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.

Virtual Unreality

Yesterday a former student with whom I correspond frequently sent me a link to a trailer for a game called Bioshock. It featured some pretty brutal treatment of a little girl (by her brother? I couldn’t quite figure it out) and her “rescue” by a machine-like creature after some grotesque activities that included injecting something into an arm that produced a swarm of bees, and the impaling of one of the characters by a device that looked like an over-sized drill bit. What prompted the student to send me the clip in the first place was his fondness for insects, and his message was accompanied by a rather ironic quip about what we really need to be spending our defense dollars on (bee-arms?). My response was something like “Who thinks up this crap?” to which he replied that, in all fairness, the game was actually about how far one would go to save one’s own life, even if it meant sacrificing one’s own humanity. To which my reply was “Yeah, but . . . .” Because I teach in a school that offers a degree in animation, and thus know more gamers (including my son and daughter-in-law) than the casual observer, I’m quick to latch onto potential problems like a baby to a nipple (sweet image, that). Truth be told, however, I have never understood the attraction of games like Doom and Quake (which my son and his friends played, and even created additions to), I have no interest whatever in Second Life, and the only computer games that even mildly amuse me are puzzle-solving efforts like Myst or Qin or silly arcade candy like Luxor that involve nothing more violent than shooting down strings of brightly-colored scarabs to earn points and defeat Egyptian gods. I suppose that simulation games like Sims can be educational (although I once tried playing one that involved building space colonies and just got frustrated because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing), but what I’m really beginning to think is that all of the energy that’s going into developing games that explore our humanity could be better spent actually exploring our humanity. Part of the problem is that I can’t get “into” virtual worlds. The idea of virtual reality actually goes back to the Middle Ages, according to Margaret Wertheim (see especially her book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace). In situations where things are not going well, folks have a way of imagining something better--and the great Medieval cathedrals provide visible evidence that their builders and their communities were anticipating the kingdom of heaven. Not having the talent or energy to create the twenty-first century equivalent, however, I take refuge in books by people like William Morris who combined a tangible effort to better the physical world with a plethora of imaginary (“virtual”) worlds of his own. To top it off, even the most carefully-constructed of these games feature figures that move so unnaturally through their landscapes that I wonder, "why bother?" Why not just go to a damn movie, for crying out loud? I used to think that I understood why people play video games. When Myst and its early sequels came out, I was truly fascinated by the surreality of the environments players entered. I loved the fact that they were about books, and that the creators had spent some serious time studying the history of architecture and technology. But they lost me when they put people in their “worlds” and made play too immediate for cranky old misanthropes like me. I have enough reality going on around me every day (maybe if I didn’t read the newspaper things would be better), that I don’t need to escape into some kind of “otherness” unless its one I make myself. So, when I want to "escape," I write. I have begun to wonder what would happen if, instead of imagining grotesque, violence-ridden scenarios, game designers used their virtual worlds to set up real-life problems and enabled people to work through actual possibilities. I suppose Second Life has that potential, but from everything I’ve heard, it’s simply an extension of the MySpace mentality that I already find so repugnant (even though most of my students, many of my colleagues, and one of my own children are all devotees of the latter). I know that all this stuff is supposed to foster community, but what kind of community? Certainly not the face-to-face interaction imagined by Adam Smith and the other participants in the Scottish Enlightenment--and on which Smith’s notions of capitalism and moral sentiments were based. Certainly not the in-your-face experiences of our earliest ancestors, that eventually led to cooperative hunting and gathering and then agriculture on a larger, participatory scale (and, I have to admit, such other ramifications as conflict and war). Certainly not even the salons and conversations that produced the public intellectuals of the early twentieth century: the avant-garde in general, and specific movements like Cubism and Abstract Expressionism in particular. The fundamental difference seems to lie in the fact that many of today’s children find the real world too “boring” or too disturbing to deal with, and playing through the games provides a kind of power missing from actuality. I know that this treatment of the problem is superficial, and that it needs a lengthy, careful, phenomenological analysis in order for it to make real sense. It’s just that watching the trailer for yet another violent, disturbing, angry game made me long for the days when one could “walk” through a virtual world, uncovering clues and solving puzzles, until one reached a satisfactory conclusion. Maybe we didn’t save the world, but we didn’t slather it with blood and guts, either. It’s not that I want everything to be pink and peachy; it’s just that there ought to be room for thinking about our humanity, and working through our problems that doesn’t include unspeakable acts of violence that--let’s face it--have more to do with adolescent notions of power and sexuality than with creating a better alternative to the problems of the modern world.