Past Intermediaries and Mediators. Metaphysics gone wild!

EDIT: I forgot to re-establish the initial thought I had with the rest of it. I'll try and fix it.

So, in this quest for understanding of Bruno Latour we have entered a new realm of understanding why there is no such thing as a group, only group formation. It is such a stange thing, something i do not understand entirely yet. I suppose I have been saying this for a while but it is getting there! The fact that I am getting there is a sure sign that trudging through all of this work is most definitely worth it. We get now to this idea that groups are constantly being made and that there is no such thing as inertia in the social realm. Latour writes:

"For the sociologists of associations, they make all the difference in the world because there exists no society to begin with, no reservoir of ties, no big reassuring pot of glue to keep all those groups together. If you don't have the festival now or print the newspaper today, you simply lose the grouping, which is not a building in need of restoration but a movement in need of continuation. If a dancer stops dancing, the dance is finished. No intertia will carry the show forward.

It is an interesting idea that at any given moment a group might disappear altogether. For the gaming world, I have been thinking about what this means. I think that first I need to further describe what I mean about Gaming.

Gamespace is the place where you play a game. McKenzie Wark calls this place a cave. Unlike most networks, the Cave is different from the real world. For gamers, they exist inside the cave, inside gamespace. Wark calls the cave, "...a world of pure agon, of competitive striving after distinction."

The network of gaming and gamers has existed since the initial creation of home consoles. You could argue that the arcade created these gamers, and it did, but the arcade was a vessel in which the game was introduced, the innovation of home gaming created a private sphere through which almost all other innovation in gaming was done. I will not make a differentiation between PC gaming and Console gaming simply because, like the arcade, the PC was a vessle through which innovations requiring larger components (monitors with higher resolutions, networking capabilities, and bigger processors) made their path into the console.

Gamespace is unique because you can turn it off. While the gamer will think about their games with the game off, they do have a switch through which gamespace begins and ends. This is contrary to Wark who seems to imply that the cave is where gamers exist and only exist but I believe this to be an insufficient explanation for the entirety of gamers.

Types of gamers can be split into several categories. For me, there is the hardcore gamer, the casual gamer, and the 'when i have to' gamer. The first are the ones who keep the gaming industry going. They are the people who mediate the actor-network "gaming" and they also can be intermediaries while switching between consoles. These are the guys who convince everyone else that their console is the best. Once that console has enough support, the group for that forms mediaries and the group's dance begins. The second, the casual gamer, are the ones who might enjoy playing games, but simply don't have the time to devote to them like the previous group does. These guys are the ones who buy into the hype when they, one lazy sunday afternoon, decide that they need a game system; they end up picking a system not based on their own choices, but on the choices and feelings of others. The later of the three could be family members, grandparents, or any of the other people who only play video games if a controller is shoved into their hands. Any of the people associated with these groups can flow within all three categories.

By all three of these categories, i mean to say that while a gamer may or may not be a hardcore gamer for each available system, they can be casual on some and not others; indeed, they could even just play a game system when it's available to them. These systems are also not linked to time. While a system may have been out of date when the new systems came, a hardcore network of gamers may keep a system going for quite some time. However, when this happens, the casual and later group may not be present at all or, if nostalgia comes in, they could play this system more than any other. Game networks vary wildly, just like any other network.

It is a slippery slope, throwing gamers into three categories, and quite honestly it is contrary to what Latour calls for through ANT. However, I believe it is necessary given the current impetus of the current generation of gaming. It actually matters for this group. I think that exploring why it has to matter here is of great importance. But first, we'll move on to the building blocks of something further back in scope, metaphysics.

We move now into metaphysics, a subject of great importance to Latour. Metaphisics, as I understand it, is looking to, "define the basic structure of the world." I guess I would call these the a priori assumptions through which the entirity of our social lives is founded. Latour is interested in exploring "...the actor's own metaphysics (51)". He calls for this by saying that Sociology has been, "...abstaining from metaphysics altogether", and has been, "cutting all relations with philosophy, that fanciful and non empirical discipline which represents the lowly infancy of the now mature social sciences."

While I am not of a philosophical nature, I do understand his point and I have been thinking about this in terms of gaming (I know, I know, logical leaps...but this is a blog so please forgive the logic leaps).

We look now to Johan Huizinga and his book "Homo Ludens: A study of the play element of culture". This book looks at how the play, the rules of play in early, pre-civilization humanity created the building blocks upon which all of humanity currently rests. Let's think about telescoping. I'm a hunter with a small band of humans. We can't really speak but we can communicate well enough to get through some basic interactions. Let's say that there is a boar over there in the woods and I've created a spear. I look at the boar and point to my head and throw the spear through the boar's head. Well, over time these rules end up becoming some sort of rite of passage. Take these rites of passage and attach more rules to them and you have more complex rules of the game, the rite of passage, take this and telescope it several thousand years, and you have society. All of our creation rests on the crazy rules a couple hunters made one day when outside their tribe, bored.

This is an overly simplistic approach to this book, Huizinga was a genius and I really feel this book and it's ideas were swallowed by the times it was published in (like 2 years before WWII). However, it isn't the creation of society we are so much interested in as we are what he thinks of society now and how it relates to video games. We move now to his ideas on contemporary society:

"The question to which we address ourselves is this: To what extent does the civilization we live in still develop in play-forms? How far does the play-spirit dominate the lives of those who share that civilization? The 19th century, we observed, had lost many of the play-elements so characteristic of former ages. Has this leeeway been made up or has it increased?

It might seem at first sigt that certain phenomena in modern social life have more than compensated for the loss of play-forms. Sport and athletics, as social functions, have steadily increased in scope and conquered ever fresh fields both nationally and internationally.

Contests in skill, strength, and perserverance have, as we have shown, always occupied an important place in every culture either in connection with ritual or simply for fun and festivity. Feudal society was only really interested in the tournament; the rest was just popular recreation and nothing more. Now the tournament, with its highly dramatic staging and aristocratic embellishments, can hardly be called a sport...

Now, with the increasing systamatization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure play-quality is inevitably lost. We see this very clearly in the official distinction between amateurs and professionals. It means that the play-group marks out those for whom playing is no longer play, ranking them inferior to the true players in standing byt superior in capacity. The spirit of the players is no longer that true play-spirit; it is lacking in spontinaity and carelessness. This affects the amateur too, who begins to suffer from an inferiority complex...In modern social life, sport occupies a place alongside and apart from the cultural process (195-197)."

I didn't want to quote this much of his work but condensing it to my own words just wouldn't be enough. We're seeing these things happen now, in gaming. Professional gaming events are just now popping up on television (and especially in South Korea's electronic sports stadium).

However, the video game is one of the last true elements of play in our society. It is a play space that is left entirely of the imagination and while it strayed somewhat away from the general populace, it has begun to find it's way back. It is as if video gaming can remind us all that the Plato based definition of play "for children and animals" might just be the wrong one.