This has been a nice break but I think it’s time to start moving forward again.
Many thanks to Sande Chen and Altug Isigan for letting me get some ideas about the predictability of game success over at Game Design Aspect of the Month. It is perhaps the most frustrating thing I have written as it was a wide variety of complicated ideas that I am still fleshing out. I felt that the exercise of writing that entry has opened up a wide-variety of topics for me...topics I have avoided for quite some time.
I find myself coming full circle back to the idea of modernization as a factor of all things. Only, I feel like the way I’ve been writing about it is, while not incorrect, a more difficult way to go about discussing it.
As of…maybe 1989, modernization theory as a possibility has sort of ended and gone two different ways. First, modernization is an a priori assumption of most globalization theories. These theories almost universally accept that we are globalizing whether we like it or not. A lot of the work on this idea talk about terms like “progress” and “inevitable” yet none of them really take a step back to look at any alternatives, any ideological possibilities. Essentially, almost all of them say it cannot be stopped now. It is as though we all stopped trying to fight it and are now academically fighting over who will end up being more right about how things will turn out.
Second, we have post-modernism. Basically, this is an ‘all-bets-are-off’ argument in social science. All methods are broken, all ideas are their own thing, all things are wrong. This was a product of feminism…or rather, a by-product of it; the convalescing of a multitude of new ideas as females entered the world of academia, science, and all aspects of knowledge production. It has many unique characteristics that make it worth reading about but is so convoluted that it is more like looking into an art museum only to find that all of the art has been painted over or modified. Who knows what was there before, it seems not to matter.
With both of these theories comes a question. What does modern mean? To that, I offer my personal favorite: Latour’s definition of modern, it is two sets of practices:
1. Translation, a practice in which humans create a ‘hybrid’ of nature and culture (e.g. Video Game, Computer, Furnace, Lawn Mower, etc).
2. Purification: two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings and that of nonhumans.
These two sets of practices rely on each other in that we need to understand humans and nonhumans in separate realms. However, in order for nonhumans to appear, we need to simultaneously understand that they are separate from us while their creation is the antithesis of that. These two ideas are a paradox.
Afterall, the act of translation takes a piece of our culture (e.g. the need to make a screen that will show millions of colors at once) and the components of nature that will allow us to do this, and combine them in such a way that A). It sells and B). does what it needs to. However, in society we do not accept nonhumans as actors in our fate. Or, if we do, it is as an adversary at best. Modern, to be modern, is to accept nonhumans as active components in our lives. Yet, we do not, at least not entirely. In many ways our minds still resemble those of our modernization movement from the enlightenment. As Simmel said, “Not much has changed since then aside from our technology.” That technology isn’t cultural change is a testament to this hypothesis.
In short, the spark needed to move us from modernizing to post-modern has yet to appear. We cannot co-exist with our creations as equals or acknowledge them as part of ourselves.
Coming back to video games, we see them as a non-human, but not as a part of us. Indeed, this question raises some interesting points, ones that I want to explore over the next few months:
1. As a hybrid, what portions of culture and nature are video games coming from? What role do video games play in creating a truly modern mind?
2. Through modernization theory, what aspects of video games are never considered by those making them? What a priori assumptions are there when a game maker starts making a new game?
3. As globalization has gone on, Japan moved from the periphery after WW2 to the Semi, to the Core. As it has done so, manufacturing of removable media moved from Japan, to China, to South Korea, to Vietnam, back to China, and then to Taiwan. This is not an absolute as there are companies in all three of the manufacturing nations (South Korea, China, and Taiwan) but is generally true. In the manufacturing of video games, what changes in production lead to these changes?
I look forward to examining these ideas.
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