Features
Wii believe
Kester Brewin
Humans now spend three billion hours each week playing video
games. But
Kester Brewin believes the attractions
of the virtual universe may hold
important clues for churches and others seeking deeper social
engagement in the real world.
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A few years ago I was reasonably pleased with what I had
published, and thought that my life was well balanced. I would
write in the mornings, play sport in the afternoons, and read in
the evenings. I also allowed myself some ‘down time’ in the form of
playing video games. I had been moderately successful, and
convinced myself that my discipline and drive would return one day,
just as soon as I hit upon the right project that would demand it.
However, games binges have become more common, and my output has
steadily decreased. I woke at 8am this morning, fully intending to
write this article. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead
until 5pm. It is now 10pm, and I have only just begun work. I
am a self-confessed addict. How bad is my addiction? This bad: a
few months ago, while in Las Vegas, a friend came over who was a
fellow devotee of marijuana and the game Grand Theft Auto.
We wanted to celebrate my purchase of the latest version, and
he brought some ‘extra sweetener’ in the form of an alarming
quantity of cocaine, which he chopped up into a dozen or so lines.
Snorted and loaded, we played the game for 30 hours
straight.
THE NEW NORMAL
You may be relieved to know that the above is not an account from
my own life, but from that of Tom Bissell, who published a frank
account of his relationship with games, drugs and reality in the Observer in March 2010.1 His is
undoubtedly an extreme case, but our concept of what constitutes
‘normal’ against this extremity may need changing. For those who
know little of the gaming community, the raw numbers are
astounding: by the age of 21, the average young American will have
spent around two to three thousand hours reading books, and more
than ten thousand hours playing video games. That is equivalent to
the total of all classroom time they will have spent in secondary
education, and far more than a lifetime’s attendance in church. The
US boasts more than 183 million ‘active’ gamers who play, on
average, around 13 hours per week, and five million ‘extreme’
gamers who play for an average of 45 hours per week – the
equivalent of working full time.
Yet this is not simply an American phenomenon. There are more than
100 million gamers in Europe, 105 million in India, and over 200
million in China. Collectively, human beings are spending more than
three billion hours a week playing video games.
These figures form part of the shocking introduction to Jane
McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken, in which she argues
that this mass exodus from ‘reality’ has to be taken far more
seriously. Gaming is not a fad. It is not going to go away. Any
system that finds itself losing 3 billion hours of participation
each week has to do some serious soul-searching, and these huge
numbers offer a damning critique of reality as many people are
experiencing it, as McGonigal makes clear:
‘In today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling
genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to
satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality does not. They
are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is
not.’2
A PRIMAL HUNGER
Citing the story Herodotus tells of the ancient Lydians who,
facing an unprecedented famine, decided to play games and thus
abstain from food one day, and eat and abstain from games the next,
McGonigal posits that we are facing a parallel situation.
‘Many of us are suffering a vast and
primal hunger. But it is not a hunger for food – it is a hunger for
more and better engagement from the world around us, […] a hunger
for more satisfying work, for a stronger sense of community, and
for a more engaging and meaningful life.’3
What is it that makes games satisfying in a way that ‘real life’
is not? The answer partly lies in their clear and formal
boundaries. From board games to field sports to alternate reality
role plays, games are defined by four traits. Firstly, there has to
be a clear goal that the players work to achieve. Secondly there
need to be rules – valid ways in which these goals are allowed to
be achieved. Thirdly, there is a feedback system, by which players
can measure how close they are to achieving the goal. Lastly, the
game only functions when players accept these rules and participate
voluntarily. There is no forced participation – a rule of
game-playing that sulking students traipsing out for cross country
running might like to bear in mind.
These four defining traits present day-to-day reality with a
grave challenge, for it often has unclear goals and seemingly fluid
rules, which many find it too easy to flout. There is often little
accountability, and people will not feedback encouragingly and tell
us how we are doing. Lastly, reality is far from voluntary and,
contrasting it with gaming, McGonigal variously describes it as
‘too easy,’ ‘pointless and unrewarding,’ ‘depressing,’
‘unproductive’ and ‘hopeless.’ The rise in gaming is thus presented
as a deeply spiritual issue, and an urgent sociological
problem.
ACHIEVEABLE GOALS
I now see that the closest I have come in life to addiction to a
game was during a time teaching at a very difficult school in South
London. A colleague and I would escape the chaos of our classrooms
at break and lunchtimes to load up an emulation of the ancient
arcade game Hypersports. Rendered in blocky graphics, two
players competed in various ‘Olympic’ events, beginning with the
100m sprint, which was run by hitting two keys on the keyboard
alternately as fast as possible. This was then followed by the 110m
hurdles, hitting the space bar to jump, and the javelin, hammer and
high jump. Let’s be clear, at this time, around 2001, there were
far more advanced sports-based games available. But the point was
not to play the best game available, only to play this game that
had set us its challenges. We played something with very
straightforward rules and immediate rewards, and we played
together, in the face of classes of children who refused the
boundaries we tried to set them, and had virtually rejected the
reward systems that the educational establishment had put in
place.
I worked hard, voluntarily, at this game because I needed
meaning and significance in a job that was providing neither. Mine
is a small story of an obsession with a game that lasted only a few
months (and involved surprisingly little cocaine), but it
illustrates part of the reason why the numbers of gamers are so
large. The hours that millions of people put into unsatisfying jobs
which offer them little opportunity for creative expression, all to
create profits for faceless corporations that they have no stake
in, are rightly being probed and found wanting. As Marx would see
it, the lack of human actualisation in so many workplaces is simply
an expected outcome of capitalist economics.
IMAGINED BATTLES
Some weeks ago I joined a school trip to the World War 1
battlefields and cemeteries around Ypres in Belgium. The tour was
sobering and shocking, our guide’s analysis of the tactics of both
sides exposing the futility of this supposed ‘great’ war. One thing
kept bugging me: why would these millions of men volunteer to go to
the front and fight in the trenches? Were they really so committed
to ‘King and country’? Our retired Major was unequivocal: the vast
majority of these men went willingly to the trenches for the
excitement. They left mundane jobs in deadening factories to travel
overseas in ‘pals battalions’ made up of their closest friends who
had signed up together. They went expecting a fair fight, with some
sense of order and reward and clear goals in mind. This most
fruitless of wars turned out to be nothing like a game, and
millions of men were cheated on.
It was with some sense of familiarity then that I read about the
extraordinary scale of the World of Warcraft game. Where
people face a ‘real’ world of redundancy and insignificance, in WoW
there is no unemployment. Since launching in 2004, this ‘Massively
Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game’ has amassed over 50 billion
collective playing hours. That’s nearly six million years worth of
playing, which reaps its owners around $5m a day in subscription
fees alone.
By any measure, this represents a huge commitment from those who
are playing. It is clearly, as one definition of gaming goes, ‘hard
work that we enjoy and choose for ourselves.’ But, like the
thousands who took leave of mundane jobs to fight in the trenches,
the scale of WoW gaming hours represents a terrible
commentary on our levels of interest and engagement at work. But
should this bother us? If people want to spend their free time
playing games, why should we worry? One reason is that the norms
that people experience in alternate worlds can be very different to
those in ‘real’ life.
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WHERE IS EMPATHY?
By some margin, the most popular games are ‘first person
shooters,’ in which enemies appear and have to be killed or
mutilated. We might reflect on the saying that ‘an enemy is a
friend whose story you have not yet heard,’ and bemoan the fact
that in game worlds enemies have no story, or no time to tell it.
In an extensive interview with the US writing magazine the
Believer, game designer Heather Chaplin commented that ‘video games
are good at fostering problem solving, but they’re not so good at
fostering human empathy or a deeper understanding of the human
condition. Maybe that tells us that psychological empathy, concern
with the human condition, is not going to be that important in the
twenty-first century.’4
(It is interesting that the two prominent female voices in the
games industry are perhaps the most outspoken too. Chaplin has long
bemoaned the central themes of violence and zombie gore in games,
and told a high-profile male-dominated gaming conference, ‘It’s not that the medium is in its
adolescence, it’s that you’re a bunch of fucking
adolescents.’5)
Most current games do not prepare us well for ‘loving the
other’, which is at the very core of Christian life. However,
McGonigal is more optimistic about the future of games, and
believes that they can mature beyond the violence and isolation of
their youth into something with more positive benefits for society.
(The parallels with the maturing of God from the Old through to the
New Testaments is deliberate. Games are a religion to some, and are
undergoing an evolution from fringe activity pursued by fanatics to
a more embedded and integrated interest.) How can this be achieved?
The key appears to be tapping into gamers’ ‘participation
bandwidth.’ People enjoy being involved in games, enjoy
participating in shared activities with common goals. McGonigal
describes many ‘live’ games that have used gaming interfaces
(mobile phones or consoles) to engage people in real-world
projects.
REAL-WORLD TARGETS
One such game involved players taking photos on their phones of
defibrillation equipment wherever they found it in offices or other
buildings, uploading them to a site which then built up a national
database of life-saving equipment. By making this a ‘game’, the
data was collected in a low cost way, and participants were then
further engaged through earning points for new uploads, and the
‘epic win’ feeling of seeing the equipment they had tagged used in
a life-saving event.
A more interesting game-based system has evolved into a project
called ‘Groundcrew.’ Its creator’s vision was simple: what if we
could receive real-time alerts about how to make real people happy?
A network of agents is created, and any user can upload a ‘wish’
that they might have. ‘I could really use a latte’ was the first
such request. Any active agent in the area can then choose to
fulfil that wish. The person who was around and thought, ‘I could
do that,’ went and delivered the drink, and thus accrued points and
built status.
This isn’t standard video-gaming, but a hybrid between a gaming
mission and reward system built over a real-world situation. In
other words, it’s a digital platform for discovering engagement
opportunities. In our atomised world we struggle to empathise,
because we struggle to find ways to connect and engage with people,
yet social media ‘game’ platforms such as Groundcrew could give us
fun ways to make those connections.
Children play games to run safe simulations of life situations
they can’t yet face: war, looking after babies, driving trains.
Games can teach us a great deal about life, but they are not life
itself because life is not a game. Not for nothing did Larkin
describe church as ‘a serious house on serious earth’; the issues
we deal with as Christians are non-trivial. There are few mentions
of game-play in the bible, and only Paul uses it as a metaphor for
the strict training we should subject ourselves to in the ‘race of
life.’6 Jesus refused to play the devil’s games in the desert and
forewent food and play as a matter of discipline. Yet it is hard to
picture Jesus as a killjoy who would have frowned at sport and
play. What he would certainly have done is look empathetically on
those who feel the need to escape into game-worlds and ask serious
questions about the systems that have alienated them.
TAPPING THE HUNGER
The Church has long had a weak theology of work and genuine job
satisfaction, and, particularly in Protestantism, has too long
cuddled up to a capitalist work ethic that has ignored mundane and
unfulfilling work as a serious spiritual and social concern. The
huge numbers of hours spent playing video games is one result of
this. However, we can look at this desire to commit to difficult
quests and hard work in a positive light. The attractions that
games and digital social media have is there to be harvested. Three
billion human hours each week is an extraordinary time-resource,
and even some fraction of that turned to genuine social engagement
could have profound effects. While they seek to protest against
mundane and tedious work that fails to provide actualisation,
churches should be using systems like Groundcrew to allow their
devolved congregations to help one another and those around
them.
It is these ‘others’ that real life and community are all about,
and while interactions with them can be playful, they can also be
hard work. Games – online, on field, or simply on board – are a
vital way of rehearsing our interactions with those around us. They
can be ritualised aggression, or codified performance, but they are
no substitute for stepping off the field of play, logging off and
reaching out a hand to others. It is only in doing this harder
work, this less obviously rewarded work, that genuine change can
occur.
Cocaine and grand larceny in cars may bring rushes of
excitement, but their crystals and pixels will eventually atomise
and alienate. McGonigal is clear: ‘the single best way to attach
meaning to our lives is to connect our daily actions to something
bigger than ourselves.’7 This, in the end, will be how our
happiness is boosted: by entering cycles of good work, good rest
and good play. Our games need not be about plugging in to virtual
networks and scoring kills in digital worlds – great fun though
this can be. In the future, they could be about using our
networking technologies to access those in need, and reach out to
help them.
NOTES
1 The Oberserver 21 March 2010.
2 Reality is Broken, McGonigal, J., Jonathan Cape,
2010, p.4
3 ibid., p.6.
4 The Believer, February 2009, p. 60.
5 http://uk.ps2.ign.com/articles/967/967360p1.html.
6 1 Cor 9: 25.
7 Reality is Broken, McGonigal, J., Jonathan Cape,
2010, p.97.
