Last year, my eleven-year-old cousin showed me the wonders of Minecraft. I was bamboozled. I even have the Facebook Status (a rarity) to prove it:
My eleven year old cousin introduced me to Minecraft tonight and took me through the world she literally created. She taught me how to shear wool, build a home, and mine for materials. She even had some analysis of the app economics (“It’s worth the seven dollars”). Can’t tell if it’s impressive or terrifying. Are we connected to things by the money we spend on them? Or by the virtual pickaxe we used to make it?
Minecraft, a world-building game with such a large fandom that I have seen this videogame in MoMA, obviously made it to the New York Times earlier last week. The piece shaped the game as not only a product of our culture, but as a producer of it. Minecraft is given credit for molding a child’s sense of logic, discovery, 3D imagination, and even the basics of coding. All things that the next generation needs to survive the impending takeover of Google compounds. Different from easy to manipulate computers and programs, Minecraft is refreshingly full of bugs and problems. In fact, these intentional blips reportedly end up encouraging players to fix the problem themselves.
With the advent of websites that literally allow you to gamify your life (see link below), we have to face an added dimension to the virtualization of everything. Online gaming and computer games are usually best in moderation, as practice or for leisure. It’s all fun and games until it’s not. When we tie gaming and games with social development, in place of or prioritized over social interaction, or rely so heavily on gaming that our relationship becomes one of addiction, something scary happens. And increasingly, as children (at least most of my cousins) are growing up weaned off of the iPad, the first point of contact to the technology is often in the form of a distracting video game.
While there is undoubtedly much research into the psychology and neurology of such a dependency, I will leave it to speculation in this blog post. Just something to think about the next time your sibling/child/parent fails to respond to your attempts at conversation in favor of a riveting RPG or perhaps SimsCity, needing “just five more minutes.”
In Maddaddam, we see Crake as young Glenn, who is shaped by the traumatic events of his family and species, but is given one of his first tastes of autonomy through gaming. Specifically, through Zeb’s life lessons and idle Blood and Roses gaming. There is no other way that Glenn can technically take control of his life, especially as Zeb leaves him. Although this fixation on extreme environmentalism to the point of brushing off individual human lives could have come first from the “real world” and was reflective onto the games, it was definitely magnified and honed by playing games like Blood and Roses. On the other hand, the Maddaddam group manipulated Extinctathon to create their own web of communications. It is worth thinking about their specific differences in using these games.
While I am writing about excessive gaming from a negatively biased point of view, we can also think about the relationship between humankind and online gaming in the context of our readings this week. Tsing names fungi as the ultimate metaphor for resistance, evading domestication for years, and Harroway talks about the blurring of lines between human and nature, and debunking human exceptionalism so we cannot point to a single enemy for our social woes. Glenn almost merges with the videogame, letting his worldview intertwine tightly with that of the game (trade you 1,000 babies on fire for an Eiffel Tower). Maddaddam resists “domestication” under the videogame, twisting it instead to work for them. There is no negative or positive connotation here, and in some ways, Tsing and Harroway describe similar phenomena. Humankind still interacts with and eats fungi even if we have not domesticated it, and perhaps blurring this line and resisting exceptionalism is it’s own form of resistance.
I would like to start the conversation here: About a reflection of not only how we use literal online gaming but “make up rules” of games in daily life, or even how dependent we are on our devices to tell us how to see the world. And what filter are we forced to screen our perceptions through? For example, someone may store their entire calendar in their phone, or be unable to look away from the screen, even during a conversation with someone in the “real world.”
And finally, with regards to Maddaddam and Crake: There is a difference between living by the rules of the game, and making up the rules of the game to suit your lifestyle. And that difference is the one between powerlessness and direct autonomy over your own time.
Links:
The Minecraft Generation: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html?_r=0
Gamify Your Life: https://habitica.com/
