It comes to my attention, in writing about video games and thinking about sociology, that video games are something of a mystery to sociology. Take, for instance, the definition of video games from the blackwell dictionary of sociology:
Video games are played via a dedicated console connected to a television (e.g., Sony's Play Station) and computer games are played on a personal computer, or PC. These two forms of digital play comprise a lucrative sector of the global entertainment complex, an immersive, simulation-based interactive medium, a high-profile domain of youth-oriented popular culture, and a preferred leisure activity for millions of media consumers. Emerging early in the new millennium, game studies is the field of multidisciplinary scholarship devoted to the analysis of video and computer games.The origins of digital play lie in the US military–university complex. Cold War-era technologies that were intended to combat the “socialist threat” and to boost industrial productivity were turned upside down – from work to play – when, in 1962, student hackers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Spacewar?, one of the first computer games. This breakthrough was harnessed in the 1970s by Atari, the US corporation that led the transformation of digital play into a cultural industry. A harbinger of the “information society,” the spread of video arcades and the launch of the first home-based consoles in the 1980s saw interactive entertainment suffuse cultural space, commodify “free time,” and prepare many young people for the digital age.
There are some assumptions here that I have been thinking about. First, that video games prepared youth in the 80s for the digital age that was about to come. I'd say that video games were a product of the digital age and computers themselves did this. Video games were just another mode of showing the current digital display technology. But then I started thinking of other things.
Now, video games do have some impact on our lives. No, i'm not talking about leading to murdering terrorists or killing your sister, i'm talking about creating or changing the a priori knowledge, the metaphysics for your action. While I typically try and espouse the academic sources, i'll use some blogs. Take for instance: TCBAGS from Brainy Gamer. Would this have happened to someone who didn't play games? Has the video game had an impact on real world people? Everyone in that thread would say yes.
The other side of that coin is what we bring with us into the game. Mia Consalvo in There is No Magic Circle says that the real world knowledge, our real world circumstances. She says:
"Because of that, we cannot say that games are magic circles, where the ordinary rules of life do not apply. Of course they apply, but in addition to, in competition with, other rules..." (Consalvo 2009: 9)The magic circle is what we enter when we play a game, it is the boundary of game space. It comes from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens. What Consalvo says is that there is real life that exists within the magic circle, we bring it in with us. Can we really call game space a pure place?
So, here we have two associations. The first is the link between the magic circle and real life and the other is between real life and the magic circle. While gameplay does stop when the game is finished, we often think about and act upon victory or defeat. Those feelings are real. I (and this is anecdotal evidence at best) still remember that tragic moment of complete and utter defeat when my linkshell in Final Fantasy 11 fought a dragon for 15 hours and eventually gave up. I was shocked, dismayed, destroyed. I didn't play anything for a day or two, I didn't do anything. That is an extreme example. Later, that same linkshell would defeat that same dragon in 20 minutes. But it serves as a reminder at just how serious some video games can be.
If you look up news on video games on google news, it won't take long to see a news media outlet linking video games to violence, video games to ADHD, or any manner of derogatory statements. If you look further, there is another movement (and i'll call this the James Paul Gee area) that looks at how video games are a benefit to learning and making sense of the world. What both of these stances agree on is that video games are doing something to us.
So, all of this arguing over what exactly is happening probably isn't as important to me as the simple thought that playing a video game does something to us. Now, from there, I suppose I need to pick a side but that is for another time.
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