Games

This is not a post for everyone. Before you begin, I'd like to give you an idea of what this post contains. First, there is a video of the keynote address at PAX by Wil Wheaton in 2007 where he discusses the social aspects of video games to a convention full of self-proclaimed nerds. PAX is a giant gaming convention built on the foundation of a love of games and gaming. Wil Wheaton is an actor, blogger, and gamer. PAX is a phenomenon in itself, but I want to talk about something broader, which is whether video games are good and/or worthwhile. Following the video are three articles that talk about addictive aspects of games. These are not necessary to read, but interesting. And following that, I respond to the bunch. This entry is mainly about posting the keynote speech and a response.

Wil Wheaton Video (Not Suitable For Work: Very Strong Language, 1 Hour): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4616592653905673144#

Three Critical Articles on gaming addiction:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ErinHoffman/20090916/3065/Life_Addictive_Game_Mechanics_And_The_Truth_Hiding_In_Bejeweled.php
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/07/game-friday-when-does-addictive-play.html
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A second prelude: I am a nerd and I am a geek. That is a fundamental aspect of my identity. Everyone has their own idea of exactly what that entails, but to establish a few implications: I like math, computers, reading, role-playing games, video games, arcade games, card games, distopian universes, speculative fiction, fantasy stories, and dragons. There are other fundamental aspects of my identity, but this is where I’m coming from when I write this. I do not play many different video games, but I have spent a lot of time of a select few.
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Are video games bad for us as a species? Is there anything worthwhile or good about video games? I ask this question because it is common to hear gaming referred to derogatorily. Above and beyond the somewhat rare (though still disproportionately common) accusations of literally killing our youth, the prevailing social thought is that people would be better off not playing video games.
I’d like to begin by comparing video games to art. There is an art to video games. Video games are multimedia (sight, sound, and sometimes touch or balance), interactive presentations. There are video games that are meant to be visual and aural masterpieces. Just as with movies, there are games that commission original scores, original artwork, original stories, but also original game design. Fundamentally, there is nothing in theater, two dimensional artwork, stories, poems, movies, or music that could not be part of a game. In addition, the interactive component can be utilized artistically. There are those that might criticize the commercialization of games, but we live in a world full of commercialized art. There are derivative video games meant to waste time and earn money, but there are plenty of similar books, television shows, and movies. There do exist video games that follow the mantra of art for art’s sake. There are also masterpiece video games that evoke emotions as strong as and convey messages as well as many revered works of art. Some games that are exceptionally crafted include Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, Ocarina of Time, Castlevania, and yes, even World of Warcraft. I will probably recall several particularly well executed and awe inspiring sections of World of Warcraft (WoW) for years to come. In other words, the possibility is there. As with art, we take away nothing physically, but rather a sort of social and cultural capital.
What is wrong with video games?
Frequently, video games are subjected to straw man arguments about social interaction and I think that the keynote address is an excellent starting response to that.
A more pressing concern comes from the three articles. On the more dangerous side of the spectrum, there are games where (quoting article one referring to article three), “the point is to keep you playing long after you've mastered the skills, long after you've wrung the last real novel experience from it.” As mentioned before, video games are not the only art form to fall prey to this vice. There are those people who pass the time watching episode upon episode of a soap opera or a reality show or a high paced series like Lost or 24 or Heroes. The first article discusses some "creepy" (and effective) mechanisms specific to video games to create such devotion.
The main problem is that there are games that don’t end. The problem with the famed addictive games such as World of Warcraft is that they are time sinks. Any amount of time that you put into the game just goes rushing down the drain. This is not as big of a problem with games like Solitaire because there is no incentive to play for ten minutes instead of five. However, games with advancement like Farmville or Diablo II, or the many multiplayer online games take advantage of the time invested to lower their own creative standards for late-game content. It is difficult to develop original content for the 5,000+ hours (2,500 two hour movies) that some (albeit few) people have spent on World of Warcraft.
Even within the games that end, there are aspects of game play that do nothing artistically but only exist to encourage game play. Inherently at the moment, games simplify our options and trivialize failure, which is understandably appealing. Even games that do end take advantage of the time we invest to lower standards. This is not the only way. For example, imagine a model UN video game where players make speeches and arguments that are judged and responded to by other players. Furthermore, “grinding” (or very repetitive actions needed to progress) can also be utilized as a tool to instill emotional connections or convey a message. Fine pieces of art can be achieved without the common level of shortcuts.
In many ways, PAX represents some of the best things about video games. PAX is a convention filled with gamers who inherently tend to be critics. There is legitimate interest in games as a creative creation and finding (and playing) truly exquisite games. In a technological age, video games are one of the greatest expanding possibility frontiers for art and culture. As an example, let us think of the strides that graphic design and game design have taken in the last twenty years. Let us be smart consumers of technological art whether it be mixed with games, movies, music, dance, or museum displays.

"Villa Grimaldi"

Villa Grimaldi
In Chile, there is a place called Villa Grimaldi,
A fossil from Pinochet
Testament to a time when men’s fear swallowed whole their compassion
Another example of a war against the Other, that hideous, greedy, larval enemy

We sat in a classroom first, listening to descriptions
As flashes hammered my memory of tattooed numbers and emaciated photos
How can tragedy have an effect after the Holocaust?
Perhaps a better question is, how can tragedy not have an effect after the Holocaust?

What paralyzed me were the contrasts:
We walked through the park and were shown, -
“Here is where people were tortured” and then,
“Here is where officers’ families would swim, and play guitar, and sing.”
Buildings were thin and the space was small, just an old country villa
And the sounds of screams and laughs would swirl together in the air like blood dripped into water.

The worst was a rose garden, the pride of the officers.
It had roses from all over the world - a thirty-meter spiral of rose bushes
Blossoming in blues and reds and purples and pinks and yellows and whites
Meticulously cared for in the center of the park
And in the open air, in the midst of beauty, the officers would rape the youngest women.
The officers would rape the youngest women and the sound would wash out over the roses, over the park, over the imprisoned, over the newly arrived, until it crashed against the walls and sank into the earth

"I am but a babe"

I am but a babe
I feel as a new babe giraffe, born at 5’7
Barely able to stand and asked to run
I want to say, “I will be ready soon,” but I’m not sure if I will, unless it is demanded now

How do you respond to someone when they tell you that they spent all weekend taking shifts at their mother’s bedside in the hospital?
As a child, we say, “Is there anything I can do?” and “I’m sorry” and return to play with our toys
We look down at our feet and fidget, looking through our eyelashes until they release us
When we ought to lift our necks and look at them

How do you talk about the earthquake?

Chile was recently hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.8, some 63 times greater in magnitude than the 7.0 that recently hit Haiti. At 3:34 on February 27th, I was on a bus in the northern part of Chile, about to be sheltered only a few hours later in a bubble known as San Pedro de Atacama, accurately described as a "tourist mecca." It's a small oasis town in the middle of the Atacama desert where half the people in the town are backpackers from Europe who have traveled to take tours of the breathtaking scenery to the east and south. The scenery is all the more amazing because it is hidden like needles in a haystack among a monotonous landscape of sand and rock that stretches on and on from the sides of roads that seem eternal. In San Pedro, our hostel's internet lay dysfunctional more than half of the time and the two ATMs in town were broken. When I first heard of the earthquake and began to respond to the worried messages of family and friends, I knew less than anyone in the US. Our flight (as with all non-essential domestic flights) was put on indefinite hold. And so, while Chile responded, we were trapped in an idyllic Odyssean paradise - full of worried travelers eager to return home, yet surrounded by arresting sights.
Home is where the heart lies, and as such, I have homes in New Jersey, Boston, Salamanca, and now Santiago. Whenever I travel, it feels like I'm holding my breath. I put my routines on hold and I go somewhere to do something. When I come home, everything goes back to normal. Normal is different in each of the four places, but I feel at home in each one.
For the last ten days, I've watched the news cover the initial impact, the aftershocks and tsunamis which continue, the looting - especially in Concepción, the efforts of the armed forces, the efforts of the volunteers, and more and more, the rebuilding efforts. Tonight, I watched the end of a "Telethon" which raised money to make Chile better after the earthquake. Interspersed between donations by organizations and performances to benefit the relief effort were inspirational videos, interviews, stories, and speeches. It's tough to imagine a telethon in the US that would be taken as seriously. The president Michelle Bachelet and the president-elect Sebastian Piñera both attended and both spoke. The closest thing in my (admittedly short) memory is Comic Relief, a telethon in the US, whose hosts included Robin Williams and Whoppie Goldberg, that raised money for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. This was on a different scale though. I find myself emotional with pride for a country that would not call me its own, but which I claim for myself. There's a commercial that explains that "We've always taught our children that Chile is a country of earthquakes." It shows a grandfather explaining the movements of the earth to his seven year old grandchild. Chile expects earthquakes and is determined to overcome them. Even an 8.8 earthquake will not stop Chile. I have strong hopes that a year from now, Chile will be stronger economically than it was before the earthquake. It is already stronger as a nation.
And yet, there are others with much better claims to talk about the earthquake than myself. I have not yet felt a single tremor. I haven't been to any areas that were damaged with the exception of the airport in Santiago. The worst damage I've seen in person is cracks in the uppermost corner of a single building's facade.
However, the earthquake does put a different lens on the beauties of the Atacama desert. Nowhere else is the tectonic history of the country as immediately obvious.
Here you can see the white stripes in rock from volcanic ash layered amidst rock and sand.Here you can see the volcanoes themselves, often three or four clearly visible from where you are standing. I heard one estimate that Chile has 10% of the world's volcanoes despite covering only 1/200th of the land.Here you can see the mountains formed in ridged waves as the Nazca and Antarctic plates crunch and slide under the South American plate, just under the west coast of the country.Here you can see the salt flats that came about when a lake of salt water was trapped between the newly forming coastal mountains and the older Andes and evaporated. Even today, the difference in the density of the plates contributes to the way mountain runoff water behaves.Here you can see geysers shooting up groundwater from the Andes, heated when it drops down to the level of hot rocks and magma underneath.And always in Chile, the Andes serve as a tremendous reminder. The Chilean people are part of this tectonic ecosystem and that seven year old grandchild will group up resilient in it.