Playing the Future. Greetings from North Carolina. I'm going to violate my own suggestion about not doing all your blogs at once because I've only got a small window of opportunity here between travel time and being on stage giving a workshop.

The book I brought along to read on the plane seems to shed some light on the discussion about violence in games. It's Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids by Douglas Rushkoff. It was written a few years ago before the web really took off, but it's an interesting and optimistic view of how life is different because of our media and networking, and particularly how kids are different from the rest of us because the world they grew up in is very different the the one we were kids in.

Rushkoff has this this to say about video games:

"In each case of an archetype's development, the games progress from objectified viewpoint to increasingly participatory ones. They turn from stories told or observed into stories experienced. The world is generated, on the fly, by the game console as we move through it. In some games, you can even see the scenery being rendered as you move toward it. But, like dreams, the scenes are from a weightless reality. A real ball never descends an incline plane, nor does a real Nazi ever fall to the ground dead. As our tolerance for the reality of dream-death increases, we can accept more and more realistic and riveting portrayals of violent events. This doesn't make them any closer to flesh wounds -- only to a more consciously experienced catharsis.

As Jung would tell us, the archetypal struggles in dreams remain the same, even if the symbolism changes from era to era and culture to culture. In video games, the central conflicts and universes remain the same over time: Our world is being attacked; I am in a struggle against another individual; or I must accomplish my quest. These are the same structures underlying dreams. But if a person goes to a psychiatrist because he is having problems in life, does the doctor try to change the patient's dreams? No. He gets the patient to remember more about them, or even dream consciously in the form of guided visualization. Dream deprivation studies have shown that if a person is not allowed to dream, he will develop psychotic delusions -- hallucinations in waking consciousness. The same is true for cultures. If we deny ourselves or repress our cultural dreams as they express themselves in our media, we will experience cultural hallucinations like paranoid conspiracy theories, New Age magical thinking, UFO abductions, and more. We should not try to change our world by changing or eliminating our dreams, but we can look to our dreams for answers about why we do what we do in real life.

The unique opportunity offered by a mediated dream space is that we all experience the same dreams together. A particular game becomes popular because it offers a dream in which many kids wish to participate. Should we fill a child with shame because he has a violent dream? No more than we punish the Shaolin priest for practicing martial arts or reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Nor should we condemn them or ourselves for participating in violent game play in the weightless realm. Unlike boxing, no one really gets hurt. In mediated play, like no other, we can push ourselves into ultraviolent, physically impossible acts of aggression, and everyone can live to tell the tale. Most video game consoles come equipped with modem ports, so that players can find opponents or co-combatants anywhere in the world. Kids will wander through the corridors of Doom together, teaming up against the monsters. Most computer quest games also have networking capabilities, so that four or more players can work together or against one another over the internet. It is as if video games comprise a technologically realized collective unconscious. A shared dream."

Is this what Eric is experiencing when he goes to a LAN party to play Quake and blasts the bejesus out of his friends?

And is the important difference of vantage points among the members of the Game Violence team due to gender, or is it because of age? Eric and Shawn might be younger enough than Sharon and Noelle to have lived all of their conscious life in the warm glow of computer screens. Did that change their wiring in ways that go beyond their plumbing?

(And isn't it hilarious that, according to Eric, Quake devotees are called Quakers? If they're going to be named after a religious group, wouldn't "Islamic Fundamentalist" be more appropriate?)