Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

Games are an integral part of industrialized, internet-wired life. Increasingly, schools use games to teach grammar, to practice math, to learn about music. Businesses devise games to draw in customers. Film companies collaborate with gaming companies to make digital extensions of familiar storylines in newly interactive contexts.

We even have games for tracking how much we exercise or what we eat, with programmed rewards for meeting our goals. Such games are often available in the form of “apps” or short programs, available for our smart phones and mobile devices, thus they are always available in our pockets and handbags.

We can play games that give us virtual points for visiting certain shops, or buying particular products instead of others, games that recommend restaurants to us as we walk down the street nearby. It seems that everywhere we look today, we see games at work. There’s a new term for this phenomenon - gamification - and its growing popularity shows just how much we enjoy playing games. For many, the ability to enrich entertainment through interactivity, to make otherwise onerous tasks “fun,” and to provide new structure for life’s daily tasks, is a tempting proposition.

When I think about our fascination with games, I think first about the structure and order that games provide. Games are, in some nontrivial ways, a lot like rituals, especially in their ability to structure experience. Indeed, games and religious rituals are both millennia-old human activities infused with human meaning-making. Some ancient games, like the Mesopotamian divination game Ur, were both religious and playful. Rituals and games manifest a surprisingly deep kinship, so much so that the difference between them is perhaps more a matter of perspective than of form or function.

Both games and rituals are often concerned with storytelling, especially stories in motion via intentional enactment. Thus, games and rituals are both deeply interactive, drawing us in and asking to play the role of someone else or enter into a temporarily different mindset. Games and rituals are also things that we do, requiring of us a degree of investment in performance that is less often required in acts like reading or watching a movie. Both games and rituals are also governed by rules that shape what experiences are possible and what experiences are not possible. Because they demarcate a space and time in which we enter into a contract with a different perspective, both games and rituals are, for better or worse, also shapers of behavior. Games and rituals place us in what-if situations, and ask us to reside in that imagined space temporarily and learn what it has to say to us.

With these things in mind I wonder if our fascination with this sense of order and structure in the virtual world via games may betray a desire for such a sense of order in a more general sense. In our postmodern world, values are often seen as up for grabs; institutionalized religion is largely in decline in some parts of the world; and people increasingly craft their own moral codes from scratch.  What if our fascination with virtual experiences, and games in particular, reveals a desire for greater order and structure? Is there some kind of existential comfort in the assumption of fixed trajectories of experience that mimic the notion of predestination? Do we long for experiences, however temporary, in which we know exactly who the bad guys are, in which we know there is some order to be discerned, in which we can assume the well-ordered hand of a Programmer guiding the unfolding of our quest and directing us about what we should do?

Our desire for entry into programmed, scripted spaces is growing, and driving research and development in virtual reality. Researchers are developing new and more “haptic” (touch-based) modes of virtual interaction. Immersive spaces such as rooms, spheres, and full-blown sets are wired with virtual “walls” and sometimes enhanced with visual technology in the form of goggles and virtual tools or weapons. If it is fair to suggest that our fascination with virtual reality is a signal of our disillusionment with the postmodern, the fragmented, the uncertain, then we might see our investment in virtual spaces as a reflection of what in other contexts we might easily consider the “religious” impulse. If viewed this way, then our desire for the virtual can be viewed also as a hunger for the real – for a sense of meaning, order, and definition in our own real lives.

The promises that the virtual proposes may help to explain why video games sometimes become addictive. Games offer us, in temporary and imagined ways, an ordered life filled with what seems to be meaning and purpose, a day punctuated by quests that can be successfully accomplished through perseverance, wealth achieved simply through doing what one has been instructed to do, and the fulfillment of ideals in romance and social position that often seem difficult to achieve in our day-to-day existence. In games, we can be who we want to be and we are assured, at least in the game world, of eventual if ephemeral rewards. It’s hard to deny the temporary respite that games can provide from the struggles of work, of relationships, of a life that may not offer all we had hoped. But the danger here, of course, is that we choose to reside only in virtual worlds or videogames where problems are too easily solved by violence, or where difficulties are managed by simply buying a different game and thus plugging into a new world with new (and pre-programmed) possibilities. Addiction to video games, an increasing problem in our contemporary world, results in part through the intoxication that these worlds offer in easy solutions to life’s complex problems. We imagine the ideal world behind the screen, and our focus on this illusion makes managing daily life, with its real challenges and more hard-earned rewards, seem a more difficult enterprise. The problem, of course, is that these worlds are not in fact real, and anything we do in them has only indirect and transient effects on our daily lives, where real people still need our love and attention.

Our ability today to receive scripted games (as rituals) seems frightening in some respects. After all, video games are often violent. Even the gaming programs we utilize for dieting or for math practice typically present us with the idea that we only need engage in those activities that offer “fun” and obvious rewards. But there is also opportunity here. If our fascination with gaming also reveals the constructedness of experience – both virtual and embodied – then our love affair with gamification may imply an increasing awareness that we are, in fact, in control of all of our own scripted experiences.  Or at least in more control than we might otherwise imagine.  We have the ability to program our own rituals, to redefine received rules. We may even be able to recognize the “rules” at work in insidious cultural “games” like racism or hegemonic imperialism.

Indeed, we may be able to expose those “programmers” of social codes who are creating “games” we would rather not play. Such awareness comes with the obligation to think critically about the games that we choose to play, both those filtered through traditional gaming consoles and those played around us in consumer culture and political ideology. Gamification might be a sign of retreat from the world – but it may also be an invitation to create a new one, with new and better rules at work.