OUT ON THE EDGE

Pressure and criticism is building against video games, saying they are violent, sexual and unsocial.  I take this to be a deflection of what ought to be aimed at the reality of things like “extreme fighting,” a big deal in Great Falls where many people don’t only admire it, but will pay major bucks to watch two people (not necessarily male) pound each other.  That’s not what I want to talk about here.  Instead I’m reacting to a video by Glen Schofield, a creator of hugely successful video games, explaining in TED style how he and his team create the games.  Much of it is about the art work of strange environments, like space, war, or foreign places.  So this talk is the “meta” level of human experience and the principles that inform arts of all kinds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6PX2n5Pj2pI#!

At the same time I just finished the May, 2013, issue of “Analog: Science Fiction and Fact.”  The juxtaposition triggered the thought that what used to be sci fi, is now often translated into vid games, a mix of reality and virtual construction, and that before there was sci fi there were “religious” stories.  We reach for what is beyond human.

Part of this is the work of understanding survival in the obvious three step process:  1) intake of sensations, 2) filtering and structuring, and 3) producing decisions about what to do.  But there is always more beyond what we know, that bushwhacks us or lifts us up with sudden grace.  Three words are markers for me:  the uncanny (that is, what is unaccountable but not necessarily threatening and possibly explained eventually); the horrible (a danger that can’t be processed); and the sublime (felt access to deep meaning of a transcendent sort).  These stories carry the abiding interest of anthropological inquiry into exotic groups like soldiers of fortune, astronauts, bedouin, gypsies, sex workers, CEO’s or -- okay, extreme fighters.  

Anthros talk about the “emic” versus the “etic” , but since those words unfortunately summon up in my own mind emus if not emetics, I prefer the theological idea of a circle inside of which the person is a believer, belongs to the culture, sees the world through those eyes, versus outside the circle where the practices, resources, and goals of those inside are understood as information, structures, and so on -- but objectively only one possibly arbitrary way of being.  Stories can be told from inside the circle, outside the circle or even a mixture of both.  Video games, mostly from inside the circle, intend to give us a compelling visual and auditory experience of being there, even if the “there” is impossible, and presses us into a mind set that presumably can let us “survive” there.  I suspect that strategy is as important as violence.  (I’m not a gamer.)

A dimension not often acknowledged outside the world of video gamers, but touched on by Scholefield is that of aesthetics: the poetic ability to summon up metaphors and images that are visionary beyond anything we normally experience.  Words and images have a special ability to sweep us into mental and emotional states.  They take us into the “feeling” concepts that are under our consciousness. 

We normally think of altered consciousness in terms of drugs.  Some remark on contemporary alcoholism among American Indians as the result of never having developed the use of toxins to affect their thoughts and release emotions.  But in fact American Indians commonly used environmental pressure on physical homeostasis (cold, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, wounds) to distort their mental processing -- sometimes on purpose and sometimes as a necessity.  Whether the result is desperation, rage, exaltation (maybe a combination), or a great peacefulness in the aftermath, is open to investigation.  The dynamics of emotion in extreme circumstances, especially those of bonding or shock, may be more consciously investigated in video games and movies than in the processing of real-world war acts.  If they were, we might understand PTSD better.  Could a video game help heal PTSD?

Schofield speaks of ransacking every source of ideas he can find, including comics and documentaries.  He mentions “The Devil Came on Horseback” and how the author of that book, Brian Steidle, a “peace keeper” in the Sudan, noted that dust storms can shut down the most powerful modern army machines, an idea he used as a “timer” -- a deadline pressing the action.   He does not include the most extreme horror: little girls from a school who were shackled in a huddle and set on fire -- alive.  Ashes and bones are all that remain -- plus whatever imagination shows us.  I don’t recommend the video but it’s on YouTube.  It IS extreme.

Schofield does show the orderly ossuwaries of skulls in the catacombs under Paris and tells us he used the image as a break in action.  And he mentions the French preoccupation with what is called the “New French Extremity” school of cinema.  These include “torture porn” and other atrocities that can be visited on the human body.  He does not mention the school of “enviro porn” showing the destruction of the “flesh” of the planet.  I’m not sure he’s aware of it.

We seem to be in a time when we search for extremes, boundaries, edges -- maybe because so many of them have been pushed back.  Maybe the most obvious example is our space probes, now outside the solar system.  In the opposite direction, there is a strange unease in finding the Higgs Boson -- on the one hand wanting it to truly be the end of all searching but on the other the nagging itch that there might be more, even rather hoping there is.  We also seek edges in our social arrangements.

Here is the creative advice of Schofield as he lists them on his video:

Keep an open mind.  Dismiss ego.  Consider all possibilities.

Assess priorities.  Establish an order.  List them.

Research while staying aware for the “golden nugget”.  Go deeper.  Then go wide, to related fields.  The obscure, the forbidden.  Have experiences.  Travel.  Don’t neglect details.  Take a zillion photos or sound tapes.  Notice the small human gestures and framings.  Shapes of spaces.

Use other people’s experiences, consultants, historians, scientists, leaders, the news, teaching tapes, field records.   Quote other films, esp. well-known ones.  Know “The Public Psyche.”

Pin-up boards, like the ones on cop shows and on the walls over the work counters of clothes designers.  Create reference booklets of photos and art images.  (For writers, save quotes, but be sure to include sources.) 

These warnings:

Inspiration may not take a direct path, but may turn out to be a labyrinth of multiple sources.

Sometimes the most crucial element comes by accident while researching something else.

The whole thing is likely to be messy -- you don’t know exactly where you’re going, how you will get there, and what you will end up with.

In the end there will be a “rule set” derived from free association and then “what if” questions.  These are the “paradigms,” the grammar of the story.  They might be trivial and conventional, or they might be transcendent and surprising. 

The following little schema is mine, derived from neurological research:

The black box :  What goes in (sensory)

What happens inside the mind (paradigms, expectations, deep beliefs, imagining)

What gets done about it and whether it leads to survival.

THEN, how to communicate all this material that may seem unpredictable, unprocessable, undoable, uncommunicable.  This is the ground of science fiction as well as video games.  What I miss in the latter is the “soft sciences” of psych and philosophy.  Maybe some of the energy of video games can be reverse-engineered into new sci-fi.  Or maybe fantasy is where the psych and philosophy have gone -- are those in video games, too?  A three minute search finds “The Longest Journey” on YouTube.  Female art student protagonist.  Multiple languages.  Many bits plus long records of other people’s games.

SALVATION AS PARTICIPATION

I’m a little nervous.  I’ve signed up for a Great Falls HIV-AIDS Outreach workshop next week.  I haven’t been an activist for years -- maybe decades.  If anyone says “committee,” I’ll bolt.  It’s not that I fantasize I might catch HIV.  What do you think these workshops are like???  Hep C is a much greater danger in a public group and there’s a lot of it around here, but not much HIV -- so far as anyone knows.  Our local attention is rather on immature young men who abuse their girl friends’ infants and toddlers, occasionally killing them.  The stats show few cases of HIV in Montana, but there a few sequestered populations that probably don’t show up in the data.  One is Malmstrom Air Force Base, one is the reservation populations (Indian Health Service) and another is probably post-prison felons.  

Otherwise most of the HIV cases are around the universities -- not just students but also the fellow travelers who hang around campuses, esp. IV drug peddlers.  Of course, University of Montana has attracted attention for cases of rape, including urban athlete recruits from the rough parts of eastern cities.  These days even nice ranch girls have defined anal and oral sex as somehow “not sex.”  Low income women dependent on men (maybe only emotionally) will accept bad treatment of all kinds esp. when both are drunk.  These days HIV is not homosexual -- it’s human.  The pattern is the same as tuberculosis or polio: under-lain by poverty, poor nutrition, housing shortage, mixed populations, lack of education or skills.

When I taught on the rez over the past decades, I had to take a tuberculosis anti-body test because the “bug” moves as aerosol and most schools have closed ventilation systems that recycle rather than pulling in outside air.  For a while I got false positives.  When I was ward clerk at a nearby nursing home, the lead nurse was sweating out an eye-splash she’d gotten while working in an OR elsewhere.  There was no known HIV on the premises, but many stories about Hep C.  (The nurse was spared HIV.)  The first AIDS death of someone I knew was a fellow UU minister, a handsome young man whose father was a denominational leader and whose male partner was an MD.  

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I leap from the particular to the universal.  Therefore, what I see in this virus is a call to theology -- one of the many needles and shuttles that connect us with threads.  This web has powered my shift from an understanding of salvation as personal and individual eternal life in some other place (as I was taught in Presbyterian sunday school), to awareness of eternal life as a fabulous shifting code pattern in which we participate through the phenomenon of consciousness -- our ability to reflect and enjoy.  This is Eastern and Native American thought, which are contexts that were spared the Roman Empire as well as the Abramic paternalistic worldview.  It’s not “New Age.”   It’s scientific.  It’s the cosmology of those who are aware of the evidence.  

Like every other threat to existing prosperity, HIV-AIDS is virulently attacked by the representatives of the status quo -- which use as disguises the imported dogma of the Mediterranean, filtered through battles for dominance in Europe, and temporarily successful domination of the Americas.  These forces (call them right wing or ultra-conservative) are really about owning and controlling.  They are propelled by fear.

A key concept of participation-based wholistic life rather than preservation-based personal life is that there is no birth and no death -- one’s consciousness is simply received and then surrendered.  Use the body as you will, while you may, to traverse the web as you encounter it.  This is so different that it has penetrated [sic] many people on this planet without those who are preoccupied with getting-and-spending even perceiving it.  But children can see and feel this universal sense of the world.  

Yesterday on www.hereandnow.org  Matt Damon’s mom, who is an expert on child development, discussed the impact of so much “dark” violence in our media, esp. since her son is pretty deep into it.  http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/02/21/video-games-guns The question is in part why ordinary nice suburban kids are so attracted to these sexualized, monstrous, terrifying images.  If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have to ban them. Since nice suburban moms with good incomes are discussing the issues, they miss the most obvious fact:  many (maybe most if you include the Third World) kids right-here-right-now are LIVING what’s in those video games.  They don’t see murder on TV -- they ARE murdered.  This is one of the reasons kids have so much contempt for adults; that adults turn away.

Even the nice ordinary suburban kids know this -- odds are some of those kids are sitting in the same classrooms, undetected and unaddressed by adults.  Anyway, the state of the world on the news, the ragged “canners” pushing shopping carts, the urban myths that circulate even in the countryside, are mostly denied and ignored by adults.  If games are a way of working through kid issues, then video games quite likely address the moral and spiritual puzzles that adults fail to address in reality.  I still dream images of torture from WWII when I wasn’t even old enough to attend school yet.  (Bulldozers push high piles of the naked bodies, bones barely covered by flesh.)  No adult ever discussed them. They are the bulldozers behind my questing, which isn’t about God-dogma at all.  It’s existential.  And mercifully, the adults who WILL address such Evil are often located in the better seminaries.

So this workshop in Great Falls is being addressed by a man on the boundary, Greg Smith:  young, good-looking, and dynamic.  Because he is a partnered gay, he cannot be a priest.  I’d like to see the world from his eyes for at least a few hours.  I’d also like to see what he knows about the Underworld where big tough outsider tribal felons hang around in bars the college guys love to cruise to show how initiated they are.  What I know is mostly second hand, but mighty vivid.  (If I’d investigated first hand, I’d be dead now.)  Being a "virtuous" old lady, impoverished and celibate, is like being a priest without a church.  

Of course, I don’t SAY that, because many people are terrified of religious people, having had relatives who were “seized” and put into prisons of one sort or another.  Christianity can be predatory.  The irony is that a physical prison -- when it reaches critical mass -- can force a spiritual rebirth.  Not always.  And some fake it.  

The media doesn’t really get all this stuff, partly because reporters tend to be young, underpaid, ambitious kids controlled by old guys with an eye that is interlocked with readership and advertising.  News is defined by profit.  The educated are too busy sitting in seminars arguing over regulations.  The priests are burying young people.  (But only their bodies.)  Some realize that life is “for reals,” not a video game.  But it’s going on and going on -- through us.  To feel that is an astonishment and a joy.