Modern Warfare Questions Towards Gaming continued

I figured I didn't need to provide substantiation for some of the points I made in a post from last month, where I raised quite a few questions about the future of gaming, as usual without any real attempt at answering them:

In the Immanence of Myth, Stephen Hershey does a brief exploration of the military and their utilization of myths in video games to recruit and train, and how these games and the overarching military rhetoric forms a myth that draws in their would-be converts. But that just means they understand something about how to market. Why can't we sell intelligence? Why can't we sell education and team-work without making it hokey and awful? The moral failure isn't the military using these things. It's that no one else does. The fact the military knows games are great recruitment and training tools and yet the schooling system does not? Unconscionable.

However, should such substantiation be needed, take a peek at this piece in the business section of the New York Times:

General Greene, a senior official in the Army’s research and development engineering command, is among a cadre of high-ranking officials pushing for the military to embrace technologies that are already popular among consumers, like smartphones, video games and virtual worlds. The goal is to provide engaging training tools for soldiers who have grown up using sophisticated consumer electronics and are eager to incorporate them into their routine.

The poor military, you see, is having "challenges" in engaging young soldiers (read: children). "His children, he says, are always “buried in a cellphone or an iPad." Of course, most of this article seems to overlook the considerable involvement of the two, in fact the military has to a great extent driven technological advancement for quite some time. Human ingenuity seems to be led by nothing so quickly as the desire to do harm to others. Just look at the history of technology as it parallels the history of warfare. You can't separate them.

This article also glosses over the extent that simulations have been a part of military training for many years, or how FPS games are used as a part of recruitment strategy. It is mentioned, yes, but I think the scope of it on a psychological level is underplayed.

But, ignoring these factors, certainly there are feedback loops both ways, and gaming has less of an impact on the battlefield itself, it is true, than it probably will in the future.

I must once again point out that the same thing is true in our classrooms. Just how long we can go ignoring entertainment and engagement, let alone play, in the methods we use to learn, if we want to hope to compete in the economy of tomorrow? More importantly, at what point, do you think, can we use our creativity for something other than blowing one another up?

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011. (Or sign up to be notified of its release on Amazon.com)

Synchronicity and a Call for Papers - All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming

By Mr. VI

Synchronicity works in funny ways:

I came up with the idea of incorporating Dragon Age 2 into a post on interactivity, incorporation, identity and storytelling. I mentioned this to James and discovered he'd been thinking on ARG's and transmedia projects - you can read some of his thoughts here and listen to an intriguing podcast here on the subject published by the folks who are also publishing the forthcoming Immanence of Myth book.

So this morning, I was cruising through my livejournal friends-list when I came across this:

All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming (more details below after I've finished pontificating)

I know, I know. LJ is so very stone-age, so very Web 1.0 but I love it anyway, even though as writer Warren Ellis says: '[I]t's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands.'

And actually, Warren's a bit of a favourite around here. His epic Transmetropolitan cyberpunk comic series has a main character who seems to have mainlined the Gonzo journalism of the late, great Hunter S Thompson which in turn has inspired the Gonzomentary of the CLARK webseries.

Warren's also no stranger to games either; he wrote the script for the 2001 game Hostile Waters:Antaeus Rising and more recently worked on the storyline for the well known survival horror game Dead Space - which the Call for Papers below actually refers to in terms of 'templarization of history'.

Interestingly enough, I didn't originally intend the remark about LJ to be anything more than a throwaway one - I missed the original reference to Dead Space in the Call, and yet it's there; an acausal connection.

Because here's the thing, narrative doesn't have to flow one single way. As James has already said in his post on time, place and convention of literature:

[O]ur expectations of narrative structure are actually incredibly unnatural. Our cognitive experience is not linear. Someone says something to you. You are reminded of something a few years ago. You wonder about the future. All of these things can happen while you are also walking and other things are happening around you which themselves may have past, present, and future layers occurring simultaneously, again from the perspective of their perception.

Questions Towards A Philosophy of Gaming, Transmedia, and Myth

By James Curcio

As Mr. VI has started to explore, there is a clear connection between games and gaming, and modern myth. However, the layers of this connection cut much deeper than surface analogies. I'd like to look a bit at the process of analysis, or de-construction, that many of the writers here on Modern Mythology have been taking. And I'll keep it to gaming, in hopes of seeing more posting about games of all kinds to come. This is a tip of the iceberg, off the top of my head type of inquiry.

There's a layer of looking at something - let's say a specific game, like Final Fantasy VII and then saying, "look at how this other specific myth was an intentional or unintentional influence..." The villain is named Sephiroth. What does that do for us? Sometimes you can make an interesting point with those analogies. Most college papers work like that- relate Charles Dicken's Tale Of Two Cities to Marx or whatever.

That kind of analysis is OK, we've done some of it here for instance looking at various vampire or apocalypse myths in modern media. But this is generally done as a means of getting a glimpse at a larger picture, or process, at work. So, we're not actually pointing to a deeper relationship which could be represented through the example of the relationship of characters in a Disney film, if we so choose. But we're not scrutinizing Disney.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer
And Philosophy.

We want to look at those deeper trends, the holographic or fractal view one can catch by blowing things up or scaling them down, twisting them around, looking at them in a way that most people might not consider. But it can only be done sometimes through an allegory or metaphor, even in an essay. That is what I would hope to do whether we're talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the "end of history." This approach to analysis is not about 1:1 analogies, "what Hindu goddess are the female character in Buffy?" but instead a new vantage point that we're trying to point out by making associations - top down, bottom up.

For instance, in biology there's the argument that competition drives evolution, and there is a counter-argument that there are co-operative factors. These are two myths, especially when rendered as "evolution is inherently competitive," (and co-operation is incidental), or vice versa. Of course, we can create synthetic myths that encompass both views.

So we're looking at games in myth, right, that's what we're here to do - but we want to cut deeper than just sifting through video games and finding the shallow points of overlap between myth and gaming, like when a mythological character appears, or even the plot-line of a game follows a pattern in a myth - unless if we can draw something insightful out of that association. That's been the goal here. Sometimes, maybe, we succeed and sometimes we stay on the surface. Blog posts have to run fast, you have to hit hard and keep going, so you just keep swinging hard as you can.

Let's take that swing. We've talked about competition and cooperation as ways that we can view evolutionary progress. Where do we find that in gaming? Do some games emphasis one rather than the other, and what are the results of that emphasis? In a narrative sense? In terms of the gamer or participant? The game system elements of competition and cooperation can apply to anything, even SEO. Our world really is a sprawling hub of networked information, and hierarchies are myth-dependent.

A lot of the material written about gaming and its social or cultural effects are some kind of alarmist noise, or they come out in support of gaming. Books and articles are constantly re-acting to this. The first time I can recall it being a major thing was around the time of the Tipper Gore family values thing, and the ripples off of that. Though I'm sure it began before then.

From Techshout

All such stories have stats peppered throughout, to prove their point, and they all allow an opportunity to take a position and spin it towards an overarching thesis. "Video games are destroying our attention span," is a popular myth, but what about ones like "games are actually a fundamental part of how we learn about ourselves and the world and game design that realizes this also must take responsibility for that role, and thusfar it does not"? Is that question too hard to formulate, so we just go for the cheap fear question?

But if we ask that question, suddenly knowledge of the mythic implications of gaming becomes of utmost importance. The only way to know the cultural effects of a myth are to understand the interplay between the two. Our moral myths will sculpt any kind of moral conclusions or presuppositions that we'd draw from this. Throw them out as garbage.

In the Immanence of Myth, Stephen Hershey does a brief exploration of the military and their utilization of myths in video games to recruit and train, and how these games and the overarching military rhetoric forms a myth that draws in their would-be converts. But that just means they understand something about how to market. Why can't we sell intelligence? Why can't we sell education and team-work without making it hokey and awful? The moral failure isn't the military using these things. It's that no one else does. The fact the military knows games are great recruitment and training tools and yet the schooling system does not? Unconscionable. Watch this presentation by Jane McGonigal. It covers what I talk about in this post, and then some, in very direct terms.