Professional Documents
Culture Documents
gaming.
Presentation script, not citeable! May be freely used under the following
license:
Introduction
My talk is itself a bit on the edge insofar it will be a kind of explorative
crossover of two questions. The first axis is that of a certain contemporary
theory of self-education through media – Medienbildung, and I want to ask
if ideas such as reflexivity, articulation, creativity, which are crucial to it,
have to be more critically assessed with regard to subliminal, implicit
effects of power.
Why, you may ask, am I looking not only for the important issue of
educational benefits but also for a critical examination of this field, in a
1
situation where digital games and new media in general are still mostly
condemned by the mass media and politicians (except of course in this
beautiful city of Vienna)? It’s because I think that, thanks to the work of
very many practitioners and researchers, the educational relevance,
benefits, and potentials have meanwhile been shown in so many ways and
examples that they have to be at least basically clear for everyone who
dares to take a serious look upon this field. I personally focused for quite
some time on showing up potentials of various the realms of new media,
and I have the feeling that, on this basis, it’s just logical to take a further,
more differentiated step towards a constructive and theory-based
educational media critique.
I’d like to start with a little story of a gaming experience I made long time
ago – and I guess, many of you will have made similar experiences. It’s
maybe about 12 or more years or so ago when I used to play the Microsoft
Golf Simulator Version 3. It was just a kind of state of the art golf
simulator, very primitive of course for today’s standards, but very well
playable. I just played it times and times again and learned how to handle
those virtual golf clubs in a satisfying way. At that point, I began to explore
the areas beside the course. As you may know, in a golf simulator you
usually can’t just walk around; you’re more or less bound to the place
where your golfball lies. So the only way to move around in a golf
simulator is by hitting the ball in the direction you want to move. Luckily,
the game let me do this, hitting the ball in any direction (except the
appropriate) one time after the other, which was a lot of fun in itself
(because it’s deviant). Of course I was curious where this world would end.
When I finally reached the border, I was astonished. Unfortunately, I don’t
have a screenshot of it. What I saw was a mixture of the regular landscape
on the ground and a sky and horizon that was cluttered with smeared
blocks and pixels of the background graphics (some Canadian mountains)
all over. I had the feeling that I saw the graphics engine at work, as if I
would look right upon the embodied code of the game itself in a way. And
it was beautiful! (13th floor) You’d be in a place that shouldn’t be there,
2
wich has not been intended, which is kind of impossible. I’m a philosopher,
so I immediately felt like home at this strange, intermediate place. I was
not able to move beyond (though I would have loved to), but at least I was
standing just right on the border of the “regular” world simulation and this
area where the construction principles of this world had gone wild and
unveiled themselves to me in form of this unpredictably changing sky. It
has not been the last time I’ve been there, and as you see, I still
remember this experience with joy. The beautiful imperfection of this
game world was just perfect to me.
I’d now like to frame my point of view on digital gaming – in order not to
be unclear about my position in this field of research. As an educational
scientist, I focus on processes like socialization, learning, and education. I
worked on theoretical problems like issues of identity and subjectivation
and anthropology on the one hand, media phenomena on the other hand,
for example by conducting an ethnographical study about Lanparties
(which is rather unknown because media researchers, as I suppose,
seldom read books about social rituals).
3
Both fields bear of course multiple interconnections through issues like
virtual identities, virtual bodies, new forms of the social, and so on. Of
course, this approach implicates a rather broad view on things. In
consequence, my focus on media phenomena is likewise a broad one. I try
to gain a view upon the various types of what I’d like to call emergent
media, because I think that all these new transformative phenomena like
the social web, the revolution of digital photography and the
transformation of visual culture through it, the new forms of mediated
sociality in the realm of the social web, and of course digital games and
virtual worlds, form a progressively convergent media sphere and thus are
equally relevant to the question in which way these media transformation
affects the way people live, work, and interact today and in the future. Put
in educational terms, the question is how socialization, learning, and
education are transforming through emergent media.
1. Media “Bildung”
Now, what is exactly meant with the concept of Bildung? If that german
term should be uncommon to you, you may know pragmatist philosophers
and educational theorists such as John Dewey or George Herbert Mead.
Dewey, for example, has promoted the notion of “experience” as a means
of understanding rich processes of learning and identity development,
resulting in new habits and attitudes, in new ways of seeing and
interpreting the world.
5
Bildung in this sense involves a kind of deep, orientational knowledge that
cannot simply be acquired by learning in the sense of “adding new
information to a stock of knowledge”. What we address as processes of
“self-education” thus transcends the horizons of the common everyday
world and is bound to change the way a person makes sense of his world
as well as of himself. Far from being a plain learning process, self-
education points at the reframing of former world views, thus leading
towards a more reflexive, flexible and complex relation to the world.
Media play a major role in this respect, and even more so the new media.
Bildung as a process can hardly be thought of as a purely individual
matter. It rather has to be understood as participative process placed
within a social or even public sphere. World views have to be expressed in
order to become reflexive, and they deserve the recognition of the others
for the same reason. “Who articulates himself”, as philosopher Matthias
Jung expressed it, “interprets his qualitative experience by putting it into
language, into an image, into music or wherever.” (Jung 205, 126).
As far as media in today’s world provide vast stages for articulation, for
cultural social encounters, it is evident that Bildung is inevitably tied to
6
participatory media as realms of gaining reflexivity and orientational
knowledge in a hypercomplex world.
The Sims is a perfect example for what Johannes Fromme, well known in
german educational game studies, calls a “playful semiotic domain” in
accordance with James Paul Gee.
Put shortly, because the potentials of The Sims in this respect are pretty
obvious:
Knowledge:
8
3. Bildung, power, and governance
Now for the” second layer” to the educational theory I spoke of. What we
did not refer to so far is an issue in the background of this conception of
Bildung that has raised some serious questions in the (at least german)
educational discourse in the recent years. When we talk about knowledge
we may immediately remember the critical role this term plays in the
thought of Michel Foucault, who conceived knowledge as a major
instrument in the social games of power and regiment. To Foucault, power
is not something that is in the hand of a few in order to dominate the rest.
Instead, relations of power traverse every part of the social, even the
smallest social interactions. Power gains its effects by constituting (and
being reproduced by) discourses and practices, which establish certain
ways an individual may address himself and be addressed (an issue of
identity) or certain practices, like practices of discipline, which constitute
subjects through subordination (the subiectum can be translated as the
subordinated).
9
What Foucault thus was searching for were strategies of resistance. Of
course, every “simple” act of resistance just doubles and reproduces the
power, at least if the individuals act as subjects.
The discussions about the concept of Bildung (in germany) have rather
lately adopted Foucaults cross-grained ideas. The outcome varies, starting
with those who judge that the idea of Bildung is too deeply contaminated
with power issues. Educational Philosopher Norbert Ricken, for instance,
concludes in his major study on the impact of Foucaults work on the
concept of Bildung that it would be rather unlikely that Bildung would ever
be able to serve as a critical concept again (Ricken 2006, 347). However,
other voices, like Judith Butler, show that Foucault wasn’t all that
pessimistic. The strategy she makes up basically lies in constructing, or “a
radical making” of subjectivity while refusing “the historical hegemony”
which embraces us (Butler 2001, 100 f.). This is not possible against the
dominating power but, as a subversive strategy, by repeating it, for
instance, so that the hidden logic of power relations becomes visible (the
queer movement would be a classical example for this sort of re-
appropriation).
10
power would be furthermore possible, this would only be so by
productively subverting discourses of power by means of marking the
dominating discourses and possibly subverting them this way (Lüders
2004, 66).
How are relations of power and rule structured in the realm of digital
games?
1. Rules
2. outcome
3. valorization of outcome
4. player effort
5. player attached to outcome
6. negotiable consequences of the outcome
So, computer games are maybe even “more” closed rule systems than
non-computer games are – which makes them a perfect structure for
processes of subjectivation. Playing a game generally requires the gamer
to subordinate himself to the rules of the game. It’s interesting to note at
this point that rules themselves have no power. Rules themselves can’t
12
force anyone to do anything. The source of power in non-computer
multiplayer games are the gamer themselves as a group, as the GO-
example shows. But the more closed a rule system is (in the sense that
the rules are perfectly transformed into algorithms), the less may this form
of power exist in that field.
So, if rules don’t force the gamer, they govern him. Systems of rules are
systems of governance in this respect. Playing a digital game thus requires
the gamer to subordinate him to the game, transferring his power to it,
from every single moment of the gaming process to the next, iteratively.
And this is surely as ambivalent as all power relations are, but it is not
necessarily a bad thing. Just like the subversive performative power that
Butler talks about, the subordination can first be enjoyed (and maybe this
is a major source of joy in gaming) and afterwards subverted. It seems to
me that what I did in my beloved Microsoft Golf Simulator 3 was just that. I
iterated that very gesture of subordination which was central to this game
and subverted its rules by doing so: Striking the ball with the club, just like
I had learned it through in-game practice – now just in a slightly different
direction, directly led me to the edge of this game.
Résumé
My question was how a concept of “Bildung”, related to digital games,
would look like if the effects of power are taken into account. I’ve surely
just strived that very complex matter here, but I think it’s at least possible
to keep this somewhat odd perspective in mind. To this, I guess it would
be possible to transform the heuristic, or to add this as an additional layer,
focusing on issues like which discourses and practices are in which way
performed in a game as well as how the body and the gamer himself are
involved into the gaming process.
How would The Sims be assessed with this heuristic? Probably not that
enthusiastic, as is governs to perform a certain normative scheme of
living, and it’s quite sure to say that it employs many patterns of
hegemonic discourses.
13
Aditionally, it’s not unthinkable that the subordination under the rules of a
appropriate game may be a realization of something like the care of the
self – another Foucauldian topic of interest in relation to Bildung.
14