Computer Games and the Social Imaginary

Graeme Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745671901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

In this compelling book, Graeme Kirkpatrick argues that computer games have fundamentally altered the relation of self and society in the digital age.

Tracing the origins of gaming to the revival of play in the 1960s counter culture, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary describes how the energies of that movement transformed computer technology from something ugly and machine-like into a world of colour and 'fun'. In the process, play with computers became computer gaming – a new cultural practice with its own values.

From the late 1980s gaming became a resource for people to draw upon as they faced the challenges of life in a new, globalizing digital economy. Gamer identity furnishes a revivified capitalism with compliant and 'streamlined' workers, but at times gaming culture also challenges the corporations that control game production.

Analysing topics such as the links between technology and power, the formation of gaming culture and the subjective impact of play with computer games, this insightful text will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media, games studies and the information society.

CHAPTER ONE

Computer Games in Social Theory

The aim of this book is to provide a clearer understanding of the cultural importance of the computer game. Computer games have been with us for a long time. They started out as the preserve of a small group of technological enthusiasts and hobbyists and became a multinational industry. In a strange way, this happened twice. At the end of the 1970s the industry grew rapidly and took on international proportions, only to fall back dramatically in the early 1980s. Since the mid-1980s computer games have become a global culture industry with projected annual turnover for 2013 of around $70 billion. It is claimed that computer games have become culturally mainstream, that everyone plays them regardless of age and gender, and that they are part of a new social and cultural reality with political import (McGonigal 2011).

The years in which the computer game has developed have been decades of rapid and momentous transformation, associated with phrases like ‘the information revolution’ and ‘globalization’. Digital technologies including games have changed the fundamental principles of social and economic organization so that we see new goods as well as old ones produced and distributed in completely new ways. These technologies have changed our ways of creating and communicating, so that scientific practices, the arts and the media all now move to a different rhythm than before. Networked computing has reconfigured our understanding of society and our understanding of our own contribution to social life. ‘Social media’ like Facebook are a very clear illustration of how the very practices of social interaction have been drastically altered by the salience of digital devices and the reality of digital connection. These kinds of changes affect the very meaning of ‘society’.

The computer game¹ has played a central role in helping people to navigate these changes. It has been instrumental in introducing many people to computer technologies and in making the use of digital devices habitual and intuitive. At the same time, the computer game has been shaped by its historical context. The idea of playing games with a computer was not a natural occurrence – it reflected the outcome of cultural activity and social choices. Both these processes are ongoing: computer games continue to leverage changes and cultural innovations and they are constantly being re-shaped by the environment in which they operate. This book tries to map the implication of computer games in many of the changes of the last 30–40 years and to identify how shifts in the social and cultural environment have shaped the games that we play.

The project of the book, then, is to position the computer game and gaming as a cultural practice in a theory of contemporary society. The rationale for such an undertaking is clear. Computer games matter because a lot of people play them and because they occupy a place of great strategic significance in the culture. Social theorists, I submit, need to think about the issues raised by gaming. For example, there has been much discussion recently about the role of social media in promoting new forms of political action and a new more engaged citizenry (Morozov 2010; Joyce 2010).² Gamers are an important section of any new public identified in those terms – playing games is something most people do when they join the growing number of the world's population who use networked computers regularly. If we all play games now, it is important to understand how they fit into our lives and affect the other roles that we have as individuals in society. In what follows I will try to show the role computer games play in reconfiguring notions that have framed our understanding of ourselves and our relation to the society we live in.

Aphra Kerr has pointed out that a social history of games ‘would focus less on dates and inventors and more on struggles and uncertainties’ (Kerr 2006: 20). I have tried to observe this principle in the chapters that follow. Writing in ostensibly similar tones, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter have offered a highly politicized ‘account that explores virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle’ (2009: xxix). In contrast, however, this book attempts the more modest task of explaining how computer games have claimed the position they now occupy in contemporary culture. This involves focusing on struggles waged on behalf of the new medium to secure its recognition as a valid pastime. A first set of relevant struggles, then, concerns the effort to make games that appeal to children and parents in a context where parents are told that games are bad for their children and children embrace games partly because parents vaguely disapprove of them. Or the struggle to make games for games’ sake, in a context where those managing the production process are only really concerned with efficiency and marketability. Or the struggle to get games that people can enjoy playing together in a society of increasingly isolated individuals, in which social atomization is often attributed to things like computer games. These are the social struggles that mark the development of the computer game as a cultural form and they are a primary focus of this book.

These struggles, in which the computer game finds itself and wins its cultural presence, so to speak, have wider entanglements. The fact that families incorporate the computer game in all its ambivalence into their homes, for example, connects to wider questions, and touches on long-established distinctions through which we have sorted and made sense of the social world, like the public–private distinction and the difference between production and consumption. The fact that public technology enters the home and permeates intimate relationships is an important social fact related to the historical transformations mentioned above. Similarly, the fact that people associate digital devices with play has implications for the way they relate to their working tools. The apparent blurring of work and play here expresses profound changes in the way that society is organized, including key productive processes. Games have been agents in the transformation of what we might call the aesthetics of technology – what machines feel like to use – and this marks an abrupt and important break in recent social history. It is essential to understand the role played by games in the wider struggles associated with these and other transitions.

These issues are addressed in the chapters that follow. This chapter begins by concentrating on three central topics of contemporary social theory within which the computer game occupies an important place. We start with the bigger picture, by locating computer games within the wider transformations associated with globalization and what has been called the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). This sets the scene for detailed exploration of the social processes that shaped the first computer games, which are the focus of the next chapter, and those through which games and gaming have won the cultural location they currently occupy, which is the theme of chapter 3.

The key concepts in this chapter are the social imaginary and a new kind of subjectivity specific to digital culture, described by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) as the ‘streamlined’ individual. The chapter begins by defining the idea of the social imaginary in more detail and identifying the relationship of the idea to the history of technological media. Section 1 shows how a specific permutation of the social imaginary associated with print technology was fundamental to the development of modern, democratic societies. It then goes on to discuss the negative impact of twentieth-century ‘mass media’ on democratic culture in terms of a constriction of the creative powers of the social imaginary, before offering some first thoughts on how computer games might break with this.

The next section turns to the question of the individual who believes in and participates in the co-creation of this re-configured social space. Social theorists have argued that contemporary individuals experience crises of identity related especially to the rhythms of life imposed by the demands of the new economic situation associated with globalization. They focus on the discrepancy between these and the idea of a coherent self with a biography that ‘makes sense’. Here the ‘gamer’ identity is pivotal, combining as it does aspects that reflect functional adjustment to the new situation with the opportunity to bolster and reinforce personal identity in a new cultural practice. The gaming self is equipped to participate in the new economy but also has access to remedial cultural resources that compensate us for the new kinds of vulnerability associated with that participation.

Finally, the chapter turns to the issue of critique and the usefulness of social theory in the circumstances described here. The purpose of critique is to identify niches, points in contemporary experience where individuals and groups might find a foothold from which they can enhance their own leverage over the situations in which they find themselves. Rather than being swept along with the flow of an increasingly ‘viscous’ (Boltanksi 2011) social reality that demands narrow pursuit of one's own interests, critique exposes points at which action based on deliberation and reflection might lead to an opening for ideas that contribute to the general well-being of society. This is not a top-down operation, in which the expert transmits the truth to a grateful reader, but rather a dialogue in which historical and other ideas are introduced into conversations and practices that are already ongoing. The onus is on the author to identify these conversations and to make appropriately targeted interventions and suggestions. One of the purposes of this book is to try and identify such points within gaming as a cultural practice.

1. Gaming and the Social Imaginary

Regardless of their historical circumstances, people have to be able to think the nature of the social collective they participate in. This thinking necessarily involves an imaginative dimension, which cannot be separated from quantitative or physical descriptions. We know that we are ‘in’ a society, but what that means to us is historically and culturally variable, and, while the strictly physical correlates of the idea are essential, they are indeterminate. Rather, the popular conception of society is made up out of images, ideas and impressions which, in Castoriadis’ (1987) phrase, ‘lean on’ more literal descriptive accounts of relevant social quanta. These two dimensions are inseparable and interdependent. Castoriadis refers to a kind of ‘magma’ of uninterpreted material that conditions how we make sense of the social world and how we position the resulting idea of society in understanding our own experience.³ Describing social phenomena involves creative interpretation and a play of our descriptive resources and capacities: it is never determined, only conditioned by this magma. There are, therefore, rules of sense-making that we use from day to day and which maintain the notion of a society in which we live. The social imaginary is where we find these rules and the margin for interpretative play and innovation that is dubbed the ‘radical imaginary’ by Castoriadis. It is particularly important to notice that even when it seems to us as if society is dominated and determined by forces beyond our control, the imaginary dimension has given rise to that interpretation and that way of thinking about them. Social events are always constituted out of interpretations acted upon and this reflexivity is ineliminable and all-pervasive. The idea of events as determined and determinate is, in fact, an effect of reflexive-interpretative processes that, if understood, would falsify the idea: the social magma is real but indeterminate.

The factors that most affect our specific historical experience of the social imaginary are the communications media through which we share and distribute ideas in a social register. It was media technology, especially print, that established the ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1985) that made people believe they were living in modern societies in which they had a role to play as citizens. Key sources here are John B. Thompson's (1995) study of the media and modernity and Jürgen Habermas’ (1989) idea of print culture as providing ‘launching-off points’ for the modern public sphere. Moveable type technology, developed in the fifteenth century, inaugurated a series of historical events that culminated in what theorists call the public sphere. The production and circulation of printed information changed how people imagined the wider social world, from a situation in which local, proximal factors determined their sense of who they were and what they could do, to one in which identification with distant others became more important. Social activity now took place in imagined spaces they shared with others, both as reference points for action and as sources of identity. The modern self is one that develops through engagement with and participation in a new kind of space that is detached from place. This space is the primary effect of the ‘modern social imaginary’ (Taylor 2004); it is the reality that underpins popular discourse on society and it accommodates the structures and unities that are studied by sociology.

Modern societies are democratic because the use of print as a medium of integration creates the possibility that people can recognize themselves as agents in the creation of social life, as participants on the same terms as everyone else who reads the papers. In this way, the modern social imaginary involves a subjective, psychological orientation that is essential to being a free and equal citizen. Habermas (1989) identifies the psychological novel of the eighteenth century as a launching-off point for the public sphere as a space that is uncoupled from place and in which people come together to agree on the rules of social co-existence. Often epistolary in form, these novels offered readers rich portrayals of the inner lives of others with whom they could identify as being ‘like them’ and as sharing a common social horizon. In the public sphere, reason, debate and the struggle for mutual comprehension hold sway rather than money and power, which also rapidly developed new potency and new forms of operation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Habermas 1989). For Habermas, the tension between these two dimensions of social evolution defines the modern period.

The public sphere represents the strongest possibility for a society in which reason and debate can determine the forms of social organization, liberating people from naked domination by the powerful or by the drudgery that Karl Marx called the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’ (Marx 1990). Communications media, and especially the print revolution, are at the centre of the idea. Thompson (1995) clarifies the importance of media with reference to three factors. First, media provide symbolic resources with which we can collectively fashion a social imaginary. Once people are exposed to media, the range of symbolic meanings they can draw on to construct an image of society becomes greatly expanded. Second, this influx of symbols is related to communicative action, which now enjoys occupancy of the new space. Reading documents produced in Brussels in my home in Yorkshire and knowing that other people are reading the same words in Berlin greatly enlarges my sense of the space that I, and others like me, occupy. This space is populated by the exchange of ideas, and communicative practices give it meaning and form (consider the resonances of the idea of ‘Europe’). Finally, involvement in these processes involves a new sense of self. As I relate to others and to space on new terms, so I become a different kind of being. The modern sense of self is no longer rooted in ‘the familiar and the routine’ (Thompson 1995: 189) – as individuals are aware of more ‘alternatives to existing practices’.

The rise of modern communications media, then, is experienced as liberating. It frees people from the ties of tradition, exposes them to new ideas and creates a new space in which they can participate as citizens. At the same time, however, it creates a new kind of dependency. As Thompson puts it, ‘the more the process of self-formation is enriched by mediated symbolic forms, the more the self becomes dependent on media systems which lie beyond its control’ (1995: 214).

According to Habermas, this dependency becomes pathological in the twentieth century. The critical social theorists of the Frankfurt School, with which Habermas was associated (Held 1989; Jay 1973), argued that culture as a whole in the post-Second World War period became industrialized, in the dual sense that it subserved capitalist industry and acquired an industrial production logic of its own. Studies of the ‘culture industry’ by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School emphasized the homogeneity of cultural production in the mid-twentieth century. ‘Films, radio and magazines’, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 120).

Behind this system lurk corporate interests t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Digital Media and Society Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: Computer Games in Social Theory
• CHAPTER TWO: Lineages of the Computer Game
• CHAPTER THREE: The Formation of Gaming Culture
• CHAPTER FOUR: Technology and Power
• CHAPTER FIVE: The Phenakisticon
• CHAPTER SIX: Aesthetics and Politics
• References
• Index