User:Amy Suo Wu/ Video games

Video games and Computing Holding Power, by Sherry Turkle. (from her book The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit)

• video gaming as a form of exercise? Girl plays every day "to keep up my strength".
• video games are a window into a new kind of intimacy

  -> holding power of v.gs are its hypnotic fascination

• holding power of video games - is computer holding power - constructed "rule-governed" worlds
• video games

  -> learning how to learn

  -> figuring out rules

  -> strategy

  -> reflects the computer within

• game is only limited by programmers imagination
• players describe the gaming experience as less like talking with a person and more like players inhabiting someone else's mind. "In pinball you act on the ball. In Pac-Man you are the mouth
• turning to games for more control in life, and when game ends it can lead to a sense of depression (some people turn to material control i.e anorexia)
• v.gs invokes a sense of immersion through imagination and identification
• they feel more like a social encounter
• will the player be the designer of his or her game? (ability to create own world)
• v.gs give a sense of individual liberation. (empowers and yet it is form of escapism)
• escapism-infatuation with the challenge

  -> involvement with simulated worlds affects relationships with the real one

• D&D - more data = more real
• v.gs encourage identification with characters, but leave little room for playing (their?) roles. There are rules, but no empathy.
• For people under pressure, total concentration is a form of relaxation.
• v.gs are infinite (privileged, religious), promise of perfection.
• desire to control inside through action on the outside
• compares a mental disorder (anorexia) to v.g obsessions
• v.gs helps you confront yourself

post reading notes

• Such terms like 'religious', 'spiritual', 'ritual' are often utilized in many new media discourses. In Video games and Computing Holding Power, 'Zen', 'recenter', 'meditation', 'infinite', 'ritual' and religious' are used to describe video game experiences. What is it about technology that evoke a mystical dream of spirituality and of promises of perfection? Why do makers and users alike, in their anticipation to achieve something 'better', glorify and worship these tools as new idols?

• In The Imaginary Book of Media, Eric Kluitenburg argues that "(imaginary media) deals not so much with realised media as it does with potential or possible media: dreamed media, fantasized media; visions of how human communication can be reshaped by means of machines...one of the recurrent ideas uncovered is that somehow these machines would be able to compensate for the inherent flaws and deficiencies of interpersonal communication. The devices then become compensatory machines. They become sites onto which various types of irrational desires are projected." Although Kluitenburg is referring to imaginary media here, one could argue that even in 'realised' media (prime example: internet) there lies a lingering trace of the 'compensation complex', where we attempt to make up for our 'inherent flaws of interpersonal communications'.

• The quote "There is the same desire to control inside through action on the outside" rings closely to religious philosophies like Buddhism. According to Turkle's text computers are the manifestation of the second self, extension of the self and the expression of our internal and external world.

• New technologies mirror and embody our collective hopes, Utopian dreams and jaded disappointments. For example, the ongoing discussion over the revolutionary potential of social media networks such as twitter, facebook, hyves etc