In his book, Carr writes, “The importance of such skills [the ones fostered by computer game play] shouldn’t be taken lightly. As our work and social lives come to center on the use of electronic media, the faster we’re able to navigate those media and the more adroitly we’re able to shift our attention among online tasks, the more valuable we’re likely to become as employees and even as friends and colleagues” (140). Jane McGonigal takes this argument one step further, arguing that the skills developed in online game play are the skills that can help us save the world. Or more correctly, she believe that games reinforce behavior and attitudes that may prove necessary for solving our real world problems.

The first such attitude is what she describes as “urgent optimism.” Unfortunately, she admits, so far this urgent optimism translates into the belief that one can change the virtual world only, and not the real world (the very thing she hopes to change with her games). But the point is that, whereas in the real world we feel increasingly disempowered to make real change, paralyzed by the seeming impossibility of affecting big problems, in the game world, these players feel like nothing is impossible. I would agree that we certainly need more of this.

The second behavior is that gamers are really good at weaving a social fabric. I might suggest that the weaving of this fabric is a game in itself – strategic alliances. My real concern here is that it reinforces the slightly sick transformation of ‘friendship’ that is occurring with our social media. And the other is that this notion of geographically boundless collaboration itself has environmental implications, when we consider the resources that go in to maintaining these connections (see Mobile Lives). But I am torn here, because in my work, I’m arguing that we need greater social connections, and these gamers are doing this. I suppose the difference is that I’m suggesting that the connections are themselves better (i.e. they are more fulfilling, and meaningful), whereas she is implying that these connections need to be more numerous, and more organized, which itself betrays a worldview bias.

The third attitude is what she calls “blissful productivity.” This is the idea that humans are most human when they are being productive, and that we feel good about this. I find this funny, in that it seems like the latest transformation of the Protestant Ethic to fit our modern world. But yes, it would be nice if these productive efforts were focused on changing the world for the better, rather than on making money (and in turn, working to perpetuate the world as it is now).

And finally, she identifies “epic meaning” as being something that gamers are drawn to. When describing the appeal of her game, A World Without Oil, she says blithely that “nobody wants to change how they live because it’s good for the world, or because they’re supposed to,” but that if you immerse people in an epic game, they can in a sense be tricked into doing what’s good for the world (though she didn’t phrase it that way). I find this really sad on the one hand, because I can’t fathom why our sustainability problems are not ‘epic’ enough to engender this motivation. On the other hand, my research argues something not too dissimilar! – namely that I suggest that people need to be re-immersed (reminded in some cases) in a meaningfilled world, one that is passed down through great myths and spiritual traditions, in order that they adopt these more harmonious behaviors. (See Walker’s Sustainable By Design.) As she said, those who participated in the epic game, continued the practices learned years after the game ended. This suggests that this is likely the key, and that I am on the right track. You have to provide people with a greater reason to want to change the world. I just sort of wish it wasn’t by having them play games online.

McGonigal has to overcome many people’s kneejerk reaction to immersion. People might argue that immersion is bad – or if not inherently bad, that this amount of time immersed in a fictional world is to the detriment of real world health/happiness/productivity, etc.. I don’t think immersion is bad (see Ryan post). And I don’t think that the amount of time spent means that it is necessarily bad either. It all depends on what you are gaining from that engagement. My issue is that the games are built within the same paradigm that seems to be producing an unsustainable relationship between humans and the planet. They reinforce particular kinds of thinking (as I mentioned before about collaboration/information exchange, for example), and they increase our addiction to computer technologies, which has both psychological and environmental implications. For example, she quickly mentions how many more gamers will be using mobile devices to connect to these games, and dismisses the environmental impact by saying that the power they use will be increasingly ‘green’. I worry that there will be a point at which these lines cross on the graph, and that as we use more and more devices/energy, we are running out of time to use these games to solve these huge problems – or indeed to do anything to solve them. Increased gaming accelerates the crises in some ways, just in terms of the energy cost of doing so.

And as for the ‘escapism’ arguments against immersion, she is not advocating exodus into virtual reality. She doesn’t want to make better games so that we have a better place to escape to. She wants to make better games that help us make our real world better. I think this is a great mission.

Finally, I must come back to the question she asks, which is: In all of the zillions of hours we spend gaming, what exactly are we training for? She quotes a figure that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming, which, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s research, means that we are producing a fleet of gaming ‘virtuosos’. But really, are these individuals ‘virtuosos’ or ‘idiot savants’? I guess I think that being a great computer gamer may not be that helpful when the time comes that we disengage from computer technology. If we are creating a generation of people who are excellent at solving problems specifically with computer – or a she suggests, we are evolving to think like this – then we may be in big trouble because. What happens when we try to unplug? Do we know how to function without these tools? We are not preparing ourselves for Power Down. And as Carr shows, using computers to help us solve problems does not make us better problem solvers, but worse….

I was pointed to this article on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11793847

The idea is that rather than have lots and lots of weak ties (read: friends in name only), the site helps you foster stronger friendship ties. These ties are designed into the system by limiting the number of friends you can have. I think it’s similar to going back in time to film cameras, before digital: You really had to pick your moments, not waste the film. When digital came along, you could snap as many crap pictures as you liked, because they didn’t cost anything to throw away. But is this a good model for friendships? Is this a fair comparison to Facebook?

There is some evidence – cited by the article – that humans can only manage 50 friends, so the notion that Facebook promotes, that we can have 1,000 if we wanted, cheapens the very word “friend”.

I think if we value true “friendship”, we ought to be thinking of ways to make that word meaningful again in the era of Facebook. People ask me all the time what I mean by “spiritual technology”, and follow up with, “Can you give me an example of one?” I now have an example. This is getting closer to what I’m talking about: Asserting human values over and above technological capabilities.

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter 7 – Nurturing Virtue in Community

This chapter was interesting. It affirms the importance of placeness as part of community – “community of virtue is above all a dwelling place” (166) – in that one needs to be a participant in and recipient of the pluses and minuses of one’s actions in order to cultivate virtuous behavior, which requires some rootedness to a place. So while what makes cyberspace so unique – and Wertheim suggests a place that can accommodate the soul, ironically! – is that it obliterates placeness, or that it stands outside of space and time. The flipside of this is that it is “de-localizing” us and “unrooting” our lives, and “we increasingly live in a ‘situation’ of instantaneity, immediacy, and ubiquity” (168). Timelessness and spacelessness leaves us without moral anchors, and “Today, manufacturing online communities is like creating gold-rush towns that come and go with the promises of the day” (169). How can we cultivate compassion in this gold-rush scenario? – “Eugene H. Peterson says that we ‘discover the meaning of the free life in acts of compassion and loving service, not in running after people who make big promises to us’” (170). Another helpful analogy is that in cyberspace, we are always tourists – “Cyberculture tends to identify us as tourists roving across geographic space rather than as neighborly inhabitants of a particular place” (171) – which means that we are interested in appropriating whatever it is (commodities, friendships, etc.) and then getting out of there, returning to our “real lives” and leaving the mess we created in our hotel rooms for someone else to clean up. The first step, then, is to become more individually responsible, which will only happen when we have to stay to clean up the mess; i.e. we have to become rooted to the space/time. And the second step, a more difficult one, would be to become hosts in this space. The antithesis to tourism is hospitality:

Hospitality thereby transforms homelessness into neighborliness. There is no ‘virtual’ equivalent of hospitality, since it occurs in a place. Illich says that hospitality requires a ‘threshold’ over which one can invite another. Communication technologies, he argues, tend to abolish the walls, doors, and tables that we need to practice hospitality. He says that we need to recover ‘a practice of hospitality… threshold, table, patience, listening.’ Such hospitality provides the ‘seedbeds for virtue and friendship’ and hence the place for the rebirth of community (172).

Secondly, Schultze argues that oral communication is fundamentally different from and superior to the kinds of communication that the Internet facilitates, because it is oral communication that “is crucial for nurturing communities of virtue” (166). Firstly, oral communication – in person – captures a great deal more depth than technologically mediated forms, which increasingly require us to include little emoticons to ensure we convey our messages to the receiver. Bizarrely, Schultze argues that oral communication is important for two other reasons: hope and memory. I understand the memory bit. Here’s how he describes the hope (I think it’s lovely!):

Technologically mediated expressions of hope are nearly always abstractly instrumental; they direct our attention away from our own communities and focus it on some distant state of affairs. Such instrumental expressions of hope thereby tend toward a form of propaganda predicated on using technique to gain audiences’ attention and to enjoin them to desire something – such as becoming more attractive or believing in an ideology. Advertising and movies are filled with such propagandistic expressions of hope – hope for cosmetic beauty, happy endings, and cleaner wash. Moral hope, on the other hand, comes not through rhetorical manipulation but through authentic dialogue nurtured in communities over time. It flows from the life of the community as members commune orally. Ong calls this kind of hope ‘arrested dialogue,’ an expression of mutuality and shared desire. ‘Hope,’ writes Ong, ‘is the difference between information encoded in machines and real knowledge in the consciousness of man.’ Words enable us to share hope, like an invitation to riposte, to life with others (177).… Speech carries a kind of sacramental potential that enables us to re-invoke special meaning and significance into our understandings of our lives in relationship to others (178).

This chapter has made me wonder if a radical revisioning of the Internet might be based on an oral conversational / hospitality model: What if we could capture conversation (videos of people talking, removing the anonymity of communication) and then invite one another to participate in the furthering of that conversation? What if people could search this space for conversations that interest them and then introduce themselves to the people having those conversations? People could have private conversations in this space, but what if those people could make these strangers feel welcome and in appropriate cases invite them to join in? And what if these conversations were more rooted in time (if not space), so that they had an expiration date on them and in order for a conversation to continue – as in the real world – there would have to be continued interest in that topic? There would have to be commitment to the preservation of conversations and stories, as there has been in oral cutlures of myth and religion. (As a side point: I think we really need to reevaluate whether ‘progress’ in itself is preferable to ‘continuity’, which is what oral cultures value. Valuing continuity is a step toward becoming more responsible the earth and to future generations.) And there would have to be an effort toward consensus making, toward shared understanding, etc. in this vision (in contrast to the ways in which cyberspace currently “fails to advance our capacity for dialogue, cooperation, and consensus” and instead “appeals to the individual ego” (183)). The emphasis of such a space would be on conversation, whereas now “cyberspace usually substitutes consuption for conversation” (183).

Schultze states: “Cyberculture tends to reject the possibility of the very thing that it most needs to foster community: an overarching moral vision predicated on personal responsibilities, framed by shared obligations, and forged through civil dialogue” (185). But more important than communication, Schultze concludes that we need communion! This would “include words that help us tell stories, nurture intimacies, and build trust” (186). This is about really experiencing other people, not just abstracted representations of them; and empathizing with each other, and experiencing intimacy in the space of the Internet. While Schultze says this is the goal, he does not have a solution for fostering communion. Nonetheless, I think it’s worth figuring out how to do so.