A Fool's Way Out, the Harry Potter Experience

So I saw the new Harry Potter movie tonight. It was odd sitting in a movie theater with Mom's, Dad's, Little Kids, Big Kids, and Elders alike. We were all watching the same movie but i'd imagine we all had different thoughts, different experiences with it. I keep thinking about a phrase that has stood out in my mind as I slog through volume after volume of modern / post modern literature, "Multiple experiences of one experience."

Millions of people have, by now, seen the Harry Potter movie. Each of them, all of them, have had some experience with it. Our baggage we carry around, our emotional state, our differing amounts of empathy, sympathy, and numbness all create a variety of emotions that will be tipped by something in this movie. Really, any movie could fit this bill but Harry Potter has a special place for you to sit in. I head back to that phrase again, "Multiple experiences of one experience."

It's so silly a concept when we think about it, post modernism. How is it that we can each be living in our own reality, how is it that we can all exist as ourselves in this world without any true means through which to connect, truly connect, to each other. We try so hard to do it. Books, movies, epic stories from olden days all hint at a love, a thing, an event, a place that all of humanity was on the same page, doing that one thing that did us all any good. I head back to that phrase again but with it comes a bit of a longer explanation. "Multiple experiences of one experience; tragedy is the easy way but hope creates the means through which we connect meaningfully."

We're in such a strange world right now. The enlightenment way of thinking has failed. We can't measure everything, we can't fix everything and worst of all, we can't make everyone be modern. We're at war right now with a group of people so different from us that we can't do anything but villainize them. We can't do anything to them but call them terrorists forgetting the fact that we too, once had to be like them. Once upon a time, we were much worse than them. The only problem is, we don't worship god the way they understand god to be. "Hope creates the means through which we connect meaningfully."

I'm going to posit something here that is probably obvious. Harry Potter allows us to feel a connection to the people in the movie theater to us. I think this is obvious. He's been around for 6 years now, longer if you take in the books. However, the setting that Harry Potter takes place in is the thing that keeps us together. It keeps us together through hope. We watch, those of us who are willing to, and wonder what it must be like to sling magic around. What would it be like to conjure up some Patronus charm. What would it be like to repair a broken house with a flick of the wrist?

We have hope that some magical world exists out there for us to connect to each other with. We hope that some new world to explore will help us connect to each other and forget this insane amount of misunderstanding and a priori assumptions about people who aren't like us. We hope that we can just magically make all of those misunderstandings go away through magic, through some thing that people just haven't noticed yet. We connect to each other, we, the so-called moderns, connect to each each other modern through the hope that movies like Harry Potter brings. It's this hope that keeps us going. It's this hope that at some moment, that feeling of being part of something amazing appears. It's warm, it brings a smile to our faces and we don't know why. We feel like each and every person in the room is feeling the same way we do. We feel it in our stomachs. It feels weird at first but it takes us over.

It's so unlike tragedy. Tragedy brings us together but it feels hollow. We might see that person we shared tragedy with later and, if we didn't know them before, we probably won't say anything, or if we do it's too uncomfortable to want to continue. With hope, it doesn't matter. We experience it, we live it, we take it in, and we move on with our lives. The fact that we all lived in the same moment, regadless of what we brought to the experience, doesn't take away that magical feeling of togetherness; it's just so fleeting.

Video games have lost this magic, if they ever had it at all. Video games are terrible, horrible, awful things. Unlike movies, unlike books, unlike music, video games cling to tragedy. We have to overcome a challenge, we have to overcome horror, we have to overcome adversity. We do this, we subject ourselves to it and when we're done we're rewarded with an ending that reflects how well we watched the story unfold, how attentive we were. The magic, the feeling, that hope isn't there. We didn't share it with anyone, we didn't experience any sort of togetherness, we just shared a single moment of tragedy with a person we will never see, with a team of faceless people we will never meet. It's as uncomfortable as meeting that person who was there when a friend died. It's as fun as meeting a person at a high school reunion that used to go out with a friend who shot themselves in a hotel one June evening. It's as fun as bumping into the sister of the guy who flew out of the truck and broke his neck when heading back into the woods.

If video games want to be taken seriously, they need to figure out how to capture this magic. They need to figure out how to introduce an impulse for action, that hope that creates the truly happy feelings that we live out in those random times. Video games can't be, can't always be about tragedy. It's the easy way out, the cowards way out, and it's getting boring.

With not a single indignent bone in my body, I ask you to prove me wrong.

Modernity, Perception, Failure, Post.....Modern?

If there is one thing I’ve learned in all my years of schooling, it is that one should question just about everything. It is never folly to write about something as it always has its reward. While it is useful, it can be sort of bothersome; those who manage to do it lead thankless existences with little to nothing to show for it other than a long line of people unhappy with the things you’ve questioned and a longer list of regrets over the failed wording that caused the few people who read our stuff to misunderstand.

The problem with this, aside from the lack of friends and abundance of people who would love to show you how wrong you are (by proving you right in a longer stem of things), is that everyone ever created, manufactured, or dispensed lives with a set of internal contradictions the like of which hasn’t really been seen in that exact way before or since.

What does that have to do with anything? It mostly has to do with perception. How we perceive things has an influence on just about every aspect of our existence. In this post we look at the perception of the world and how it relates to video games. Namely, we will be looking at the ideology of the enlightenment and its power to shape perception in a specific way.

It is difficult to look at video games through sociology and not feel as though I’m developing something of a, “Communism, but with video games!” or “Functionalism, BUT WITH VIDEO GAMES!” feel. This isn’t what I am trying to do. What I am trying to do is look at how video games fit, given social theory, into pop culture or society at large. What pop culture makes it into games and how does the interpretation of another culture’s pop references morph? I want to look at questions like: What does it mean to play a video game from there? What does it mean to create one? And look at it from a place that isn’t psychology, anthropology, ludology, or even sociology in its pure sense. The theoretical realm is not an easy place to live.

I have thought about ludology quite a bit. The name “Ludology” confines itself to the study of Video Games yet derives from the Latin word for play, a word that was also used in the book Homo Ludens in the 1940s, a flagship book of the study of play. Ludology is concerned with video games as a cultural artifact. This is a multi-disciplinary placeholder for the study of video games from a variety of perspectives. This is great; however, it bothers me that it starts and ends with video games; ludology should study the entirety of play. But then, I am fretting over something that doesn’t matter in the long run. The important point is to not ignore the non-video game aspects of the video game. To do so would make put a very limited scope on a very large area.

So, where do I want to identify myself? As it stands, I am unsure as to where I want to fit into this weird world of academic boundaries. No doubt the ego and identity of the ‘ludology’ group is established insomuch as in the popular media, so I am trying to just do what I feel is proper and calling it a work in progress.

One of the unintentional things I had started to become conscious of was how much I hate using quotes from other author’s works. It drives me crazy, it’s like hiding behind someone else’s work and not bothering to formulate your own words. The thing I decided was to try and sum up, use the quote, and offer a link to the source. My unintentional method ends up trying to show more information for people interested in things more or outside of ludology and/or video game studies.

This exposition is useful in that it moves us toward the exercise that is this blog. However, there are some things we need to do first. As with all things scholarly, we begin with conceptualization. For this piece, I am concerned with:

Modernization / Modernity
Post-Modernism
Feminist Theory
Conflict Theory
Privilege
Otherness
Methodology
Symbolic Interactionism

Before we think about video games, I wanted to define modernity and get into a couple of Latour’s pieces. The definition of modernity (From The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology) is:

“Modernism is a particular view of the possibilities and direction of human social life. It is rooted in the enlightenment and grounded in faith in rational thought. From a modernist perspective, truth, beauty, and morality exist as objective realities that can be discovered, known and understood through rational and scientific means. Not only does this view make progress inevitable but it provides a basis for increased control over the human condition and increased freedom for the individual.”

Postmodernism is defined as …

”what we experience as social life consists primarily of how we think about it, and there are diverse and changing ways of doing that. There are no societies, no communities, and no entities that exist as fixed entities. There is only an ongoing stream of conversations, abstract models, stories, and other representations flowing across every level of social life…”

There are three books that I wanted to discuss as they are based on a perception that is mostly contrary to popular theory in Sociology (popular theory being posited above from a dictionary). I could list way more but I am or want to remain at least somewhat brief.

They are:

The Desecularization of the World by Peter L. Berger 1999
We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour 1993
War of the Worlds: What About Peace? By Bruno Latour 2002

We will begin with Peter Berger. He began, toward the end of the science wars, to talk about how the world was not becoming a secular, scientific utopia. The concept of modernity in his book The Desecularization of the World. He says that the perception that the world was growing scientifically while at the same time secularizing the world is something of an upside down myth. Science does not necessarily destroy or kill faith or religion. As science has increased in complexity, the general populace has roughly stayed the same. Modernity, it seems, has increased our need for something that resembles faith, while the need for church (In Europe more so than in America) has declined. Berger states:

“My point is that the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today…is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled “secularization theory” is essentially mistaken” (2)

Modernity, as it went on through the couple hundred years, proved to be more and more difficult to maintain super saturated in the various modern cultures of the world. This slow movement of, not so much anti-intellectualism, but religiosity was not noticeable until the rest of the traps modernity had for it began to be sprung. It was slow to take effect simply because the elites of society, those in charge of science, education, and various ideological minded institutions of the world could not see from the perception of those who didn’t need science. This is where Latour’s work comes in.

Latour’s earlier book is something of a dated piece by now as the ideas put forth in it have begun making their way into popular culture. Perhaps the Amazon description from the back of the book makes the most sense to post.

“With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.

What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour's analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming--and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture--and so, between our culture and others, past and present.

The argument is pretty straight forward (for Latour). There is a contradiction in the modernity movement; you can see it in all forms of media and throughout history. There is an otherness to modernity, everyone else, and the modern; or, those who accept Science and everyone else. Bruno Latour puts forth an argument on the intertwining of these entities is seen in all aspects of society.

There is an otherness that exists in the language of modernism. Those who are modern, and those who are not quite modern yet. The next book, War of the Worlds, looks at this concept from a world politics point of view. Perhaps the most poignant paragraph out of it, the best descriptor of the main point, comes in the middle of the book:

The modernists were never really at war since they did not recognize the existence of possible conflicts, except in the realm of superficial representations which themselves did not really involve the world of nature as it was deciphered by reason. Is it not astounding that the modernists managed to wage war all over the planet without ever coming into conflict with anyone, without ever declaring war? Quite the contrary! All they did was to spread, by force of arms, profound peace, indisputable civilization, uninterrupted progress. They had no adversaries or enemies in the proper sense – just bad pupils. Yes, their wars, their conquests, were educational! Even their massacres were purely pedagogical! We should re-read Captain Cook or Jules Verne: there were always fights everywhere and all the time, but always for the good of the people. “That should teach them a lesson…” (page 25-26)

What Latour is talking about here is the idea that progress and modernization became more important than the cultures and people that existed in the world. Modernism, starting in the enlightenment, created a call for world-wide unity under the flag of science. Centuries later, this call for unity through the natural world has caused more problems, created more strife, than any of the oppressive regimes that came before modernism began. The flag of modernism ignored all culture, all history; unity under science meant abandoning culture and rearranging the cultural perception of reality that had been around far longer than science and enlightenment thinking.

When modernism began to fail, the modernists became post-modern. This new line of thought was almost completely opposite the flag of modernism. It came through as irreconcilable differences amongst groups meant that we could never agree on a ‘natural world’. This reversal of unity to fragmentation meant that we could and would never be together. Here is where immense conflict, long hiding in wait, reappeared. A great negotiation process between groups needs to begin in order to acknowledge the damage of the past 3 centuries so that we may move forward.

In Sociology, namely through feminism which stems from conflict theory, there is an immense body of work on privilege. This is a concept that isn’t typically manifest in consciousness; rather, it is an unconscious, unseen oppressive ideology that keeps minority groups in check. Another way to talk about this is that this is basically a means through which the dominant group oppresses and controls those not part of the dominant group. Modernity was a form of oppression via introduction of a goal, the Scientific explanation of reality, coming from the dominant group. Latour is speaking here of that oppression. Brenda Laurel writes, in Utopian Entrepreneur:

“I realize invoking the Enlightenment at the dawn of the twenty-first century may strike some as just a bit retro. Enlightenment values such as Reason were mangled in attempts to justify appalling acts of repression, and science has, after all, enabled humans to create technologies of mass destruction. For fifty years, then, we’ve dutifully engaged in a critique of the Enlightenment and its legacy.” (15)

While the critique of the “Enlightenment and its legacy” has created what Thomas Kuhn would call a paradigm shift, it becomes more complicated than that. This shift in the basic structure of the world is slow and splotchy. It is difficult to see it change and the paradigm shift means that instead of unity under science, we see permanent and irreconcilable fragmentation of the cultures of the world. There is two issues at work, one, learning about disagreement and how to negotiate and two, how to not over react when the dominant group tries to acknowledge and achieve true unity with the minority groups.

We see this through capitalism in that all new companies and new products are designed to imitate and improve upon that which came before it. Anything from outside the realm of reality within an economic system (for instance, a company in Africa trying to sell things in America) is actively squashed with exceptions prevail here through various means like globalization and cultural impulses calling for a return to grassroots. Latour’s report on the destructiveness of modernism is wrapped up when he says:

“For indeed, if modernization cannot give an account of others, since it forces them into a far too exaggerated otherness, how could it give an account of Westerners? The Whites have never been modern, either. If it is unfair to portray the peoples who were civilized as irrational or as archaic survivors on their way towards a single world, it is even more unfair to describe the civilizing peoples as rational and modern…it is equivalent to seeing the Europeans or the Americans with the perspective – all tropical palms, secluded harems and painted savages – that they themselves adopt towards other cultures. In other words, as long as the modernists are taken to be what they say they are, one treats them with the same cheap exoticism one finds disgusting in the tourist brochures when applied to other peoples. Peace negotiations are not possible unless both sides give up exoticism and its perverse complacency with the false difference introduced by the one nature-many cultures divide. Likewise, diplomacy cannot begin until we suspend our assumptions about what does or does not count as difference. There are more ways than one to differ – and thus more than one way to agree – in the end.” (page 42-3)

The two highlighted phrases revolve around the two different issues in the change from modernity. First, a common argument of the dominant group, of whites, is that of reverse racism. This is a defensive mechanism while learning to cope with the changing status. While this is typically a derogatory phrase only meant to foster a spirit that could only be called hostile and angry, it does have something of a basis in usefulness; namely, in the form of first steps.
The creation and use of science since the beginning of the enlightenment has been a useful tool of trying to understand the world around them. While the sentiments, ‘universal science’ and ‘unity of all under science’ has been destructive, the methodology and understanding science itself has brought is useful. We can find more unity through disagreement than we can by trying to force agreement on the entire world. Latour writes:

“Take the example of research. It is one thing to present oneself to the world under the cover of universal Science, and quite another to present oneself as producer and manufacturer of local and risk-laden sciences – with a small “s.” In the first case, the recipients of such an offer only have the option of withdrawing into the irrational, or of humbly changing sides and submitting to the modernists’ pedagogy. The second case is much more uncertain: the sciences make suggestions or “propositions” that lengthen the list of beings with which the common world must be pieced together, but still more propositions may be made by others, making this list even longer and complicating yet further the learned confusion. A universal Science cannot be negotiated and thus it cannot be universalized for good, but sciences that aspire to incremental or emergent universalization can…Independent, asocial matters of fact cannot bring about agreement, but hairy, entangled states of affairs may, in the end. “ (45)

This discussion is part and parcel of the American created sociological theory Symbolic Interactionism. The difference is that where post-modernism would say that we create multiple realities through our interactions and with our cultures, SI says that our interactions form just one complex reality, the reality all around us. The study of this reality is Sociology. From the Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology:

“Interactionists study how we use and interpret symbols not merely to communicate with one another but to create and maintain impressions of ourselves, to forge a sense of self, and to create and sustain what we experience as the reality of a particular social situation. From this perspective, social life consists largely of a complex fabric woven of countless interactions through which life takes on shape and meaning.” (159).

In part, the failure of modernity is the realization that conquering the entire globe with reason and logic created from a singular perspective and not acknowledging the rest of the cultures of the world, creates more problems than solves them. Even if that perception is wrong, discussing it and negotiating the wrongness of the claim can prove more beneficial than simply handing out different books and denying the existence of the previous.

Still, the damage is done. Most things created by the ideologically dominant class has become routine and super-saturated within their super-structures. Because of their absolute adherence to capitalism, competition, and mass production, all art, all games were reduced to a complex series of repetitive tasks. Their only release was through unintentional innovation or manipulation of the magic circle. House rules, variants, and high-stakes replaced the simple pleasure of play.

So what does this have to do with video games?
My basic argument is this: Video Games are an attempt to capture the magic of games that has been removed from the world through enlightenment-based lenses. However, unlike the old pen and paper, or board, games, video games are a combination of several commercially viable scientific principles that rely on the idea of ‘progress;’ meaning, that more of something is better (more realism, more processing power). The magic that had been in the games that video games were attempting to emulate begins where most of the magic was already gone.

Institutionalization of the magic in art had started long before video games came about.
Interactivity has become a goal of video games in the late 20th / 21st century. Combined with this impulse along with a want to portray video games as interactive fiction in which the player takes on the role of the protagonist and controls their movements, video games try to move past their earlier simulation of sport and basic graphic representation. They attempt to portray the thoughts, actions, and tools of professional sports or as a main character in a fight against evil or as an anti-hero. Games have had art attached to them much later in their life, eschewing their structured board game past for a muddled, convoluted path into the structure of story. They are trying to find a path through which money and fortune can be made by attempting to emulate other types of fiction that have been popular in the past but in a new and exciting way. This attachment comes after the principles of modernity failed, the after modern period in which the changes in perception lead to a paradigm shift.

My goal over the next 2 or 3 posts is to further evidence and clarify this argument.