So like many of the things I think, this probably won't make any sense. But for the sake of my academic standing I'm just going to type this anyway.
I had a friend over tonight and she was telling me about this crazy documentary (?) she watched called The Institute, and I am just finishing up watching it right now. The premise is that these weird signs go up around some hip California city (San Francisco?) with a population best described as hipster. The signs had a phone number on it, and when you called you it gave you the address of some office building in downtown and you were to go to it. When you get there, everyone knows what you're talking about and it's kind of weird and obscure and the receptionist doesn't talk to you and she hands you a key. The keyring has directions to this other room, and once you get there you watch this video with instructions. It tells you that under no circumstances you are to open the drawer next to you and take what's inside, but of course everyone does. So there's a clue in it and you end up going on this scavenger hunt through the city and there's a picture of this girl that keeps popping up. It's kind of Alice In Wonderland-y. You end up in this world they call "nonchalance" and everyone is called an "inductee" and it's absolutely nuts basically. It points out all the coincidence in the world, sort of? Like when you're nonchalantly walking down the street and you get to your destination but you fail to see how many cars did not hit you, etc. Anyway. Over the course of their time in this game/alternate world people are told to show up places and then end up having dance parties where people with stereos show up on street corners randomly. You get to explore the city and discover things you've never seen. One of the founders says the goal is to bring "spontaneity and play to our public spaces." The point is to find this place "Elsewhere" and there are these transmissions and communications from Elsewhere. There ends up being a missing girl and a guy searching for a missing girl.......and I still have it playing on my TV so I don't know yet.
I think it adds tons of value to what we are talking/reading/thinking about this semester. Even the description of the movie on its website says "...the film looks over the
precipice at an emergent new art form where real world and fictional
narratives collide, creating unforeseen and often
unsettling consequences.
Fusing elements of counter-culture, new religious
movements and street art, THE INSTITUTE invites viewers down the rabbit
hole into a secret underground world
teeming just beneath the surface of everyday life." I think this is almost what the investigation of tech/religion is--looking at an art form that changes the way people look at the narrative of their life and creates consequences and new religious-type movements. They go into the people that created this experiment and they call the people who participate "players." The developers so to speak describe it as an "alternate reality game." These participants are acting out a game. But in the process, it changes their world view. But at the same time there are people who insist that it is not just a game and there's something bigger and cult-ier and world changing going on.
It hits so much of what is talked about in the book and what I've sort of been thinking about all semester. One of the participants says, "you act out the game...and you become part of the story that is unfolding in the city, in the real world." Narrative and story and meaning-making play a big role in Rachel's book and connection between religion and games. On page 101 of our book Rachel says "meaning-making no longer includes just traditional religious symbolism and narrative." Meaning-making and narrative have always interested me, long before college. I think that's the part of me that pretends to be a writer. It's always been something I naturally think about and lean toward--how people create ideas of who they are and their place in the world and what they do with their time here. How these really basic human things change and morph but still somehow stay the same whether we're drawing on walls in caves or writing Facebook statuses or making meaning of our world though weird Californian scavenger hunts is fascinating.
I've been having some issues this semester because I can't connect to the "gamer" aspect of this class. I've been able to connect the theories to more "real life" things like subcultures and stuff and it's for sure not going over my head, but I felt guilty because I seriously am apathetic toward technology. This documentary has been valuable to me because it took the "game" aspect of the book out of Xboxes and made the game more real. It reframed it to involve people's real, concrete, life. Anyway. This documentary and this class have so many connections I can't really articulate fully here. I haven't found it anywhere to stream but you can rent it on Itunes for 5 bucks and it's kind of reinforced all the content of this semester for me. I think basically everyone should watch it because it's seriously our class as documentary.
.....Now this probably doesn't make sense and I have a hundred different directions I want to go in here. But welcome to my head.
Your comment is one of my favorite ones so far. I love being able to connect what we are learning about to outside sources, especially documentaries of movies. The Institute sounds waaay too interesting. I am going to look for it as soon as we get out of our meeting tonight. A couple of the things that you talked about really stood out to me, one of the things that was interesting was the creation of the another fantastical world- elsewhere in order to add spontaneity to the real world. A second thing that you touched upon was the idea of destiny...(is how I took it). All of this reminded me of the movie "The Game". I talk about this movie a lot in this class because it is so relevant to what we are studying. If you haven't seen this movie it is basically about a man who gets a "game" made out of his life in order for him to live life in a more vivid way. The trick with this is that he does not know what parts of his life are part of the game and which ones are not. The ending to the movie is pretty cool so I recommend it. Anyway the whole premise of the movie relates to what we are studying in that the man is sucked into a different reality in order to answer a larger question about his life and about his world.
ReplyDeleteThe ideas of going into a different world, or elsewhere in both of these pieces of media completely pair up with the ideas that Rachel Wagner was talking about in her book. The player of a video game has entered an "elsewhere" when he begins playing. Once there he or she must find his or hr way through obstacles which eventually lead them to an end. I see the end as the answer to the BIG question in the player's life. The whole reason they exist is to carry out a mission. What question is bigger to humans than the question of what our purpose is? how did we get here? and what is really the end. I think the video game "Heaven" illustrates the reality of what video games do, they take us somewhere we never imagined and it is how our BIG questions are answered. What I really find interesting though is that in the real world there is no such thing that helps us find the answers to our questions, maybe this is what in a primitive way attracts us to the video game reality in the first place.
...and, further, maybe this concept of an "elsewhere" world is what draws us to religion, too? Perhaps a different way of thinking of the magic circle...
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about The Game when I was watching this documentary because I remembered you talking about it. I'm probably going to watch it this afternoon.