There is some discussion of work and how we need a way of talking about fun. In thinking of this I have long said that we need think of playing videogames as a performative act. We need to stop looking at the games and start looking at the players. (I’ve been saying that for almost 3 years now! That is a lifetime in videogame studies!) The fun is in the players, not the game. While his work has been criticized and it has ventured close to new age self help territory, I think that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on “flow” can be of help in focusing on what goes on with the gamers and what is fun and how to talk about pleasure. I really recommend taking a look at Beyond Boredom and Anxiety for a way of thinking about pleasure and what happens when we are in the zone and why work sometimes is pleasurable.
Go with the flow
- Posted by: Bryan-Mitchell Young
- Category: opinion
About Bryan-Mitchell Young
On Art and Violence
Now that the semester is winding down I’ve got a bit of time to blog (and write my last couple dissertation chapters and then revise all of them and write the intro and conclusion chapters…). A couple things have happened (and are in the process of happening) that have the gaming world buzzing: Roger Ebert wrote about videogames again and the Supreme Court is taking up the case of California’s law forbidding the sale of videogames to minors.
Regarding Ebert, he ends by asking, “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” which echoes my own call for all of us to stop caring about “art.” Tons and tons of people have tried to convince him he’s wrong — so many in fact that I don’t even want to bother hunting down links to some of the stories that do it. I’m not interested in arguing with him because I don’t really care if he thinks games are art or not.
However, it is very disconcerting that he seems to think that he can judge games by looking at screenshots. Would he write a review of a film based on the text on the back of the dvd box? That’s pretty ignorant to think that he can judge games in that manner.
Unfortunately, this is just the top of the iceberg because look at the picture at the top of his post. Now I have no idea if he picked that picture or not. I would say that he probably didn’t but he did pick the rest of the pictures in the post so perhaps he did. Regardless, the picture didn’t just appear by itself. Someone chose that picture. What is in that picture? A kid. So someone whether it was Ebert of just some random web guy, wanted to pick a picture of a gamer and they picked a kid — once again perpetuating the stereotype that games are for kids and in this instance also seemingly indicating that games are in and of themselves childish. Wow. That’s pretty sad.
OK, now onto the Supreme Court…
I’m pretty confident that the Supreme Court will say this law is unconstitutional not only because lower courts have consistently ruled that laws regulating videogame sales are unconstitutional but also because of the recent Supreme Court decision declaring a law banning animal cruelty videos unconstitutional.
Today the Diane Rehm Show had a segment on the Supreme Court taking on the Videogame law regulating videogame sales and had Leland Yee, the California politician behind the bill, Craig Anderson, the guy who has never met a form of media that didn’t cause aggression, and a couple other people I don’t remember. Now, I’ve previously criticized Anderson’s vague use of the term “aggression” so I was pleasantly surprised that Diane Rehm’s first question to him was “what is the difference between agression and violence?” Anderson initially tried to avoid answering the question but then Rehm re-asked the question and Anderson admitted that while violence is generally understood as an extreme form of aggression, it is very rare for aggression to actually turn into violence. I think that it really key because in that statement Anderson (who also in this CNN video says that videogame-caused “aggression” isn’t really any worse than film or television-causes “aggression” ) says that videogames don’t really make kids violent.
If the most well known person who thinks videogames cause aggression doesn’t think they make you violent then that makes the case that they are so bad that we need laws against selling them much harder to prove.
Personally, I look forward to the SCOTUS shutting down these kinds of laws once and for all.
…well that and Jack Thompson getting involved and saying some crazy things…
Movies can be scary too…
Allow me a non-videogame-related rant here… It is still about moral panics surrounding children and media though so it could easily have been about videogames instead of movies.
I caught a story on the local NPR station last night about someone threatening a lawsuit against Redbox because they sell “R-rated” movies. I searched for something about the story and apparently it got picked up by a few local news outlets including the Indianapolis Fox Affiliate and the Louisville ABC Affiliate. According to stories the whole thing is being stirred up by Vanderburgh Country Prosecutor Stan Levco.
Of course there’s two little details that neither of the two stories linked to above or any of the other stories I saw seemed to mention: First, The MPAA rating system “is a voluntary system” and the ratings are not legally enforced. The only possible grounds for a lawsuit that there would be would be under obscenity or pornography laws. Levco almost certainly knows this. So why is he causing a stir? That leads to the second missing detail: Levco is running for re-election.
So this is just a ploy to get into the headlines so that Levco can say he is “fighting for families” and concerned about “family values” without having to do anything. The minute I heard this story I immediately wondered if the guy was up for re-election because that’s the only time public officials try to start legal proceedings related to media. I guess Levco couldn’t find any easy videogame targets.
Heaven forbid that any of the media outlets that aired this story would take two minutes to wonder why Levco was doing this or anything… That’s some good reportering there…
Speak his name and he appears…
In my last post I asked, “Where have you gone Jack Thompson?” Well, if you say his name then he’ll appear…
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick’s full DICE speech, Jack Thompson says ‘Gotcha!’
I think it would be a poor move to associate game studies with Csikszentmihalyi’s lackluster work. “Flow” is feel-good pop psychology based more on ego than any kind of science. (The URL below links to a discussion on my blog.)
I agree that some of the bagage that comes along with flow is problematic. In fact it may be that the bagage is so big that it might be best to leave it all behind entirely.
However, I think that when we are looking for pleasure and we are looking at what happens when we play games, it is a usefull concept. I see people talking about it all the time, only without using the terms.
I agree that the mental visualization stuff is new age-y and I would like to ignore it.
I haven’t read the Flow book you discuss. I draw my citations from Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. I’m not sure of the relationship to Skinner but in the book he talks about how we can become either bored or anxious if the activity is either too easy or too difficult and when we are in a flow state we are beyond those two extremes. That is what I always asumed the title refered to.
Some of the later things you refer to do not seem to be in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety and do indeed sound problematic. I really just concentrate on his 7 aspects of flow (which I think he later expanded into 9) and how they relate to playing videogames. And even at that it certainly isn’t the centerpiece of my work.
I think that portion of it is usefull. And while I was aware that it was new age-y, your comments will serve as a warning to make me be more specific about what I find usefull in Csikszentmihalyi’s work in the future.
Thanks for the post and the link!