Envisioning New Worlds

Little did folks like Louis Daguerre and Eadweard Muybridge realize, only a hundred and fifty or so years ago, that their technical innovations would spawn a perceptual revolution. Well, they might have imagined a small one: a new way of looking at the world, perhaps. But the power enjoyed by visual media today would have been unconceivable to the earliest pioneers.

Film, video, animation, and various manifestations of virtual reality all stem from some very simple ideas, which would have seemed like magic to the guys with the clunky boxes and bottles of volatile chemicals. Good film and animation still evoke magical responses, especially in children. And therein lie two aspects of the power these industries wield in the modern world: education and responsibility.

For reasons I've yet to fathom, some children (primarily boys, although culturally "primed" girls are also involved) really like to blow things up. They love fire and guns and exploding body parts. I'm not going to get into the black hole of discussion about whether or not visual media cause violence in children, because there are good arguments and data on both sides of the question and I suspect that no single answer is forthcoming. However, I do know that after my son watched Tom and Jerry cartoons when he was just a little guy, he would then run around being a holy terror for the next two hours; so I suspect that the cause and effect argument is not entirely without merit. Nonetheless, I'm not advocating the banning of violent video games or anything like that.

What I would like to see, instead, is an increase in games and films that challenge the little gray cells: excellent stories, stunning visual effects, intellectual stimulation, historical fidelity, and ethical consideration. No, I'm not asking game designers and movie producers to provide us with more Davy and Goliath. But surely virtual life can provide alternatives to stealing cars, blowing up buildings, and newer and fancier guns (that still do the same thing: blow arms and heads off of enemies). The puzzle games I found interesting and challenging early on (Myst, Labyrinth of Time, Qin) now seem like blips on the screen. These days the choices seem to be between glitzy arcade games and "historically" based adventure games--in addition, of course, to the shooters. The graphic environments of these games still seem creative and effective most of the time, but I'm not sure animators are ever going to get humanoid figures right (one reason I don't like games with people in them). They also don't get the history right very often, and use it primarily as a vehicle for delivering to the gamer more chances to beat the crap out of someone or something. How about an adventure game that explores the possibilities involved in cleaning up the planet and finding alternative ways to live? Ways, that is, that don't involve blowing people up? I know I've ranted on this subject before (see Virtual Unreality), but our current situation seems to me to offer the ultimate scenario: saving the planet and building a sustainable future. Without the use of explosive devices.

For filmmakers, it seems to me that we've pretty much exhausted the chainsaw bloody guts splatter kill and maim genre. How many different permutations are there of Jason and Freddy, anyway? Aside from the basic psychological question of why people even find this stuff entertaining, there is the challenge of creating films that explore core moral concepts like honor, friendship, fidelity, responsibility, co-operation. I'm not saying that films about these concepts don't exist, but they're few, and usually involve some canned, sentimentalized, dumbed-down situation with unambiguous solutions to hackneyed problems. Potentially good stories are ruined, and their lessons muted, because some dope in Hollywood thinks he or she knows kids better than the storyteller does (I'm thinking specifically of The Golden Compass here). Or, we get the cynical version, where the good guys die, their cause is defeated, and their efforts have all been in vain. And then everybody gets blown up.

Maybe one reason I became such a Firefly fan is because it was the first television show I'd seen that refused to pander to popular tastes and expectations, but managed to be morally uplifting and entertaining at the same time. Joss Whedon and his writers presented ambiguous situations honestly, and unsentimentally. And humorously. Some folks criticized the Old West In Space aura, but Westerns were once one of the few genres that dealt with big, important themes. Well, Westerns and pirate movies. And a few space operas.

Anyway, this is where I'm going: The film and gaming industries are completely unnecessary to human existence. We will not die if an EMP shuts off our power and movies go away. Gerard Butler can always tell the story of Star Wars in a bunker in post-apocalyptic Scotland, just like the bards of old did with the story of the Trojan War. That said, however, films, videos, television, and games have become such an integral part of human life that barring the apocalypse, they're not going away. But aren't people eventually going to get tired of the same old shoot-'em-up crap, with different anthropomorphic monsters, sporting new and improved guns and bombs, and slightly different bodily fluids to spray all over the set?

And how are the kids going to turn out? If all they see through these media are stupid people doing stupid things, or violent people doing violent things, what the hell kind of future is that going to lead to?

I'm not arguing for cotton candy here. But how about thoughtful, challenging, visually stunning films that use all of this (highly environmentally destructive) technology to help make our kids smarter, more curious, less passive, more eager to get out and do something about the problems we're handing down to them. Documentary films that don't sex up a question with "mysteries" and hyperbole (like the recent Secrets of the Dead segment on the Minoans) and portray historical events honestly and accurately would help them learn that questions can be answered, and interesting problems can be solved using responsible means.

And, occasionally, we could turn off the TV, put the Game Boy or XBox away, and take everybody out to rough it in the wilderness for a few days. Who knows, they might see real stars.

Photo: Virtual reconstruction of the barred Milky Way Galaxy. Wikimedia Commons.

Family/Time

During a lovely conversation with a group of students yesterday after my lecture on the Bronze Age Aegean, the subject of time arose. Not an unusual topic for a humanities class, but the context was the question of violence in video games, rather than time lines or conceptions of time throughout time, etc. Everyone at the table (a group whose task it is this quarter to conduct research on ancient Japan and to create a presentation based on what they learn) was anxious to defend their favorite video games and to supply reasons why reasonable people might want to play hyper-violent games like the subject of my previous rant, Bioshock.

I was pleasantly surprised at how cogent their reasoning was, even though most of their conclusions relied on somewhat limited notions of human “nature” and the role of violence and conflict in history. One chap even brought up a psychological study (that he’d heard about from, I seem to recall, his sister, who is a psychologist) about conflict and bonding to support the notion that tendencies toward violence are staple components of human behavior. The main problem with the whole conversation, however, stemmed from an all-too-common confusion of the is/ought question. Human beings have always encountered violence, goes the premise, and have, more often than not, solved problems through wars, etc. Human “nature” is violent; just look at the statistics, the news, and other evidence and one has to come to the inexorable conclusion that we’re a violent species. Everyone seems to have the same picture in their heads: the scene from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey in which primates get started on the road to humanity when they not only discover tools, but discover how to beat the crap out of their fellow primates with these same tools. I kill; therefore I am.

But, I countered, do we really have to be this way? If we do, in fact, possess free will, is it not possible to learn how not to solve our problems by blowing each other up?

One difficulty seems to stem from the fact that this generation lacks the metaphors that were available even just a half-generation ago: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter and Arafat. Not only that, but what they have instead simply reinforces the presumed inevitability of conflict: Iraq, Darfur, Palestine–and their parents’ memory of Viet Nam. The present government in the U.S. refuses even to discuss matters with “rogue nations” lest conversation beget legitimacy, so the ability to solve problems through dialogue has diminished considerably. The ultra-violent video games, I suggested to my students, only add to the dilemma, because they reinforce the notion that brutality is necessary.

“But that’s the nature of video games,” they countered. “They have to be exciting. They’re entertainment.” Sitting around talking about problems, it seems, is boring. Or at least it’s not something you want to watch on the screen. Apparently, what I need to be able to do to save the world is to inspire a bunch of game designers to create an “exciting” game about nonviolent negotiation. Hmmm . . . .

As we sat around talking about the matter (which most of us seemed to find fairly stimulating, even if it didn’t raise our blood pressure significantly), I posed my concern about the issue of children raising children in the modern world, because I see this as a crucial element. “How many of you ever sit down to a meal with your parents?” I asked. None, as it turned out–but they’re all in college, living away from home, and probably only see their parents at holiday gatherings. “Okay,” I countered, “What about when you were still in high school and living with your parents? How much time did you spend with them?” “Seldom” and “little” were the answers. “Too busy” was the excuse.

“Doing what?” I asked, with mounting trepidation.

“Playing video games.” This got a laugh. In all seriousness, however, they each expressed some regret that their final years at home–what should have been the capstone of their education as a family–were woefully short on contact hours with Mom and Dad and the sibs. Everyone had his or her own “thing” to accomplish. Parents were working (in part to help put their kids through a pricey college), brothers and sisters were hanging out with their own friends (playing video games?), so there wasn’t much time for conversation. There might have been time for arguing and conflict, however, so I’ll have to pose that question later. How much of domestic conversation these days is devoted to sharing ideas, and how much to arguing about whether or not the kids need to have a curfew or wear baggy pants–or play video games?

Now, my childhood was far from idyllic–or so it seemed to me as I was growing up. Frequent moves meant that leave-taking and emotional upheaval were common events; my parents divorced in my mid-teens; two cousins were killed in violent accidents: the usual stuff of human comedy. So the fact that I can look back on it all with fondness and even (at times) awe, means that it went well, in the long run. And the memories that stand out are significant: being taught to cook by an Italian friend of my mother; leisurely Sunday afternoons in a boat on Green Lake in Taiwan, where my parents and their friends taught me to swim; trips to the beach with the parents and our dog Griso (in a headscarf and sunglasses) in a beat-up ‘48 Chevy convertible with a hole in the floor; the “Mission Rounds” in Wulai, where we met with priest-friends and Taiwanese Aborigines and brought back home-made salami and fresh veggies from the mission garden; lunch at the Friends of China Club or the Foreign Correspondents Club, where I met people like Roy Crane (Buzz Sawyer), who drew a little cartoon for me on a note pad. Some of this was extraordinary, to be sure, but some was everyday stuff. The common ingredient was this: my brother and I were raised around and by adults. We saw our peers at school (in small classes taught by very strict Dominican nuns), and occasionally one would spend the weekend, but generally our world was dominated by adults. Nowadays, the situation seems to be reversed, so that children spend far more time with other children than with parents.

Which brings me back to the question of time.

Time is a concept invented by human beings, and mediated by technology. The commodification of time in the post-industrial, capitalist world (“Time is money,” the old saw goes) means that whatever “time” is, it doesn’t “belong” to us any more. We are constantly at the mercy and dictate of the clock (my new computer has a cute “gadget”: an image of an analogue clock on my desktop, right under the “local weather” icon). A major modern metaphor consists of the clock (remember Modern Times?), and the sound of seconds, ticking away.

I can remember being astonished when my students started looking at their watches to see what day it was, and I’m not yet used to the idea that they don’t even wear watches anymore (except as accessories, like jewelry)–they simply look at their cell phones when I ask them what time it is (since I neither wear a watch nor own a cell phone). If I’m not at my computer, I only have a relative sense of time, and try to be aware of “when” according to habits, the position of the sun, whether or not the dogs are acting hungry. But so many of our technologies revolve around time (television, radio, kitchen ranges, microwaves, coffee machines, automobiles, computers–everything’s got a clock) that avoidance is really impossible. And since I’m paid to be in the classroom at a certain hour each day, and for a measured length of time, there’s really no escaping it: hence my need to ask students what time it is in the first place (although my ability to sense when a break is due is something of a legend among them; the first part of class is inevitably an hour and a half, usually within five minutes of being spot on).

So: time and video games? Two items.

One, playing video games (violent or not) suspends the sense of time. When I’m playing, I lose all notion of “when.” The world consists of me and whatever is happening on the screen, and I’m isolated from everything else. I’m pretty sure that this divorcement from the outside world is radically different from what happens when I read a book or work in the garden, even though these are also solitary activities. My students pointed out that gaming provides its own kind of community (I remember my son’s LAN parties, with huge CPUs strung out all over the house, connected with wires in the days before wireless systems existed), but that’s probably a topic for a later post. I’m pretty sure there are fundamental differences in the quality of the community experience between game-playing online (or even on separate units in the same room) and face-to-face interactions that don’t involve blowing things up.

Two, if families were to take time back from the corporations, the technologies, and whatever other phenomena compromise our ability form communities with our own children, it might be possible to help them imagine a future that is not dictated by violence and conflict. “That’s the way it’s always been” is not an argument. Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and others have shown us that there are alternatives that can be made to work. But the political will has to exist for these alternatives to develop, and if people keep throwing up their hands and saying “it’s human nature” or whatever the excuse du jour is. William Morris himself, despite his ability to imagine a nonviolent future, thought that violent revolution was an inevitable precursor to utopia. But during Morris’s time, human beings did not yet have to power to eradicate life from the earth. We must find an alternative.

If we want to ensure the survival of our children (or at least our children’s children), taking time to help them learn from us, rather than from their peers or from those terribly exciting but morally dangerous games, is vital. Educators have a particular responsibility, because we form a sort of bridge between family and other, "external" communities. My recent encounter with my students showed me how hungry they all are for real conversation: for people to listen, and to share ideas, to argue, to affirm, to refute, to engage. For all our sakes, we really do need to take the time.