the joy of the experience in general. I think this does illustrate how the most fundamental aspect of new technology seems to be its social dimensions. More so than religious, educational, and other considerations I feel that social changes are the most profound upheavals and changes that will be caused by continued of integration of new media into our lives.

Reading Response

This one I could not think of any connections with. There was the chunk of Eliadae, and we’ve already covered the broad scope of his ideas in class and reading the actually essays has not caused me any further insights into his theories, merely more expansion on his basic premises.

The bit the reader of ritual studies was interesting, applying a Freudian outlook on human growth and progression to the concept of “ritualization” which is like the ritual version of “socialization”. The author views even small acts such as a mother’s inspection of an unhappy baby’s crib as part of this “ritualization” as there are ritual elements such as naming and mutual recognition that are involved. And just as the Freudian conception as children going through stages such as “oral” and “anal” stages, this model as children going through different stages of ritualization such as the aforementioned  “mutual recognition” or a “judiciary” phase where they are introduced to rituals which judge right and wrong. While the theories presented were very interesting, despite being based in Freud and psychoanalysis which I have an intellectual and emotional distaste for, I unfortunately can not think of an parallels between this and either any virtual-reality related topics or the Myth of the Eternal Return.

Muslims and the Metaverse: Can Second Life Improve US-Islamic Relations?

This article is about Islam in SecondLife-esque settings. It starts with a short anecdote about a Muslim woman attending a virtual Jewish synagogue to see what Jewish prayer was really like since in her own life there was no way she could ever experience that. The middle chunk is devoted to Doha, a conference of some sort regarding virtual reality and Islam that is being held in Qatar. The last anecdote shared is when doing some research for Doha that two researcher called Eureka and Nilsson went onto an Islamic sim of some kind and started some conversations. In the middle of the very hostile conversation the researchers realized that the Muslim men had mistaken their questions about “ijtihad”, a process of internal spiritual struggle, with questions about “jihad” and were being hostile since they felt that these were just other Westerners who knew nothing of Islam beyond the word jihad.

Now what does this have to say about sacred space and time? Well the Muslim women in the first anecdote does bring up an interesting problem. In a physical Jewish temple there certainly would not be a Muslim women just sitting in listening, or there would be no-one sitting in listening without being active participants themselves. Now does this deviation from the model of the traditional synagogue make the virtual synagogue less sacred in addition to the problems presented by its virtual nature? Why is it ok for an outsider to come in and essentially gawk virtually but physically it would verboten?

While the misunderstanding anecdote is interesting it is more related to textuality. It also demonstrates a huge problem in Islamic, Western understanding, the vocabulary can be really hard.  With text-based communication though it is easier to look up words and ideas while you communicate, but then again on the other hand the text nature leads to text-messaging like spelling which could obscure meaning even more when dealing with unfamiliar concept.

Reading Response

I’ve read about 60 pages of Mircae’s book and it seems to mostly focus in on one thing. Ancient people felt their actions such as rituals or even fishing were more validated if that action had a corresponding prototype in their myth or legend. Most of the work seems to focus on that concept. I will note I think I got an older edition of the text so maybe some chapters have been re-arranged or something of the sort. Reading the game-time article made me think that perhaps in the new edition the time related stuff comes first but not in my edition.

Anyway the discussion of actions being validated and real despite just being imitations of ancient heroes reminded me of an old debate in the video game community. Strategy guides or walkthroughs are documents that tell the player how to defeat the entire game and often includes all the secrets and hidden places in the game world as well. Some feel that it cheapens the experience others feel that it just allows you to fully enjoy the game. I say this is similar to the concept of following in a god or hero’s footsteps and copying what they did. Perhaps even for some compulsive game completers it is similar to the idea that the playing of the game is not “real” or “valid” until, just like the writer of the strategy guide or walkthrough, they perform every task in the perfect way and achieve 100% completion or something of the sort.

The First Person essay regarded game time and how it relates to real-time. Various game genres utilize different relationships between “play time” or the time the actual player is devoting to the game and “event time” the time scale in which the events of the game unfold. Action games have a pretty direct connection between event and play time to create a sense of immediacy of action and quick emotional pay off. Strategy games have a time scale that distorts play time into massive event time so that events such as wars or the rise of civilization become playable.

Now there is an interesting area where the readings overlap. I managed to get into some of the “Regeneration of Time” segment and looked at how various cultures viewed New Years Celebrations. They are a time to expunge the community of sins and mistakes and become re-prepared for the new year. I feel this is similar to the idea of a save point as discussed by Jesper because a save point allows the player to “expunge” the “sins” of their previous failure by not completing the task and try again. He wonders why that save, reload, play, reload, play, style seems so boring on the surface but can actually be enjoyed by the player. Perhaps it has to do with this sort of ancient enjoyment of fixing previous mistakes and trying again, people might just enjoy 2nd chances. I can attest to doing a lot of play, reload, play, reloading myself and I feel that the pay off of finally getting it right is worth the previous failures.

As a final note Mircea used the word “biocosmic” and I rather enjoyed it.

Reading Response

The first chunk of the Persuasive Games reading had to do with historical games and how playing through these docugames gives the player chance to play through a perspective on a historical event and see how the designer colors the experience. The Waco game seemed very intriguing as not only does it show what happened during that siege but having to use the cult’s interpretation of Revelation to activate certain powers means you can more easily understand what exactly was so radical about their theology.

The second part I felt was more pertinent to our discussion, more explicitly to how games can condense vast fields of knowledge into more digestible fragments such as the very nebulous concepts of “Grassroots Politics” or just “Politics” into games like Howard Dean Takes Iowa. Using such simplified forms of messier real world concepts could be useful to illustrate many messy religious concepts. The first thing that popped into my head are sorts of introductory game to various religions where being a member of that religion is condensed into easier to conceptualize bits that the player can then play through and get a better idea of what people are talking about when that religion is discussed.