The theme of these articles seems to be the pretty standard two sides of the argument about violence in video games. This is after discounting the third view of “It’s just a game” with all the magic-circle baggage that brings. The two sides are roughly as such

Side 1 – Video games create a realistic environment in which players enact violent acts. This is similar to training VR simulators used by all sorts of group for all sorts of purposes, including the Army for combat training. Ergo video games with violence are training players to commit violent acts.

Side 2 – Like sacrifice of old or other “scapegoat” traditions, the virtual enactment of violence leads to a sort of violent catharsis in which violent impulses are purged.

With all of our research it seems that the most important aspect of virtual reality is intent. What you bring in determines what you are going to take out. So for those who go into virtual gaming with a sense of “It’s just a game, let me enter my magic circle and blast some alien scum”, then they create that magic circle and get a -blasting. For those who enter with an extreme propensity for violence, then the gaming might train them to kill or weaken their already faltering resistance to the idea of real and enacted violence. Or some enter into the gaming world with some great rage and frustration and say “Well, I can’t stab my boss but by golly I can stab some orcs.” and they stab some orcs and social order is preserved. The difference between that second and third scenario seems to be the mental will of the player and if he or she is able to keep that psychic barrier between enacted virtual violence and real violence separate.

Of course with a view like “intent is key” it’s really hard to do meaningful analysis because every experience is then different and subjective. But if that’s where the evidence is pointing, guess you gotta follow it.

The one that interested me most was the one that was a critique of Turner’s liminality as a universal concept. It’s nice to see such dissenting views since we have been discussing liminality as some sort of given when discussing ritual. One minor point of confusion I had with her work had nothing to do with ritual studies but she said that medieval Christianity was marked by asceticism and anti-dualism(joy in creation and physicality). I have no idea how one can be both ascetic and have this great joy in physicality. Beyond that it was very interesting to see how she felt that many women’s experience in religious ritual were more static than liminal. Now this could relate to virtual reality where my completely factually unfounded and probably media-stereotype influenced view informs me that women are more interested in things like SecondLife which are more continuations of real social life while men are more interested in things like CounterStrike where you log on, have some liminal havoc, and then log off. That’s just a first unfounded impression.

On the work about “Video Games of the Oppressed” I feel the author has completely unrealistic expectations for the gaming industry. He’s taking a theater model used by free, not-for-profit theaters in Brazil and hoping that huge for-profit corporations such as the one that has created The Sims will suddenly adopt it. The Aristotelian model is preferably for profit-driven media because the linearity and necessity of the author makes it easier to turn into a profitable enterprise because it isn’t recrafted and redistributed by the people. So the author’s rebuttal to Zimmerman’s very telling critique that such “open-source” games already exist is a faulty one.

The thrust of this article’s argument is that Civilization is ultimately a game that claims the Western model of development that lead up to the United States is the ultimate method of development. The reason for this claim is that there is only way to advance in the game, through the pre-determined “tech tree” that leads a civilization from knowledge of the alphabet to knowledge of missiles. While the player can determine in what order a few various technologies are researched, in general there is only one way to advance and that way is the one that Western civilization went.

Near the end the author gets into some embodiment questions about what it’s like to be virtually embodied as “The State”. First of all the author claims that the game implicitly argues that almost all economic, cultural, and military power is concentrated in the hands of a like minded cabal of capitalists or aristocrats since the player can command their civilization with little to no problems. So this means that actually the player is not being embodied as “The State” but as the cabal of rich and powerful who run the state and civilization.

It was an interesting look at how something that is not explicitly argumentative like Civilization, because Sid Meier constantly speaks about how he doesn’t let his views influence his programming in interviews, can still be arguing something with procedural rhetoric. The author wrote before Civilization 4 came out, and Civilization 4 does include religion which would have been good for him to discuss for our course but alas he did not. As it stands now when I look at religion and look at his work I would think the author would argue that Civ 4 argues for religious pluralism. Each religion is equally mechanically advantageous for a Civilization and “collecting” religions by founding as many as you can is good for your score, culture, and diplomatic relations. Thus the game implicitly argues that one should try and get as many religions as possible, but you still have to choose one to be your “state religion” even under a “democracy”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So evidently I posted the article I was supposed to write about last week instead of writing about the IF article. So I know this isn’t relevant to the topic of Community but after re-reading the IF section after our discussion I had some thoughts.

The parser as a God figure struck me as an interesting parallel, especially when Eve discusses how liberal a parser may interept the PC’s actions and it made me think of Judaism. Precisely I mean that a conservative parser, like a conservative/Orthodox conception of God requires that everything be done correctly in the correct order piece by piece. God isn’t going to generously assume that you meant to do right thing, you have to actually do it. On the other hand more liberal conceptions of God think that the little nitty-gritty of the Law aren’t terribly important and so instead of, in IF parlance typing “keep kosher” followed by “rest on Shabbos” and then “Love God” would be the more conservative, Orthodox way while just typing “Love God” and the parser inserting the others would be the more liberal interpretation.

And then the question of what IF has to say about free will is terribly interesting. I feel like it does create a sort of Western-theist view of free will in the sense that yes, you have it, you are allowed to try and do whatever you want. What makes it Western-theist though is that there is pretty much only ONE way to get it right, and to do that you have to negotiate the right path with the parser(God) until you reach the end. Ending up muddled, confused, and lost without any idea as where to go next could be compared to a crisis of faith and just quitting is like giving up on religion and you never get to see the glorious end. It’s an idea.

Also, there was a fire-alarm when I was writing the Reading-post for Monday so I’ll quickly finish that thought.

Communitas reminds me of internet communities. The author was saying that Communitas is needed for healthy societies and I thought that maybe when organized religions allow the more chaotic flow of internet chatrooms or discussion boards to enter more thoroughly into their structure that maybe it will revitalize some really sagging, heavily hierarchical religions like Catholicism.

The first ritual readings was a classic one about sacred vs. profane. I’ve heard a lot about the theory so it was interesting to actually get to read it. What really struck me was the line about how people fear mixing sacred with profane because they feel the profane will “infect” the sacred. That fear is a strong component of many peoples’ fear of using technology in religion I feel. That somehow by portraying Jesus on bytes or some of these other controversies that somehow the profanity of profane objects will leech over and foul the sacred.

At the same time though, the sacred/profane divide seems a little artificial as there are things which cross that divide quite regularly. Wine is a great example example, for pagans or Christians it could both be sacred libation or delicious dinner complement. So then couldn’t the same happen for technology?

The other reading showed the concept of communitas. All I could think as the author was describing communitas is how much it sounded like an internet forum or things of this kind. Then thinking about the idea that communitas is needed for social, fire alarm.