More things that don't make sense.

As this is our last class session and our last blog entry, I naturally still had no idea what I was going to talk about. What has interested me most this semester is story. The story of religion, the stories we play out online, the stories we play out in video games, and why humans like stories. I like stories--I have always loved to read and have learned a ton through stories, and also like to tell stories (sometimes.) But WHY do humans have this need to create a narrative that has a beginning, middle and end? Why does everything need to be neat, no loose ends, why does everything have to be part of something larger that we are working toward? Why do need to have somewhere we came from and somewhere we're going? Sometimes things just suck. Sometimes things just happen and they just....happen. Sometimes we work a crappy job to keep a crappy apartment in a crappy city and we're not really doing anything but turning our wheels and we're not living a "story" at all, but we still TELL ourselves stories. ""Well, when I get my next paycheck..." "Well, I came from a hard place..." "Well, this is temporary..." "Well, at least I'm better than before..." These are all forms of stories that make our lives seem bigger, seem better, seem larger. They give meaning to our lives in ways that nothing else can. I believe that religion and story are VERY similar....I would even argue that religion wouldn't exist without story. I mean, how do we learn about religion? Through parables, stories, sermons, ect. I feel like Christians have this notion (although probably not all, I'm speaking to some stereotype in my head here) have this idea of "this is where I came from, this is where I'm going, this is how I get there, these are some obstacles that are my plot line, and then there will be this glorious hero-esque ending." And as humans we don't want to die but we are going to die so we might as well construct some sort of meaning around that and gosh darn it stories give us that meaning, thus, religion. (I hope this doesn't sound offensive in its simpleness, because I truly don't mean it that way, but it's also not a secret that I am not religious and either don't know what I believe or don't believe in anything and I'm still working out the difference between the two.)

But here's the problem for me: I also believe that life is just messy. People die. People use you. Friends leave and come and go and bad things happen. But good things also happen--you meet people, you make some friends, you put your feet into the ocean for the first time. Blah blah blah everything in between. But what if these are just events that happen instead of stories? What if there IS NO MEANING?! What if as humans we lost this idea that we are bigger than just the cells we live between and we actually are just cells and synapses and the information that fires between them? 

Even typing this I get stressed out because I love stories, people. I love them. I can think of many stories that have changed my beliefs about life and about myself. But I also believe we can deceive ourselves with them and other people can deceive us with them. And I hate to think of myself as 1) able to be deceived or 2) capable of deceiving others. But I fear that these might be the only two roles of stories. Because if everything IS just random and life is just some sort of frenzied card dealing, we ARE deceiving ourselves through the stories we tell and form, especially large systematic stories like religion. We are assigning significance to things that don't have significance and this has the potential to be damaging.

People spend so much time in story. It's no surprise to me that things like video games and religion get compared because to me those are both just stories and we're drawn to them because humans are drawn to all stories. We watch movies, we gossip, we read books, we learn history, we play video games, we listen to other people. There is almost nothing in our culture I can think of that does not contain some sort of story. Even as consumers we are drawn to stories--TOMS shoes, for example. If you read the company's book (I've read a lot of random stuff) the founder talks a lot about the story he created around the company because people buy into stories. And people like to be part of stories. Because when they are a part of a story they matter. And people like to matter because mattering means that when we die we will still be here and none of us want to be gone. Stories also help us learn, help us grow, help us not do what that guy over there did, help us think we can get to the top too if we work hard enough. But here is where the lines blur for me: What is the value in the story of a violent video game? Is it usually set up so the person who is playing is the "hero?" This is a true question I hope someone can answer because I don't play video games, and I'm curious. Because if the story is just straight up killing and shooting, that is the kind of story that would confuse me greatly. Are they usually you vs. the "bad" guys? And if the narrative is bad, like in the Columbine game in our reading from last week, what does that mean? Is that game then "bad?" Why do bad stories have no value? Can't bad stories still teach us things?

What if this is all just pretend? What if stories are just socially constructed because our brains simply evolved too far and we can't stand our existential problems? That, friends, kind of scares the pants off of me. I know I'm not the first ones to think these thoughts and I'm going to be far from the last one to think these thoughts but I really struggle with this idea that life might not be a narrative and if it's not, what is the harm in pretending that it is? And, getting into  a new problem with technology: our lives now CAN be fully 'just a story' we tell. What does it look like when our lives DO become a narrative--through blogs, facebook, avatars....can we create a life for ourselves that is ONLY a linear narrative and does that have value? I think for sure it can have a therapeutic value, but can that caricature then stand on its own? And is it you or a different being entirely? And what aspects of your story do you add and remove and WHY and who influences that choice?

...Sometimes thinking about stories keeps me up at night. Also, here is my TED talk for the week:

(Also, just so everyone knows, when he says no one describes their life as reality show, I always do and always have. I'm happy to bask in that uniqueness for a bit.)

(Also, if anyone has found my textbook for class and can return it me, I'd be grateful. Cough cough.)

Outdated and Far Too Modern

After finishing Godwired, it seems clear that for Wagner, virtual reality is capable of performing all the functions that were once exclusive to religion. I was excited by this prospect, and I suppose I still am, but Wagner's handling of the material seems terribly out dated. By this I do not mean that she uses examples that are no longer relevant. In fact, I was impressed by her broad knowledge of contemporary digital media. No, what is outdated is her understanding of religion as an all encompassing category capable of swallowing up every bit (pun intended?) of culture and tradition. Such treatments are the vestiges of modernity in which conflict was resolved by denying differences. Racial tension provides an easy example. If skin color is a problem for us, then we must become color blind. Today we realize that ignoring the color of someone's skin easily leads to ignoring the person. We see that to really know someone or something we must be open to everything and especially that which makes them or those things unique. Wagner's definition of religion is a kind of cultural color blindness. "Religion" becomes a way of making peace between Judaism and Islam and Christianity by ignoring the conflicting elements in each. In so doing, Wagner ultimately loses sight of the particular manifestations of her abstract category. By speaking of religion in the abstract, Wagner alienates herself from Judaism, from Islam, from Christianity, from the actual content of her abstract category. Attempting to speak to everyone she ends up speaking to no one and it is tragic because we all feel like she has something very important to say.

Virtual Future

What makes a religion a religion as opposed to a cult? This is an honest question that I hope someone will answer in a comment below.

Wagner says, “Instead, make belief is the real life performative act of as-if. It is creating the appearance of the real or the meaningful as a means of generating its acceptance as real” (215).  It is make-belief instead of make believe. What happens though if people do believe something like that is real? Take the man who is in love with Twilight sparkle. Isn’t that make believe. He completely believes with his whole being that she is real, she is capable of feelings, she can think and communicate, and that they love each other. When someone believes so deeply in something it seems to me that they can make a religion out of it.

Wagner talks about people devoting themselves to movies like Lost, Twilight, and Starwars. The people who devote themselves have ‘believers’ in the form of fanatics. They recite ‘scripture’ from their holy books, aka, twilight etc. They wear designated clothing that shows their ‘god/gods’ and “pray in public and virtual forums”. This scares me to death.

How many of you have heard of Cullenism? It’s this new idea going through the twi-hard virtual community. It is a religion where the followers worship Edward Cullen and Stephanie Meyer. They have special days, holy places (forks), a prayer, and a list of beliefs. People post of forums professing their faith and saying they will live for eternity like the Cullens if they follow the rules and rituals of their faith.

All this makes me question religion. I don't know why this book made me have a dark moment, but it is true. What if future religions are based on books written by authors like Stephanie Meyer or even game designers! I'm not familiar enough with gaming to be able to talk on that but what if these forums dictate the newest and most popular religions? How will society look in 20 years? I'm terrified to find out. 

You Guessed It........Skyrim

While others are posting super pertinent and thought-provoking apocalyptic ideas, I'm going to outline my paper a bit because

a. I finally have a direction
b. You can give me feedback and it will give you class credit
c. I didn't do the reading
d. But I will before Thursday, Professors Russell and DeLashmutt

So going back to the recent conversations around violence in video games, I find myself comparing two very different instances and contexts: Skyrim and Call of Duty. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the games, I won't explain them here but I recommend a quick Wikipedia search for grounding. Basically what I hope to get at between the two is the inobvious but somehow very palpable manifestations of violence.
I will delve a bit into the conversation around humanity's violence-crave and the evidence around that - virtual games (and childplay situations) that involve heavy themes of competition/domination, instincts (CS Lewis connection to be revealed!) and the motivation they give, and even, theologically, how violence is both a part of our sinful human narrative and the one thing that turns it around.

Maybe I'm casting out too many nets here, but whatever I'll narrow down later. Anyway:
The big factor that sets apart Skyrim and COD in their utilization/inclusion of violence and first-person killing is narrative. My argument isn't that packing murder into a nice, complex storyline is okay (or even terribly clever), but that violence as an aesthetic is entirely separate from violence as a necessary element. In COD you might have campaigns and other goal-driven 'storylines', but my sense is that in any other setting (WWI, Vietnam, Crusades) the tweaks between games would be so minor. It'd feel about the same shooting someone in one as it would the other - you are meeting objective A in the ___ war.
And let's be real - most COD players only own the game for multiplayer, which is also where I will make a comparison.
Video games, by nature, need, as outlined earlier, violence. Every game needs to fill the blank: 'get a certain number/amount of ____ and you win'. Skyrim contains and sometimes necessitates violence (as it must)  but COD fills the blank with kills while Skyrim fills the blank with many things. You need to kill to achieve those things, but killing and winning aren't the point. You're free to make them your goal, sure, but in doing that you lose a piece of the game; you are robbed some of what it was meant to be. The game loses some of its soul, and soon enough all games would look the same if you chose to play that way. COD, GTAV and others tend to skip to that place (or create complexities around it? The Aesthetic Violence?) while I believe Skyrim, Pokemon, Assassin's Creed, etc (Skyrim is my paper's focus) combat (lol) that trend. The story comes first and only through it are any elements necessitated, not any necessitated story built around those same elements.
Thoughts?

Zee Katamari Ball and Other Stories

Before I write about what I will actually be discussing I would like to take a moment to look at the idea of the game "Katamari". Today William P. Young came to speak to our school about his book and in the private Q&R ( not Q&A because he is Canadian) he gave out a set of statistics. From the very beginning of human history up to the year 2003, he said, humans had gathered 5 billion gigabytes ( I think) of data. He continued on and gave the astonishing statistic that by the end of this year humans will be producing that same amount of data every 10 minutes. Can you all believe that? the amount of data since the beginning of human history until 2003 is the same amount of data we are producing in only ten minutes. Like the game "Katamari" our data systems are growing and we will never be able to go back. The "Katamari" will never shrink therefor he has lost the chance at obtaining points, like our data consumption it will never be the size it was just before a specific moment in its lifetime. Just like the "Katamari" being able to conquer new challenges we are also growing in a way that will allow us to face challenges we never had thought were possible to even comprehend.

Now on to the actual topic of this post...the construction of belief. Throughout the reading I couldn't help but involve Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In this model humans need the basics to survive, we start out with basic food, water, shelter and work our way up adding safety, love and belonging and self esteem only to be rewarded by self actualization. Building the pyramid should not be difficult for the average Joe but where, I wondered (while reading) would belief be? making belief is not a physiological need, it doesn't have to do directly with belonging or with security and I am sure one can have self-esteem without it. This all sounds acceptable but it does not sit right with me. Making belief is one of the most important pieces of the human experience, whether you believe in a deity or just in each other. Belief is what keeps people grounded, belief that Jesus is our savior and died on the cross for us is the base of a religion that millions of people ascribe to...but you have to believe. Could a person get to the pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and end in self actualization without belief? I do not believe it to be possible. But how does one believe in an age where "choices are more overt involving competing options"(Wagner 214) so many competing options that it seems impossible to make a well educated choice without having dipped in many sources. This is where the idea of "make-belief" comes into play. In a world where a religion can be as individualized as frozen yogurt there will be a need of structure somewhere, this need of structure will show up eventually, it will create a full cycle of not having choices, to having too many  and back around to wanting less of them. Video gaming may be one of those structures. I am not making a claim that video games that are meaning/belief builders are popular for their specific religious/ritualistic nature but who knows; they may become a stepping stone towards a tech friendly religious structure having to do with the church. Does self actualization include having a "religious" belief?

That is all. 

Zombies as a Sandbox-Transmedia and the Postmodern Turn

Our lovely hero Rick from The Walking Dead, attempting to reconcile the meaning of life.

Certainly trailing off of Dr. Jeff Mallinson's ideas and his influences, I would like to engage zombies briefly here. If you are looking for something to pass the time with, give his podcast a listen:

http://virtueinthewasteland.com/3/category/zombies/1.html

I am going to make the claim that zombies have beautifully reflected and responded to our mass subconscious' fear of modernity, science, and the death of culture itself. I would make the claim that the way in which zombies have been both collaboratively made into a subject of thought within a growing context and then that subject critiques its context (society-at-large) is arguably prophetic.

Zombies, as a creative creation, have now become a transmedia phenomenon stretching from graphic novels, novels, movies, video games, web comics, and more over the past 5 decades. I am especially inspired by Rachel Wagner's engagement with transmedia and religion and how those two intersect (212 in our reading of Godwired) regarding the conversation of zombies-in-media as a possible catharsis for affluent, modernistic cultures.

I would like to say that the subject of zombies has become a sandbox dialogue. Wagner discusses what it means to have religion as a transmedia subject with a sandbox view versus an answerbox view; the primary difference landing between the interactivity of the sandbox and the fixed narrative of the answerbox (220-235).

The zombie subject is a beautiful example of a sandbox dialogue because of how the theme and representation of zombies has changed over time due to different, growing sources, contexts, and medias. At first, key zombie movies focused on the events that took place in an imaginative setting where zombies have suddenly taken over. The earliest zombie movies simply look at the moment, the particular, the accident, of zombies and a specific story. Later films depict survival strategies, reclaiming human dignities, rebuilding human needs, and everything up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, ending with love. (Perhaps the zombie theme is still incomplete in its playing-out, since individual's expression/identity and aesthetics are yet to be meaningfully constructed in an adaptation yet to date.)

For an example piece of the story, look at Romero's Night of the Living Dead/Dawn of the Dead/Day of the Dead series. The focus and engagement with the theme of zombies in his films is highly religious, shocking, momentous, and represents an interesting piece of social commentary. There is a progression of hopefulness between the three movies. But after these movies comes more important themes than simply experiencing the apocalypse, surviving the apocalypse, and rebuilding from the apocalypse. The theme of zombies becomes a reflection of the postmodern turn and then the emergence from the ashes of postmodernity. One of the fascinating parts of the transmedia conversation behind zombies is that in playing with the possibility of society's fall to the undead hordes, it accomplishes an actual process of meaning-making for the real world. The complex narrative of the zombie apocalypse, as stitched together from many different pieces of media throughout the last 45 years, represents a very real progression into and reclaiming of meaning, hope, and love from the ashes of modernity's meaningless, contagious, and violent clutches.

Mother Teresa Make-Belief-ing

It was difficult for me to understand what Wagner was really trying to get me to take away from her last two chapters (before the "expansion pack"), other than "yes, gaming and religion do have interestingly similar apocalyptic narratives," or "oh yeah, I guess Katamari Damacy and the Bible are world-building texts. SO INTERESTING."


It wasn't until Wagner's comparison of "making belief" and Mother Teresa's confession that my interest was really piqued. Here was a woman that, until I had read this (and maybe I just haven't been paying attention), I had taken for the one of the most devout, compassionate Catholic figures of our time. Admittedly, my Mother Teresa knowledge is limited mostly to what I remember hearing about her in the news before and after her death when I was a child, but even from the glimpses of information I've caught since then it is so surprising to me to read these things she thought, and the deep guilt she felt about them.


“…there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead…the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear…no faith, no love, no zeal…the saving of souls holds no attraction…heaven means nothing…what do I labor for…where is my faith…I no longer pray…what hypocrisy…”


Wagner describes her outward display as one of "making belief." Mother Teresa no longer believed in what she was saying and doing, but she performed the "belief" as if she did. In a way she was fooling the world. What could be even more intriguing to me is the subsequent quote by Pope Benedict XVI about this very thing:


"The idea of living 'as if God didn't exist' has shown itself to be deadly: The world needs, rather, to live 'as if God existed,' even if it does not have the strength to believe; otherwise it will only produce an 'inhuman humanism.'"


Setting aside the claim that "Godless" people are incapable of "human humanist" acts, I find it so interesting that the Pope would encourage people to live in a way they do not truly believe in. This is what Mother Teresa had done for so many years and was unable to find any peace in it.


I definitely don't mean to slam the Pope, just to bring up the real idea of "make belief-ing," and the real turmoil it can bring to people. Wagner brought up the idea with an example of ARGs (which I can tell you right now, I would be utterly addicted to) and cosplaying, where people take on these personas in the real world that are not their own. However, what happens when we are not able to go home and not be a part of the game? When we can't do anything but make belief?


This is where Mother Teresa's turmoil came from. She no longer believed in this thing that she held so sacred--so sacred that she couldn't quit seeming to believe.


There are many instances that I can think of that people do this--though definitely not on so drastic a scale. I have friends that hang-out and interact with people they really don't like because they just can't seem to let go of the old connection; I know people that won't let go of a job they don't need and that treats them poorly, just because they have been there so long and are afraid to break that connection. I suppose this could explain in part why Mother Teresa never did anything to alleviate her suffering. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to me because I will never be as compassionate as she was--make belief-ing her life in order to bring peace to those around her.


Do the opposing ideas (as far as make-belief-ing for real, not in a game) then come down to "making belief and a sort of security vs living in a way true to yourself and insecurity?"