In reading Friedman, I find myself agreeing with most of what he says, but at the same time wanting to challenge the limits of some of his arguments. For example, in the section titled “The Power of Interactivity” Friedman talks about how games can restructure perception. While I agree that a game may temporarily alter ones way of looking at the world, I don’t think it can become dangerous. Friedman says that video games may make us lose our grip with reality and become desensitized to the human consequences of violence and war. It is here that I think he is going too far. Games like Full Spectrum Warrior and America’s Army may have been developed largely by the United States Army, but they certainly don’t make the impact of war any less horrific. Games, at least for now, haven’t crossed the boundary between the game world and the real world. The player doesn’t forget that he’s playing a game because it maintains the structure of a game. Even in Ender’s Game, the kids never knew it was real and that’s why it was so easy for them to do what they did. When Ender found out it was real, he was flooded with all the emotion that war brings. I don’t think this will change until the day comes that shooting a person in a video game looks like a video of someone being shot in real life.
Friedman also talks about how gamers form a cybernetic consciousness with the computer where gaming can be described by the constant back and forth player-computer interaction. I really enjoyed Friedman’s analysis of how powerful this experience can be. This is because it’s hard for me to describe to non-gamers how it’s possible to play something for 8 or more hours straight. Superficially it sounds extreme, but it’s something that I’ve done dozens of times. Friedman even alludes to that specifically when he says “It’s very hard to describe what it feels like when you’re lost inside a computer game, precisely because at that moment your sense of self has been transformed.” I want to add that this has actually been a dangerous for some people. Forgetting to eat or even sleep is a common result of this level of gaming. A great example of this type of danger is the South Korean men who played Starcraft for 50 hours with very little food or sleep and died.
I don’t really have much to say about the Galloway reading besides going over a two points that I liked and agreed with. He started off briefly predicting a golden age for video games in the next decade and alluded to how very few media critics consider it as a worthy art form. I find it especially interesting that video games have gotten a lot more media coverage and annual industry revenues have risen significantly since he wrote this in 2006. The other point that I wanted to talk about goes back to a few classes ago when we debated how much play was needed to really understand a game and critique/analyze it. Galloway writes that in games,
“The game is learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel allegorithm).”
This argument that we should try to understand the allegorithm of a game is dependent on extensive play. He goes on to say later that doing this allows us to “understand contemporary political realities in a relatively unmediated form.” I wanted to mention this because I feel that this is a strong argument for why there should be a “close playing” of video games.
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