Monday 30 July 2012

The Exodus to, er, Made Up Worlds

I was listening to an old Econtalk podcast with Edward Castronova today while doing some house keeping, and immediately thought that it was worth blogging about, being both Relevant To My Interests and very educational. The blurb is as follows:
Edward Castronova, of Indiana University and author of Exodus to the Virtual World, talks about his provocative thesis that a growing number of people around the world will be spending more and more time playing multiplayer games in virtual reality both as a form of escape and as a search for meaning. He talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how this trend might affect government, religion, and our happiness.
I'm not an expert on multiplayer online games, because I literally don't play any of them: my only experience with online gaming of any sort is the odd blast of Dominate Game with the guys in my office and long-running PBEM games of Steel Panthers: World at War with 50-something fellow military history freaks in Texas and Virginia. So my comments ought to be taken in that light. It also needs to be said that Castronova was being interviewed here in 2008, and things have obviously moved on since then: they talk quite a bit about Second Life, which seems to have faded away (to my knowledge anyway), and they cite World of Warcraft dollars-for-gold-piece auctions as a $1 billion dollar per year concern, where I suspect today they are even bigger than that.

The most interesting issue they raise is the philosophical one: what are the consequences for society that a sizeable minority of people actually seem to prefer living in a virtual world than to the real one? And what does it say for society? It being Econtalk, which is probably the most cerebral podcast on the internet, they manage to steer clear of stupid pat answers like "blah, capitalism destroys the soul, people want to escape, blah". Instead they offer a number of different thoughts, foremost among them that modern society has to a large extent tried to shed myth, and in doing so it has left a core human need unsatisfied: history and anthropology suggest that myth is something that fulfils some sort of genuinely human requirement. They make the observation that World of Warcraft is like an exercise in myth-making which seems to fill this hole.

In any case, it got me thinking about table top RPGs. Are they part of the same process, the so-called "exodus to virtual worlds"?

It's a shame table top RPGs are so niche, because I think they can be productively analysed in relation to issues like this. RPGs are sort of like Second Life and World of Warcraft, because they involve the creation of a fantasy world, they are to a certain extent escapist, they resemble Nozick's Experience Machine to some degree though don't map perfectly. And yet at the same time they are different - because they are social in the "true" sense (you play them face to face) and very rooted in the real world of dice, pens, paper and, perhaps crucially, the written word.

I don't have any particular thoughts on the matter, though this notion of myth-making struck a chord with me. What myths we do have in the modern world - essentially, books, films, comics, etc. - are all passively partaken in. So although I'm prepared to buy the argument that nowadays films fulfil something of the function that mythology did, it isn't really correct to talk about watching films as being involved in myth making because nothing is being made by the audience. This contrasts with religious myth in particular, because religious myths involve an active response - they are supposed to be linked in some way to our behaviour. There is something more of that in table top RPGs: active engagement with issues of right and wrong, good and evil, and so on, and also just acting with some kind of in-game meaning as opposed to being an unengaged observer.

14 comments:

  1. I think the de-sacralisation of lived experience nowadays may have something to do with the attraction of D&D, and more broadly of fantasy in general. Some films do speak to this need, though I'm struggling to think of more than a few over the past 30 years - the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the original Star Wars trilogy, the first two Terminator movies are some that come to mind. A couple decades before that and you get into the era of the mythic Western movies.

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    1. There's also superhero films. I know they're based on comics, but nobody took them seriously until this weird renaissance they're currently undergoing.

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    2. Good point - I'm not a big Superhero fan, but many of the films clearly go for a mythic portrayal.

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  2. I process "escapism" as a slur since it's almost never defined or contrasted to acceptable uses of the imagination.

    You see the same kind of panic described in Don Quijote's neighbors, and implicitly in what happens to the Don from reading too many books; at the same time Cervantes has other characters mount a spirited defense of fiction. But he's one of the few commentators ever to examine as well as depict and practice the difference between escapism and imagination.

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    1. Can you expand on that? I've never red Don Quijote.

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    2. Well, you may have heard that in Cervantes' novels, he is an old guy who gets addicted on the Renaissance equivalent of fantasy novels (chivalrous romances) and, like Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters, acquires the delusion that he is a crusading hero from the novels and goes traveling through a very unheroic Spain, with various misadventures that hinge on his misinterpretations and the more down-to-earth attitude of his squire Sancho Panza.

      His neighbors strive to free him of the delusion and at one point organize a bonfire of the books, but this is a device for Cervantes to argue (through the character of the curate) for distinctions between the more consistent and worthy romances, and the trashier and more implausible stuff. In the second book of the Quijote a main theme is that Quijote's madness allows him to see the moral universe more clearly, whereas it is the rest of the world who is mired in delusions.

      The multilayered, truly Baroque irony is that Cervantes is himself writing fiction, at the same time implicitly denouncing the effects of fiction through Quijote's madness, but later playing the other side of the argument. What's more, within the novel there are characters who themselves argue for and against the merits of fiction.

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  3. I can't imagine Russ Roberts ever saying "capitalism destroys the soul." :-)

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    1. Well yeah, but you know what I meant. Always good to meet a fellow Econtalk listener, by the way. It proves you have impeccable taste.

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  4. Will give it a listen later if I get the chance; it reminded me of the first TED Talk that Jane McGonigal gave. In fact, she might reference Castronova. She certainly refers to the "exodus to the virtual world".

    http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

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  5. Wow, RPGs as a replacement for Religious mythology. Maybe.

    I think I would argue that the Short Story is a more obvious replacement, along those lines. A passive medium but with a tight focus on getting an active response from the reader: either by teaching a lesson, or by giving a mind-expanding experience.

    Like Harlan Ellison who says about his stories "My message is always the same: we are the finest, most ingenious, potentially the most godlike construct the Universe has ever created."

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    1. That's not quite the same as RPGs either though, because the RPG has some concept of *action*, even if it is imaginary action.

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    2. Well it's quite similar if one assumes that the absence of 'religious myths' leaves a person longing for other forums in which their imagination is 'relevant'.

      And besides, which is more of an 'action'? An action in an imaginary world or a perception-changing(in the real world) experience inspired by an imaginary world?

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    3. Go search for fan fiction and roleplaying chats based on popular films. It is myth-making, because audiences embrace the film and expand on it, change it, in their own ways.

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