In ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’ by Philip K. Dick (2000) a short story reconceived in film by 20th Century Fox as Total Recall (1990), the protagonist Quaid ceases to know how to distinguish between simulated and historical experience. This results in confusions and complexities surrounding his identity. We live in a culture characterised by moral panic about this ontological confusion, as explored by Baudrillard (1994) among others. Identity and reality are meant to be coherent, integrated and stable. If we decouple identity and a naïve concept of reality, we face ontological disintegration if not moral decrepitude, both being the result of a relativism born of a more complex concept of the real.
In media contexts, this moral confusion about reality and identity results in questions about what types of immersion we should value. Newer forms of media, such as video games, often bear the brunt of this question. The sorts of questions posed in mainstream media surround whether privileging experience in video games under-values non-mediated experience; or whether immersion in video games is different (or even worse) than immersion in other media.
Your attitude to whether teachers should harness the video game as a pedagogical tool is flavoured by your attitude to reality and identity. This is not just a question about content, it is a question about what types of experience should be valued. As a tertiary teacher, I value video game experience because it offers a performative way to explore the nature of human identity. Through video games, self-identity can become the subject of a student’s experiment, as the possible real is almost infinitely expanded in a range of possible worlds limited only by a programmer’s and a designer’s imagination (roles that the student her/himself will increasingly fill).
Ultimately, our questions about the real are answered by the identities that result from our experience in the world/s that we explore. I will argue that creative people such as my students explore and expand their own creativity if they are better attuned to who they are, which is always contextualised by other people and the world/s they are immersed in. This is where video games are helpful.
A technosocial pedagogy
We are always immersed in worlds, including worlds that are partly created by technology. Any computer-mediated exploration of identity is a collaboration with the affordances of the device, and that itself has an impact on ideas about identity. As we inhabit, explore, create and communicate our identities via the apparatuses that pervade our media-saturated lives, a technosocial nexus comes into operation which simultaneously challenges our ideas about social relationships and self. We feed the results of our technosocial engagements back into the system that creates the terms of those engagements, and the self dynamically evolves. Programmed media such as video games offer a prime venue in which identity, community and the apparatus are explored. A liberal education would include such exploration in its curriculum.
I teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the media discipline. Before you can create interesting, engaging media for other people, it is necessary to have a clear idea of who you are. Many of my courses thus involve a level of self-exploration, in which media-making is explicitly tied to positionality: whatever you express, you ultimately express yourself, so you may as well make this overt. Video gameplay can help students develop a sophisticated sense of self, and furthermore, a self that is more easily available for sophisticated theorization. Video games can act like a side-show mirror: you see your self, but it is a self distorted, and as a result you explicitly contrast and compare what you see with what you understand to be ‘really’ the case.
Video games possess a range of material, symbolic and interactive affordances in which users make choices to progress the game scenario. This is a performative experience, and a feedback loop between game and user emerges.
The experience of game play establishes a very different relationship with the player than media such as film. Playing a video game requires collaboration with the apparatus (and possibly with other human players). The relationship between programming-apparatus-player establishes an ontological ‘vanishing point’ (immersion) in which the real becomes indistinguishable from the simulated. As immersion takes hold, the simulated world becomes the (only) world; that which vanishes is ‘nonmediated RL’ (external, physical, geographical reality), and with it, ideas about the separation of audience from spectacle. Depending on the simulation, what remains is self, community and world (gameverse). So what learning can be done in these environments?
What do we learn from video games?
Elsewhere in this volume, Ian Bogost describes traditional approaches to education which promote ‘schooling not education’—that is, teaching conformance to approved knowledge. He continues:
"Ironically, the real promise of videogames seems to come almost entirely from the ways in which they do not participate in the traditional processes of institutionalized education, ways that upset the very notion of what it means to study."
James Paul Gee’s concept of critical learning underwrites the nontraditional education that video games provide:
"…the learner must see and appreciate the semiotic domain as a design space, internally as a system of interrelated elements making up the possible content of the domain and externally as ways of thinking, acting, interacting and valuing that constitute the identities of those people who are members of the affinity group associated with the domain."
A critical learner is a highly self-aware individual able to critically assess, compare and contrast the various environments (‘semiotic domains’) s/he finds her/himself within. In other words, the side-show mirror reflection of him/herself that the video game provides is not naively accepted, but critically examined. This type of learning is at best implicit in the Army Science Board Summer Study (2001 quoted by Macedonia (2001, p. 158); discussed also by Mindy Jackson in this volume) which lists skills that video games promote like multiprocessing, context switching, and information literacy. Such skills may further give rise to:
discovery-based experiential and example-based learning;
concrete as opposed to deductive and abstract reasoning;
organised intelligence organized in easily accessible databases; and
community of practices through knowledge sharing;
all skills which are pertinent to critical learning. However, while the Army Science Board Summer Study may give passing recognition to critical learning, this type of learning is not generally harnessed in learning contexts. In humanities pedagogy, the belief that video games privilege ‘functional knowledge over declarative knowledge’ (Kurt D Squire in this volume) means they are doubly undermined as a pedagogical tool. Not only are video games considered to hinder acquisition of traditional academic skills, but critical learning is eschewed in conservative humanities curricula in favour of content-specific, well-defined, canonical bodies of knowledge. Clark Aldrich (in this volume) points out that video game-based learning ‘is emotional’. Video games require interpretation of detailed and subtle real-time feedback about unpredictable gameworld scenarios; they result in post-play reflection of experience. Such emotional, personal experience undermines the acquisition of the rational, dispassionate skillset of academic argumentation in favour of development of a subjective, emotionally-engaged and explicit positionality.
Identity work
For students in the creative industries, exploration of personal identity is the prerequisite for creative, sophisticated, engaged production: understanding who you are, your own strengths and weaknesses, your privileges, blindspots and disempowerments with regard to broader society are prerequisites to being able to speak to that society. Understanding the communities that you belong to and don’t belong to allow you to develop a sophisticated sense of the relationships you have with other people. Seeing how other people see you is part of this self-understanding.
Experiencing the self in other environments is often a seminal experience for young adults when they first go overseas. Playing video games similarly engages a sophisticated and complex meditation on individual and collective identity, in the face of evidence about alternate ways of being.
The extent of identity work available through video games is too broad a subject for this paper. Certainly, it is a chaotic, ‘fuzzy’ style of learning that George Siemens (2005) suggests is one of the characteristics of life-long learning. I will confine my discussion to two types of video game identity work.
1. Identity work via mythic themes
In role-playing games (RPGs) players assume an heroic avatar and reprise mythological heroic figures, which are ‘universal archetype[s] recognizeable across all the variations of culture, author, and medium’ (Murray 1997, p. 137). The heroic avatar is placed at the centre of the gameverse, a similar situation to theorist of mythology Mircea Eliade’s (1959, p. 65) description of the mythic hero at ‘the very source of absolute reality, as close as possible to the opening that ensures him communication with the gods’. That is, the player, through her heroic avatar, assumes responsibility for creating the world and ironing out chaos, much in the way mythic heroes do.
Players in RPGs perform in mythic scenarios via super-human avatars. For example, Eva Liestøl (2003, p. 340) draws a parallel between the game Duke Nukem and the myth of the minotaur and the labyrinth. The game performs a myth of rebirth of masculine identity, like many myths before it (p. 342):
Although the masculine body of Duke is absent, his voice reminds us of his masculinity and of his role as combatant. If we hesitate to realise this role, our inactivity is responded to by Duke’s ironic remark that tells us that questioning our role is ridiculous. (p. 347) Thus the player learns to perform and conform to a set of behaviours and values associated with this type of mythic figure.
Playing an RPG, a player feels herself to be a witness to meaning creation and universe generation. On the other hand, she is also co-conspirator in the creation of the world - the events that unfold and the pace at which they unfold. She is radically integrated in the world. In a good RPG, her avatar is pivotal, responsible and able to evolve. The learning required is not merely how to use the available weaponry: it is also about ideals of social behaviour articulated within the moral universe of the game. Learning a gameverse triggers explorations surrounding the coherence of the world and its scenarios. The player needs to understand the purpose of the hero, and agree to the moral universe that surrounds the hero. If the player cannot conform to that moral universe (for example, because s/he finds the gameverse too violent or too scarey or too sexist), s/he may not be engaged with the game and its hero. That, too, is a learning experience about identity. Learning an RPG happens on many levels, and engages ideas about identity in many ways.
Similar mythic and heroic narratives exist in films and novels (Eliade 1957, p. 35). However, narrative alone can’t ‘carry off’ the immediate, experiential aspects of being a hero in a mythic universe. Although RPGs have cornered the market for mythic experience in contemporary media, the RPG hero-avatar experience can be compared to another type of culturally produced immersive experience. Here is an extract from a Swampy Cree Indian narrative poem called ‘Wichikapache goes walking, walking’ (Norman, 1982, p. 138). This poem follows the adventures of Wichikapache, a trickster character with shamanic abilities.
He went walking.
It became winter then.
The forest
was covered with snow.
Ahead,
he saw some huts.
Children were playing around them.
He called to one, ‘Come here little brother
I need your help.’
The child came over.
‘Tell me,
where is the head man’s hut?
Which one is it?’
The child pointed at one.
Wichikapache went to it and walked in.
The man inside said, ‘Welcome,
sit down.’
He was given some food.
‘Don’t get too comfortable,’
the man said.
‘We move around a lot.
We’ve moved four times in the last five days
In fact, in the morning we’ll move again.’
But Wichikapache undressed.
He took his clothes off
and hung them
over the fire to dry
from wet snow.
Smoke went into them.
Then
he lay down and fell asleep.
In his dream
he went walking . . .
This narrative is reminiscent of the experience of assuming an heroic avatar in an RPG. Like Wichikapache, players spend a lot of time ‘walking’ to find characters to kill or learn from. A common trope of both types of text is the attainment of superhuman powers by coming to terms with the environment.
The sense of achievement you gain from becoming an expert manipulator of any environment is addictive and affirming. When performed in its cultural context, ‘Wichikapache’ is intensely immersive, as Norman (1982, p. 134) reveals. Video games can also achieve high levels of immersiveness. In both types of text/performance, the lack of an omniscient narrator and the enhanced powers of the player character/trickster have implications for the position of the major character. As Wichikapache announces:
I made this world . . .
Norman, 1982, p. 140
Roy Ascott has argued that the Internet is a potentially shamanic environment (Ascott 1990; Shanken 2001), however, RPG immersion is often an isolated, individual experience, without the revelatory and cathartic cultural reverberations of culturally sanctioned shamanic performance. Networked, community-based simulations such as Second Life may offer environments that better replicate the psychological conditions for truly mythic experience, however most of the behavior encountered there is not structured in terms of identifiable mythic themes.
2. Identity work in digital communities
Second Life (1999-2007) is a massively multi-user possible world - that is, it’s not really a game with quests and conclusions, unless they are self-imposed. In Second Life identities and lifestyles can be invented. Whole islands and everything on them can be designed. People communicate in varied ways via their avatars. Second Life sits at the interactive ‘rich media’ end of a continuum of social software which includes blogs, media sharing sites, and friend-making sites.
Elsewhere in this volume, Tom Abeles argues that ‘second generation e-learning’ is an arena in which education institutions must engage contextually, with community in mind. In social software networked environments, issues of identity and community are concurrently explored; the ramifications of experience there can be strongly coupled with life offline (if such a distinction remains meaningful).
Some 90 educational institutions, including my own, are currently experimenting with using Second Life in the classroom. In my own courses, I am encouraging students to create symbolically meaningful self-portraits using the available tools to build not only avatars, but also environmental features. This project is inspired by Ulmer’s description of a ‘wide image’ (2003, pp. 10-19), which is a symbolically-rich image students create about their own identity. My students are required to create this image within Second Life. The point of this activity is not only to create media and experience these creative, networked communities, but in the process, and almost ‘by accident’, to create self-reflective professional practitioners.
Reflective practice is a significant strategy in critical learning, and one role of the teacher is to implement reflective exercises which encourage it. Built into my Second Life assessment are tasks about explaining and justifying activity with a range of social software in terms of its relevance to a student’s development of his/her wide image.
As Ulmer (2003, p. 1) points out, the first thing to notice about this activity is that it is public. Instantly, the student has a different relationship with their learning, and is responsible for it in a different way than if the work were seen by the teacher alone. The evolving technosocial self learns that it is always contextualised by the various mediated communities in which it is immersed. Your sense of the multiple real impacts on your sense of self, and as such facilitates the development of contextual subjectivity and identity ‘mashup’ (Berlind 2006; Shapiro 2006).
Second Life is used in relationship with other forms of social software in my classes. My students and I form communities of interest using networked social software; we publish (text, image, audio and video) on topics of common interest on the Web (most commonly to our blogs). Such media-making can even be published back ‘into’ Second Life and gifted to other Second Life avatars.
Posthuman identity blues
The struggles my students have with networked publishing often concern identity. On reflection, even the MySpace generation finds the process of creating a public self somewhat confronting. The idea of responsibility for what they publish to a community of interest becomes more complex the more it is explicitly made an issue; as a result student identities expressed in social software evolve and generally become more complex.
Users of social software – whether they are students or not - often make identity into the explicit theme of their publications. A famous recent example is Geriatric1927 (2006) who posted a video about himself to YouTube, a networked video sharing website. In that video, Geriatric1927 announces he wishes to ‘bitch and grumble about life in general from the perspective of an old person whose been there and done that and hopefully you will respond in some way by your comments and then I might be able to do other videos to follow up your comments…’
According to Goldsmith (2006), Geriatric1927 received a half million viewers in the first week. His success is an example of a strong prosuming impetus to make identity public and therefore perhaps convert life itself into a work of art (Bauman 2000, p. 82). Indeed, Zygmunt Bauman goes so far as to suggest that for the users of social software, camcording your life makes it real (p. 84).
Perhaps if ‘the search for identity is the ongoing struggle to arrest or slow down the flow, to solidify the fluid, to give form to the formless’ (p. 82), our social software use faultily grasps towards this essentially elusive goal. However, I suggest that such engagements concern the manipulation of fluid identities and multiple realities, and any hope that social software users entertain about making a permanent archive of the self quickly recedes.
What are we assuming when we make the topic of the self central to our mediated experience? Placing importance on the construction of self identity is an aspect of the Western humanistic tradition, one of its sign-posts being the development of the concept of authorship. My students seek to be professional media-makers; the concept of authorship is very important to them and appears to be part of their motivation. When collaborative forms of authorship, or work whose copyright is difficult to enforce, are suggested as viable creative outcomes, my students quite often profess disdain for types of creativity which seem to down-play authorship.
In other words, contemporary (particularly networked) media-making heralds a period of conflict about personal politics and motivation. Collaboration may always have been necessary, but increasingly we are obliged to collaborate with the apparatus, and it is a collaboration mediated by networks. Such decentralised collaborations may allow individuals to wrest some control of the media from dominant media corporations, but the price exacted questions authorship and decenters an individual’s importance. In using video games to develop personal identity, are we not therefore reverting to a hierarchy of values that are increasingly out-of-date?
This is a conflict of values that many students find difficult to even entertain, and one that I have not resolved in the classroom. While educators interested in establishing life-long learning practices can use video games to reveal to students the value of learning about the self, we thereby assume things about identity that may remain under-explored.
The way forward does not appear to lie in neo-romantic ideas of immersion, or indeed, in the rage of postmodern ideas that depict identity as a series of more fluid positions. It perhaps does engage a phenomenology of relationships, in which relationships with other entities such as our apparatuses are re-defined. Those relationships may be explored in future video games, but they probably won’t be games which belong to either the RPG or the community simulation tradition mentioned above.
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