God is a game designer: dependence on video games

Computer games are accused of all sins. The Russian Orthodox Church said that video games are increasing the risk of divorce, and offered to ban them. Elena Mizulina believes that video games teach children of cruelty. Scientists have proven that video games do not cause addiction , but they do not believe them. Alexander Vetushinsky, an employee of the Department of Ontology and the theory of knowledge of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Moscow State University and the Moscow Center for Research of Video games, told Samizdat whether there is a game dependence on why to study video games and why they are so unhappy with the conservative public. Special correspondent of Samizdat Pyotr Manyakhin recorded his monologue.

I seriously study video games. Seriously, because the phrase “I study video games” does not contain a professional component that I cultivate. Seriously, it means in a scientific one. The academic community understands us much better, and this was evident in the fact that the first two years we held the events, our main listeners were students of humanitarian universities. Many have never even played video games, but they came to see how humanitarian science can work with such a difficult object as a video game. Then, people with game experience began to connect to us, but without academic baggage. Seriously, this is so that there is no such thing - “the guys from Moscow State University study video games. Ha, I, too, have already played for three hundred hours. ”

We have a sociologist, culturologist and religious scholars in Mosco Game Center. Our task is enlightenment. So that people understand what video games are, how you can work with them, how to analyze. With our activities, we demonstrate that video games are not a low object. And if a student comes to the department where I am working now and says that he wants to engage in video games, my older colleagues allow this business without problems.

That audience I deal with - students and researchers - does not believe that a person playing games cannot be socially adapted.

As for the complaints about the video of the conservative public, a certain fundamental ideological agreement works here, that games need to be recognized as absolute evil. Not because there is some kind of science behind this, but because there is a certain moral judgment that is due to the fact that we do not fully understand what it is. Children behave strangely because they play some strange things-video games. So, they can be the cause of these oddities. The reason for the pressure on video games is, first of all, a misunderstanding.

But there is also bad heredity in the video game. The board games were usually also not very treated: there were aristocratic types of chess, but some stained their reputation. First of all, those from which video games are taken. Video games came from the first slot machines in bars. The most popular was Pinball, banned in New York for more than thirty years due to its alleged connection with mafia groups. What the video games grew on is already dropped.

Another reason is the fear of artificial intelligence, which is the basis of video games. Another father of the video game Alan Turing, who played a computer game without a computer, wrote an algorithm on a piece of paper and played chess in accordance with this algorithm-realized that people had already lost to the car from an intellectual point of view. He took part in the decoding of signals of fascist Germany and stated that the victory was not needed by a crowd of mathematicians, but by a decipher car. Only the car can win the car. It turns out that artificial intelligence, and therefore video games, is a sign of the future victory of the car over a person.

In the sixties, computers began to win us into checkers, and in 1997 the computer defeated Harry Kasparov in chess. Most recently, the computer beat the champion in Go. This caution is associated with video games in relations with synthetic life forms.

The line of the 19th - 20th centuries is the formation of an intellectual culture of suspicion. Just like video games, the film of the Lyumier brothers about the arriving train was comprehended. A mythological story says that people in the hall were scared and fled around. Critics of new technologies concluded from this that we do not even suspect how dangerous cinema is. He can kill us all, and we must be very critical to what is happening on the screen. He can turn us into fearful creatures that do not see the boundaries between real and virtual. Video games, by the way, are often accused of this. But so Tatyana from Evgeny Onegin can be accused of reading, reading novels, goes into virtual reality.

Some researchers offer to rethink this myth. People got up and ran at the premiere of the film Lumier, not because they were frightened, but because they wanted to play along to the director - “Do so, I like it!”. People went during the radio broadcast of the “War of the Worlds” to home bunkers not because they are such fools and cannot distinguish fiction from the chronicle, but because listening to the “War of Worlds” underground is much more authentic. It is better to play this situation and thereby get more pleasure. When in the first -person shooter the player dodges the bullets, sitting in a chair, he does this not because he loses the border between the real and the virtual, but because he gets more pleasure.

I have been playing games since childhood. And every summer, when my parents took me to the village, my brother and I sat and invented games in notebooks: we painted characters, created situations, level maps.

A person has the right to spend his free time as he considers necessary if this does not interfere with living him and his loved ones. You can’t say that if you read the books for six hours, this is good, and if you play games, it’s bad.

Game addiction is not a myth, it exists, but you need to understand what its boundaries it has. In our country, this very often turns into the following forms: a psychologist, it is not clear where, having come from the right to speak like that, can say: “If your child plays games for more than three hours a day, then he has a game addiction, he needs to be treated.” It is not clear where these figures come from.

For example, in China, where they play a lot of games, including MMORPG, there are clinics where they are treated with game addiction. But these are cases that parents were unlikely to not notice. This is when a twelve -year -old child can sit for five days in diapers so as not to go to the toilet. The case is heavy, but this is not video games made it like that. If video games make us dependent, they exacerbate existing problems. If parents see that the child is dependent on the video game, it is necessary not to ban the games, but to figure out what is wrong with him. He has where to burst - in cinema, literature, alcohol, drugs. And the symptoms are not important, the reason is important.

Game designer is not the one who should be able to make a good game, but the one who should think well

Talking about the corruption of youth video games is normal. Each new technology was considered as something that kills the existing world. And she really destroys him and builds a new one. Video games really change us. According to gamification theorists, this is what will change production and business will solve the problem of motivation. Transhumanists seriously discuss the question of whether our reality is computer simulation, and we are characters of a large computer game. God today is not a artisan, but rather a programmer or a game designer.

The conversation about violence in video games will still not go anywhere. We have experience, albeit not real, but murders. But they tell me that when I play games, I become a hidden killer or rapist. No, this is not so - I just play.

However, if we look at games in terms of content, we will understand that, for example, many military games are charged with pacifist pathos. Having passed the game from beginning to end, they try to impose the idea that you feel bad. Of course, you fought, but you have seen the horrors of how this happens. And it is unlikely that after that you will want to sit in a trench with a machine gun.

It is easy to say in the media that video games are to blame for everything. This is the very ideology of an external enemy that cannot be verified. Video games are to blame because they are video games. This is a typical technique of ideology that works through tautology. Any sexist will say that a woman is worse than a man not because she is not as smart or strong as a man, but simply because she is a woman. For the Nazis, the Jews were bad because they were Jews. If the video games are bad, as we are declared from TV screens, science is not needed here - you do not need to refute or prove manipulation.

There are no studies that video games lead to an increase in aggressiveness, but there is a ridiculous quasi -scientific sociological study that showed that at the time of the release of a major game, the number of teenage crimes is reduced because everyone plays.

Video games are not drugs, not alcohol, they produce what can give experience in drugs without drugs, the experience of war without war, the experience of death without death. This is the field of experiments. Video games help you be inside other races, other sexes. You can find out what it feels like to be something else.

Video games are, like any mass culture, a platform for saying. Many cinema theorists dreamed of interactivity, but interactive cinema is unlikely to be possible within the framework of Kinumedium. The theorists of literature dreamed of an interactive novel so that the reader would be an author and write a work. This is impossible in the literature, but can be done in video games. Video games also begin to get their place in the museum. There was a e -sports that makes us rethink the very understanding of the sport. Our world is a world that plays video games, and this must be admitted, even if you yourself do not play. The experience that the inhabitants of modernity have is a world with video games. To pretend that we understand modern culture, not paying attention to video games, means not to understand anything.

I am sure that Game Studies in Russia will begin to give roots not at philosophical and not at all at the humanitarian faculties, but at gamedes' programs that are already beginning to appear in universities. And these are not courses-the university takes the obligation to release a person who not only knows how to do something with his hands, but also has some kind of cultural capital who knows what the history of culture is. Therefore, a game designer is not the one who should be able to make a good game, but the one who should think well.