03/10/2024 Andy Robertson
5 weeks ago Author:Growing up is not easy. Discovering your identity. Building a sense of agency. Finding your place in the world. Making friends, doing laundry, cooking and earning money. And doing this while parents, society, teachers and politicians make clear their expectations.
The level of challenge, of course, depends on where you grow up, the resources of your family, and the wider community you are (or aren’t) a part of. As I’ve written before, understanding how options are closed down for many children is crucial for those of us looking to support and guide them.
The sort of structures, rites of passage and movements that used to bring children into adulthood are at best fraying, and perhaps better described as in tatters. Faith and religion are now peculiar and unusual rather than mainstream. Neighbourhoods are fragmented. Education is increasingly about exam results rather than the whole of life. Playing outside till dark is the stuff of nostalgia. Life-long careers are rare. Even owning a house can be unimaginable.
This doesn’t only make it difficult for children to understand how the adult world works. It closes them off from being able to see how it was created or how it could be different. Young people know something isn’t working, but getting from the problem to possible solutions isn’t on the horizon.
Children Looking for Meaning
Of course, children are ingenious and imaginative. Like water, they will find a way to make the world their own and cope with the state in which it has been handed to them. James Bridle describes this encounter, in his book, Ways of Being:“When confronted with systems of control which are incapable of generating within themselves the necessary conditions for meaningful change to occur, it is necessary to reach outside them in order to find a source of novelty and strangeness sufficiently powerful to spin the system into a new configuration.”
Bridle suggests that we must look beyond human progress as the pinnacle of history and instead pay attention to plants and animals for new ways of being. The wisdom of the natural world is a common rebuttal to the way we run things. Less common (but of interest to parents of children who play a lot of video games) is Bridle’s inclusion of technology (both as it is and how it could be) as a source of intelligence that may point to new ways of being in the world.
“If our inability to tell meaningful, actionable stories about our changing planet is part of the problem, then we need to rethink the tools we use to make culture itself. Technology can be part of this communal, sense-making process… This is urgently necessary, for even traditional knowledge systems, from which many of us have already been cut off, cannot always account for the velocity of change which is occurring in the present.”
This offers a different perspective on children flocking to play video games. As I’ve written before, we can rush to assume that they have been tricked into playing and are wasting their time. Bridle’s view of technology suggests there may be more going on. Could it be that they are reaching beyond themselves to try out new ways of organising the world? Perhaps they are finding, to use Bridle’s language, solidarity, entanglement, connection and a way out of oppositional world views and binary choices.
Children Flock To Participate
Video games offer a unique way to cut through the noise and arguments of the adult world. Unlike books or films, that perpetuate debates by deepening understanding of other people’s opinions, video games offer a way to experience what it’s like to be someone else. “Where we start to move forward,” writes Bridle, “is when we learn to ask questions which are less concerned with are you like us, and more interested in what is it like to be you.”Ursula K. Le Guin defines technology as “the active human interface with the material world”. On this basis, video games stand out as a peculiar kind of technology. They are a technology that invites you to engage with the world by experiencing what it feels like to engage with the world as someone else using someone else’s technology.
We had methods for recording stories (novels, poetry, film), sights (drawing, painting, photography and film) and sounds (written music and recordings). But, as C Thi Nguyen puts it, “games turn out to be a way of writing down forms of agency, of inscribing them into an artefact,” and then sharing them with each other.
This experience is not only a new way to walk in another's shoes but also makes clear that how we walk around the world is something we choose (or is chosen for us). As Alfie Bown highlights in The PlayStation Dreamworld, video games uncover the systems that (try to) insist on their universal appeal or inevitable desirability.
Meaningful Participation
However, like any successful technology (no matter how revolutionary) video games have increasingly been harnessed to perpetuate the way things are rather than challenge them. Big commercial games have many benefits for children, but they are unlikely to question the systems that enable them to be profitable. Guidance and legislation are steadily ensuring these blockbuster titles are safe spaces for children. But, we are not doing as good a job at ensuring children discover how games can lead them into new ways of being in the world.This is more than simply finding “good” games (please not another reason to play Minecraft) for them to play, but supporting them to develop the knowledge, networks and connections to discover the games that speak to their situation and their future. Experiences that invite their participation in the world around them. To move from “What do I want from the world?” to “What do I want for the world?” and maybe even “How do we get there together?”
We can play a crucial role in helping them assess the games they play. We can challenge games that lock them into a holding pattern of entertainment, distraction and consumption. We can be enthusiastic about games that invite them to go deeper, go beyond and go further than the structures they have been born into.
Bridle offers three conditions for better, more ecological machines. “Machines better suited to the world we want to live in and less inclined to the kinds of opacity, centralisation of power and violence we have come to understand as the hallmarks of most contemporary technologies: Non-binary, Decentralised and Unknowing.”
Video games should be Non-binary in a way that supports new ways of doing and seeing things with richness, complexity and nuance. Their participatory nature lends itself to new ways of seeing things. Some games, in particular, offer a lens on the world that reveals its depth, complexity and richness. These games don’t usually have single (or even many) endings and instead offer a haphazard organic journey.
Video games should be Decentralised in a way that creates a context for relationships that insists actual power, rather than mere connectivity, is shared out. Video games are, at their heart, the invitation to a relationship. This can be a new way to relate to a particular scenario or environment, other characters in the world, other players or even yourself. Some games offer ways to spend money, or vast amounts of time, to advance into these relationships faster. Many, however, ensure that players have an equal share of the power on offer, to do things in the world and build relationships.
Video games should be Unknowing so they accept our inability to control or solve the world and instead embrace its complex, ever-shifting landscape. Games create worlds that invite us to solve them with barriers that complicate and defeat our attempts at simple solutions. Many games are popular because they are unsolvable in linear terms. These games are played by working with systems you can’t understand to organically encourage them in the direction they need to go.
Restless Participation
Bridle tells the story of how the scientists who established the early internet were the same generation discovering how trees communicated and shared nutrients. The internet offered them a metaphor to discover a similar system in the real world. He suggests that technology comes to us as a toy-like echo of worldly realities we haven't yet grasped.The question is, then, what are video games here to help us discover in the real world? What future is being imagined and what intelligence is at work as video games become all they can be?
I think C Thi Nguyen’s book, Games: Agency as Art, points us in the right direction. He argues that the art of a game is not because of how it looks or sounds, but how it enables players to inhabit that liminal space between achievement and failure. The art of the game designer is granting the player abilities in a particular world and then deftly dropping in barriers that create just the right texture of struggle.
“In game playing, one takes on an alternate agency”, writes Nguyen. “And games don’t just simply describe the outlines of such an agency; they plunge the player into it, exposing the player to that form of agency from the inside.” Games are restless experiences that “ask us first to absorb ourselves in a narrow goal, but then to step back and think about the value of the whole activity in an open-ended, sensitive way.”
It’s this restless striving participation which offers a metaphor for how power-limited individuals can deal with powerful systems. We first submerge ourselves in narrowed agential modes, giving ourselves to the systems we encounter. But then, as we struggle to progress, we step back and reflect on the value of these narrower states.
“Games let us flirt with such seductive little agencies in a protected context. Here is the hope: if you spend a lot of time engaged in aesthetic striving play, you will have plenty of practice losing yourself in, and then drawing back from, the pleasures of value clarity. You will be used to wearing your submersion a little lightly. Then when you face the calls of the crisp and clear value systems inherent in money, grades, Twitter likes you will have developed the right habits of lightness and control with your agency.”
Discerning Participation
It’s what Bown was saying about how video games can undermine the idea that there are universal desires everyone has. By trying out what it feels like to live as other people in other systems, “the apparently natural connection between desire and subjectivity is conceptually threatened, showing desire as neither universal nor unique but constructed politically.” Our current ways of being are no longer how things have to be. Which means we can imagine other more appealing ways to live in the world.Video games are timely for people facing a world where systems seem inevitable and unchanging, where individuals are siloed into echo chambers of agreement and disagreement.
- They require us to consider not just behaviour but intention through experiencing being others.
- They train us to plunge into unforgiving unwinnable systems, ready and able to step back to break, bend and find gaps in the rules.
- They teach us that how systems work is not inevitable and that we can (and must) choose how we want our systems to work for us (and the world).
If Bridle is right, this isn’t only timely but reflects some wisdom we haven’t yet discovered (or have forgotten) in the world around us. Perhaps this could be what Ian Leslie writes about in his book Conflicted. He asks why the counter-productive human propensity to confirmation bias hasn’t been weeded out by evolution. His answer is that confirmation bias is an advantage when you are in unavoidable contact with people who robustly disagree. It becomes the spark that drives discovery through healthy argument and enquiry.
The point, video games seem to be saying, isn’t only that we need a better way to engage, challenge and imagine new worlds, but to find ways of doing this where our perspective isn’t swallowed whole by the way things are (and isn’t kept private and away from the ways things are).
Discourse is rarely actual discourse when it consists of siloed individuals shouting at each other on social media. Video games model a form of engagement more like a conversation between two people than a debate of opposing views. They encourage us to lose ourselves in worlds and ideas we don’t understand or agree with, to understand the intention and motivation from the inside. At the same time, they train us to draw back, pause, relativise and reassess what seems obvious.
It’s not teamwork, systematic thinking, resilience or identity work that is the best that video games have to offer us. They have come, at just the right time, to undermine our assumptions and relativise the inevitable so that we might find new ways of being together. They are moving us from asking “Are you like me?” to asking “What is it like to be you?”
Andy Robertson |
© 2024 Family Gaming Database