A few years ago, before I got too heavily involved in institution-building
and administration to pursue the idea actively, I thought that of all the
phenomena of contemporary culture, the most interesting new developments
lie in video- or computer (more formally these days Digital) games.
Their strong popularity and rapid growth show that they meet some deep-felt
needs. They are also the cutting edge of semiotic mediation as tool and
resource. They undo the overt passivity of television, their most direct
predecessor in popular media, and they can tell us a great deal, if we know
how to ask, about how meanings are made across media, across attentional
spaces, in real time, on multiple timescales.
So now that I am once again free to pursue research (yea!), this is the
field I'm moving into. And so are many others, starting with senior
researchers like my friend Jim Gee (we are the ones who can best tolerate
the academic skepticism toward the medium), but now also including more and
more new researchers who are themselves products of the first videogame age
(the arcade game era) and in most cases players of one sort of digital game
or another. As often happens, I think, artistic and popular media embody
the very latest (i.e. most recently noticed, or "discovered") principles of
intellectual theory (multimodality, intertextuality, rhizomatic
constellations, hypertextuality and traversals, multi-scale mediation,
emergence, etc.). But not usually in the most academically respectable
form, because we academics are supposed to be culture snobs, perhaps as
part of our "critical alienation". As Mike says, we have to play against as
well as along with that distancing stance. It also helps, at my age, to
bridge the cultural gap to a world of much younger sensibilities. Every
Other is a teacher.
Part of understanding digital games as a complex medium/genre is clearly
some sort of theory of "play". Game theorists do talk of Mead, and
Huizinga, and Caillois. Not all play, clearly, takes the form of games.
Games are of many sorts, potentially with diverse cultural and
developmental functions, or affordances. As for role-taking, so called RPGs
or role-playing games are one of the most popular genres of digital games,
especially with younger players. They descend from face-to-face
around-the-table games, similar to dice or card games but with a focus on
the joint construction of fantasy adventure storylines and
player-interaction, most famously "Dungeons and Dragons". In these games
each player constructs for him (less often her) -self a game character,
which explores the options within a _role_, which is in turn defined
_relationally_ to other roles in a group. Successful adventures require
teamwork, playing a role in a group that is "balanced", i.e, has players
who are playing other complementary roles (e.g. sorcerer, warrior, scout,
thief) in your party. In more complex versions, there are shades of grey
between protagonist and antagonist roles, and you may design your character
in terms of their moral stance, belief system, etc., and then play within
these broad role definitions. The interest comes from the emergent and
unpredictable possibilities inherent in various combinations of player
choices, random events, properties of magical objects, actions of
antagonists, etc. The players work not just to perform a role, but to
create a good story.
So in this play genre at least, role-taking is complementary, and
identities are relational within a sociocultural system. Players often
re-play the same games taking other roles, and digital games are considered
more desirable to the extent that they afford this possibility and result
in genuinely different experiences when playing in different roles. Here
play fills its classic role in learning and development: to let us safely
experiment with the system of options allowed by the culture/society. But
that is clearly not its only function, nor even probably the most direct
source of its interest. Many other affective-developmental needs are being met.
In such a context, it is not surprising that all sorts of cultural
ideologies get played out and embodied in these games. Like television, and
perhaps even more so, they are a mirror of much else in our culture: gender
role ideologies, gender-stereotypical emotional appeal, middle-class
fascination with physical strength and violence, the fascination with power
on the part of vulnerable children and young teens, the appeal of revenge
action for frustrated boss-hating cubicle workers (the powerful enemies to
be defeated are conventionally called "bosses", though the derivation is
not work-related), etc., etc. There are other game genres in which you
just shoot people, or more often nonhuman monsters. There are
puzzle-solving adventures. There are historical simulations (derived from
table-top replays of famous battles) and interactive alternate history
"diplomacy" games. There are highly interactive, collaborative games. There
are games of exploration in virtual worlds. There are games of sociological
simulations, both macro and micro, right down to simulations of individual,
family, and community social life (very popular with female players).
These arts imitate life. Will our future lives, our beliefs, values, policy
choices, etc. come to imitate aspects of the games? There are many possible
answers, and reasons to expect various relationships ... As with the
movement of scholars between engagement and disengagement, what matters is
what gets carried back.
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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