To be quite honest, I have no idea how I would like to start my post here. I have a few dissorganized thoughts that are only related because they came about from our reading. Forgive me and my rather stream-of-consciousness here as I ramble to get my ideas out. These are the two topics I'd like to get out of my brain and on to this blog:
1. I would love to explain my own context and story and the love and meaning I find in play and gaming.
2. I have a specific rather terrifying feeling that this discussion of virtual realty, specifically the space of virtual reality, might have brought to light some serious issues in the church. However, I am not sure Wagner has fully engaged this idea of mine.
My Marriage and Virtual Reality. I think that I would consider myself a practitioner of gaming and I would say that my wife is also.
When I was 15 and she was 16 she wrote me a love note at a summer camp retreat (which I still have) and a few weeks later I asked her out over MSN Messenger. On Messenger I had increasingly sought her out because she had wrote this love note; I wanted to get to know her better. Virtual reality was the safest way for me to pursue her. I couldn't quite tell what sort of person she was, but the moment that she said she loved video games and named a few, I knew something was special. So I suggested that we get together and play some Turtles in Time together (an awesome classic). She refused. I told her that I didn't understand because she had written me this note that was so passionate (for an innocent 16-year-old to write, mind you). She then told me that she wasn't interested and didn't mean what she had written. I later found out that she did have feelings, but was just afraid to commit. For her, leaving the safety of virtual reality and entering something "real" was too terrifying.
Years later, it's 2009, I'm 19 years old and I get a job at Papa Murphy's where she is a supervisor. Her and her cousin knew me and put in a good word. Shelby and I become instantly good friends. We, along with primarily my best friend, would often get together to watch silly movies and play horror video games together. This little late-night ritual of ours opened up to a deepening of our relationship as we would spend late hours talking to each other about our fears and beliefs and ideas.
Well eventually I go off to school in 2011. Once I had left, she realized that she might lose me and she writes me another love note when I come back in the summer of 2012. This time, she didn't reject me when I followed up. But before she gave me the note, she called me up and asked how my last semester had gone. I told her that my academic dean, Jeff Mallinson had assigned me to play Final Fantasy X for his Loci Communes class and it blew my mind. We got together and played Final Fantasy VII together as a follow-up to that conversation. (Yet again, the space of playing games together is a safe one for us.) Once she gave me the note, the rest of the pieces fell into place and we got married.
Now we spend a lot of our bonding time playing together. Sometimes we take walks, go to movies, take naps, wrestle, tell jokes, or have projects we work on together. But significantly more time is spent playing video games together than anything else I would consider fun. I have recently been inspired playing Minecraft with my wife because we are building a kingdom together and cooperating to create beauty, fun, all while fighting off the zombie hordes that come at night. There is something about world-creating and meaning-making in all of this that has stimulated our relationship in ways that the mediums of the "real" world have made sterile many of our passions and excitements.
Gaming has become a place for us to safely engage serious issues. As we play we enter a space where it is okay for her be much better than me and for us to talk about what that means, or for her to be afraid of certain sorts of mass-multiplayer games and what that means. All kinds of real-life anxieties, fears, ideas, hopes, and dreams find a place to come alive and enter our thoughts through the games we play.
Racial Equity and Virtual Space. This topic is specifically fascinating to me, and perhaps I should explore this idea further in a paper. But Rachel Wagner discusses virtual "space" in a few places (notably 80-86, specifically) and what this space means theologically. I have spent some time in conversations about racial equity, most fresh on my mind is my recent trip to Chicago and Shekinah Chapel, and I know that space is absolutely important in the conversation about equity.
Space as an escape? Liberation? Or perhaps sacred? For a friend of mine, the fact that his church has an actual location that is physically embodied in a context of racial violence and oppression, the church has a sacredness to it that is unique to its community. The church becomes the place where an embodied, communal, experience takes place both in worshiping God on Sunday mornings and then fighting the political, financial, and governmental systems of oppression on the weekdays.
My friend says that just walking in to his church gives him a sense of power, freedom, and safety when the streets around the church make him feel disempowered, trapped, and in danger.
I would like to say that virtual reality, especially after having explained my story with my wife previously, can easily become a space where we as people can feel powerful, free, and safe to engage things that perhaps we could not have otherwise. I will also say that there is something I cannot quite put my finger on that seems different between virtual reality and a physical space like this liberating church in an oppressed community of color. Perhaps the difference is that the virtual space provides primarily virtual power, freedom, and safety in a noumenal sense. The possibility exists that these concepts are engaged in a playful way. But the phenomenological, empirical power, freedom, and safety of a church that actually provides systemic change for a struggling community is more engaged, real, and much less (if at all) playful.
I would just like to point out at this time that either Wagner has not yet made the point that virtual space can create actual, physical agency for those who are oppressed, or she simply does not see that as a vital component of religion and ritual. I would like to say that play, even for the sake of play, in the end does not feed the hungry. If Wagner is suggesting that ritual and religion is like play, but actual agency and change are not involved in the meaning and purpose of ritual or religion, then that "religion" is subject to a Marxist critique. Perhaps Wagner's religion really is just an opiate of the masses. Or perhaps at best the ritual or religion becomes a rather Platonic place of agency and change, separate from the real, starving, hungry, and desolate world.
Space, location, and context. Virtual space I would argue, has a hyper-individualized location and contextualized way of creating meaning. What I mean by that is, virtual space does not force you to engage meaning that has been chosen already, but rather virtual space is simply a place where persons may or may not cultivate their own meaning. In comparison, however, a female child born in an impoverished Afgani community where meth is rampant and the richest and most powerful community member is a male drug dealer with his gang and guns, cannot as easily navigate, choose, exalt, or dispose of meaning as they please. Meaning is not playful for her. Interpretation of meaning becomes different when it is behind a screen or separate from embodied, physical reality and restrictions.
Another friend of mine, a mission organizer at a racially diverse church, encouraged her community to practice the idea of caucusing first before they engaged in an inter-racial conversation. What this means is, the different people of different cultures and races would gather and discuss racially-relevant issues separate from the other groups. After these discussions take place, the groups come together and share what this means for the community as a whole. As opposed to segregation's "Separate but Equal" the slogan of caucusing here becomes "Different, Unequal, but Unified." Instead of a slogan like in the halls of the Lutheran School of Chicago, "Many Voices, One Story" the slogan becomes "Many Stories, One Voice." The different caucusing groups go and discuss issues, which in many cases my friend said were the first times that the white people discussed feelings of white guilt and being on the receiving end of racial oppression. After the caucusing groups discussed their needs and concerns, they assemble as a whole and then figure out what they can all do together to approach the many diverse problems of the assembly. Separate they caucus for issues, together they unify for solutions.
But what happens when virtual space comes into this conversation at this church?
I see "caucusing" play out often on the internet, but there is no sense of unification with other groups after the caucusing takes place. Strange people will assemble with other strange people of the same type of strangeness to discuss their own strange interests, hates, problems, and ideas. I think that there is no better place to caucus than the internet. There are whole, massive, communities of people who are engaging the very same yet unique issues that each one of us individually may or may not have. Then there are locations like facebook which assembles all of ones social contacts, regardless of sameness, for a giant conversation.
But I am mostly concerned that the internet has become the meeting place for racial equity and not the church. I am concerned for this because as I said earlier, I don't believe that the internet (or virtual reality) can create actual change and agency for oppressed and marginalized people in the same way that an actual, physical location could if those people were to meet. If people meet on the internet for a sense of community and sameness, why would they go to church for a sense of diversity and action? (Especially if the church is rarely a location for diversity or action at all.)
To conclude this little section of my blog: if Rachel Wagner believes that virtual reality can accomplish the aims and goals of religion, ritual, and sacredness, then her idea of religion ultimately builds an unreal (even false) sense of agency, power, freedom, caucusing, connection, and diversity for people. Rachel Wagner's picture of religion only has a Platonic gospel that enters into a virtual space (at best) and not a concrete, embodied, real gospel that enters into the actual world.
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