Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that outright, but when applied to addictive gaming, Castronova absolutely has a point. The documentary “My Gaming Addiction” — originally titled “Second Skin” — addresses this by following several people who self-identify as gaming addicts. I can’t really outright identify with any of these, as I’m not a hardcore gamer myself.
<stream o consciousness ahoy — may eventually tighten into something more cohesive>
I never had Nintendo growing up. My parents gave my sister and I each 30 minutes of TV if we had finished our homework and done a host of other daunting tasks like taking baths, reading books, practicing instruments, chores, etc. (We’d usually not get the tv time and if we did, we’d bicker about aligning them so we could watch a 1 hr show or not. Could each of us watch the other’s 30 mins etc was all grey area and hotly debated. In any case, she and I both became avid pop culture vultures in spite of this / as a result?).
I have an early childhood memory of discovering the no-coin-required Pacman at the dentist and playing for like 2 hours once when waiting for an appt when a friend I was having a playdate with fell and knocked out a tooth. It was amazingly fun and I begged my parents to switch dentists after that.
But mostly, I only really engaged with gaming through friends. I went to an all girls school and somehow that kept me from noticing the huge absence of SNES in my household until I was about 9 or 10 and hebrew school friendz would discuss at length and I realized, shit, my life sucks. Managed to score a gameboy for my birthday and would play the same 3 games i got with it (bart simpson, tetris, and something else forgettable) a lot. But I never got really good at them. As a result, I blame my lack of gaming dexterity on this lack of early childhood skill-building. In college I got a busted old tube tv for an art installation (i never ended up making) because we figured out it worked. The dorms werent wired for cable tv, so we scouted yard sales and found a SNES and several games. this became my only opportunity to experience the tshirt on cartridge magic:
in any case— all of this gaming & me history is tangential. I just really loved & highly recommend this documentary. It gave me another level of insight into many of my friends who are / have been hardcore gamers. Also, working with gaming from a brand / advertising side, I guess you see the artificiality of it? Plugging brands into it for immersive experiential ad experiences or even the game as a product vs a recreational / lifestyle choice.
I’ve read Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds twice now but think I might reread, given how the documentary pulls another thread of insight through it. One thing especially intriguing from a synthetic / theoretical perspective is whether the choice between in-game and reality seems constructed as being binary or fluid. Depending on the “success” of the people addressed in the documentary, it seems that gaming is either a fluid extension of their terrestrial life or a totally different / preferred escape. That’s probably where coping skills / overall wellness / some ineffable metric for how together you are comes into play. One couple in particular met through Everquest II and while they dealt with typical rocky relationship ups and downs, they seemed fairly adept at Regular Life and weaved EQ2 into their lives rather seamlessly.
That end of the gaming spectrum versus the strung out, fast food-only, isolated, peeing-in-a-bottle style seems more sustainable and more likely to be what the idealized mainstream for our future looks like.
