The Insight of the Computer Game
How insights give people (not “cause”, perhaps allow?) a certain view on an event - sometimes more indepth, sometimes more biased, but always limited.
Let me delve for a second into a post just on a building block of my thesis - insights.
I think people would call this a meme - a basic building block of cultural knowledge:
A meme, (IPA: [mi:m]) as defined within memetic theory, comprises a unit of cultural information, the building block of cultural evolution or diffusion that propagates from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution. Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes).
(ahhhh Wikipedia)
However, Rather than use the less common term of meme and all the explanatory extras that it might carry (the “discourse” which surrounds memes) that I dont understand and might mistakenly add to my argument, I am going to borrow a plain English word from commentry at Manifesto Games on Super Columbine Massacre RPG:
And a game such as Super Columbine Massacre can lend insight into the events of that terrible day that newspaper reports, or somber and thouthful essays, cannot. Not necessarily better insights–but different ones–precisely because it makes you complicit in recreating the events. [emphasis added]
I love that way of explaining it because it’s so simple and think it says most everything that it needs to, but let me try to expand on it just because I should bring it into my own realm of meaning.
Our knowledge and understanding of the world can be seen to be comprised of a collection of insights. These can take many different forms and come from many different sources, they can be contradictory or complimentary: an equation learned in physics class; being told about getting sunburned, then actually getting sunburned; being told Islam is a tollerant religion, or being told Muslims are terrorists, whilst having a Muslim friend, etc. Insights and how they combine, interact, reinforce or contradict each other are, like memes, the Lego blocks which build who we are and what we “know”. They create the chemistry which interacts to form our understanding of the world, they create a filter (let me call this filter common sense) through which all other information is first passed and scrutinized before ultimately being rejected, accepted or assimilated in a modified form.
Ever since human kind could pass on knowledge, we have been doing so through small building blocks (insights) like this. Perhaps the most common and simplest method of passing on these insights has traditionally been in the form of stories: cave paintings which pass on history, phables which pass on morals and ethics, fairy tales which serve to teach (or condition) children not to lie or to stay in bed etc. These stories all taught something, either overtly or covertly, and most people would probably be able to point to the “moral of the story”. These examples represent ways in which stories were used to intentionally pass on what I will call situational insights. In other words, parents, teachers, elders, or storytellers could pick these stories to provide insights on what they thought would be the right thing to do in a certain situation:
“The boy who cried wolf” provides insights into what happens in a situation where a child lies all the time - you get into big big trouble, like getting eaten.
“The Tortoise and the Hare” provides insights into what happens in a situation where someone/something is cocky vs. methodical - The cocky person loses while the methodical one wins.
“Snow White” (or was it Cinderella?) provides insights into what happens when you are in a really unhappy situation - you wait, do your chores, be a pure kind young lady and wait for Prince Charming to save you.
These are obviously all very simple and to the point insights because to a large extent that is the assumed purpose of these kinds of stories. They were overt attempts to suggest how people should think or act and are created very much inside the existing cultural, religious or social order (the examples above, for example come from a male dominated, “western” perspective). Today, the insights we get are much more well hidden and are usually much less intentional - today, we see and use stories primarily as modes of entertainment rather than the for the dissemination of knowledge, but that is perhaps a overly simple misconception.
Today, the stories we listen to are primarily formulaic with the intention of making someone money: movies sell an entertainment formula; news media, a sensationalism formula; novels, one which will keep people turning pages and create media hype. Today, we are bombarded by stories from a million different sources in ways which engage the sense very differently than simple fairy tales and people will struggle to point to the “moral of the story” of, say, The Bourne Ultimatum…but that does not mean there isn’t one - Narratology has for a long time told us that narrative and narrative structures can affect our perceptions for example.