It Was All A Dream..

Maybe a better version of this song could go... It was all a game.. I mean is that not where we're headed?  Sociologists are hard at work finding why people like playing games so much more than they like work, or reality for that matter. McGonigal showed that one of the reasons was that gaming was tied to a sense of urgent optimism. When we play games we can't help but feel that we'll win in the end, that there will be some prize at the end of the story, and that all this risk and time will have some sort of reward at the finale. Other emotions that she and others have found tied to games are: tight social fabrics, blissful productivity, epic meaning, and total empowerment. 

Being a little behind, I'm still feeling the effects of the latest TEDTalks, most notably Sir Ken Robinson's. One of the things he said struck me. It was a quote by another philospher but it goes like this, "There are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world into types and those who do not." Now this was a joke in his larger argument, but it is interesting  if we apply it to gaming. If we do divide the world into types of people, there are people that are enduring, and those that are enjoying. For the gamer, it would be enjoyment (gaming) and enduring (reality). Their time is split between a boring reality, and an engaging alternate universe. Sir Ken Robinson brought the idea that we are born with our passions. Schools should act as the choosing ground, creating a space where a person can find their passion, which seems to be inherent in all of us. 

The gaming theory that we looked at before seems to show differently. There is not an inherent passion that makes us jump out of bed, but rather the emotions tied with that passion. So, anyone can find this joy in life if they know how to trigger those emotions. And again, these emotions are a tight social fabric, blissful productivity, epic meaning, total empowerment, and urgent optimism. All these emotions found and linked to gaming are also the emotions that are linked with a pressing passion. 

What this unfortunately seems to mean is that even the most boring job can be made awesome and empowering by embedding a game into it, and even a worker stuck in the pits of an accounting building can feel special and feel like their work has epic meaning. What matters is the reward. Right now, we can't see the reward, or we can, but we can't see how we can accomplish it. 

In the finale of her argument, McGonigal showed her conception of how to make reality into a game. If I remember correctly, the two examples they had been working on were: what to do when an apocalypse comes, and how to be a social innovator. As I looked over her examples, I kept thinking to myself, "there's no way I'm going to play those." And this is coming from a pretty avid gamer, who doesn't shy from eighteen-hour gaming binges fueled by Code Red. The reason why, which jumps out at me right away, is that someone wants me to learn something from this game, that there is an ulterior motive to my gaming. Right away that ulterior purpose shuts down my gaming tendencies. So, the problem, at least mine, is that my choice, to escape from reality, is not  being honored. 

Going back to the education model that Ken Robinson is proposing, we see a possible solution. These games could work if they were tied to the gamer's free will. We have to feel like we are making the choice to play it, and the trickery involved (us actually learning something or buying something) is the repercussion that we accept for the fun involved. 

This is a really interesting concept though and I'm just barely touching the surface right now..

Trying to stand on hot lava..

In a perfect world it would be easy to note the lines of demarcation separating then from now. Back to reality though, and we find that the past elements that shaped yesterday are merging and bouncing off and back with the elements of today, creating weird combinations of rhetoric and reality that are hard to acknowledge. The three essays we examined this class show  the reality of today (even though Jamieson's seems to be a little dated).

In Jamieson's article she points towards a changing trend in media where the feminine style is becoming higher valued over the male counterpart. She writes, "the intimate medium of television requires that those who speak comfortably through it project a sense of private self, unself-consciously self-disclose, and engage the audience in completing messages..." (805).

Where once we valued combative arguments, the distancing of emotions, and the strong, silent type, now we value expression, indicating emotion, harmonizing tendencies, and as Thompson writes, "the prolific, the outgoing, and the shameless." Thompson points how CEOs, a typical manly figure, surrounded in secrecy and hierarchy, is now being brought down to the people. We are turning into a social society and secrecy is no longer valued. We want these titans of industry to express their emotions, say how their business works, ask for input, and communicate with us, the little guys.

We see that Jamieson's analysis was spot on, even though she was writing back in the 80's, when Reagan was president. She focused solely on television, but with the rise of the internet there is a much greater influence on style than she could have imagined. A word that she didn't mention, but has resulted as an offshoot of this trend towards feminine rhetoric, is transparency.

We want to know everything about the company we work for, the boss we are under, the product we are buying, and even the president of our country. Obama is  the most prolific twitter president we have seen thus far. One of the reasons for his popularity is his embrace of social media and apparent transparency. As Thompson might say he is a "President 2.0." Now this isn't to say that he is the same person behind closed doors, but this series of closed doors is becoming smaller and smaller until we are soon left with only one room, in which only the most essential secrets will be kept.

It is interesting to see how the public image has shifted away from the strong, independent leader to one that is social, communicative, cooperative, and engaging. In a sense it is a shift from manly rhetoric to woman rhetoric, in the public domain. This might be just for the people, but Thompson would seem to push that soon all things private will also be transformed into this style of rhetoric.

At the same time as this discourse is going on, we have Wysocki, who pushes against this strain of socialness and culture deciding what is right and wrong, beautiful or ugly, important or not. To do this she examines and argues against Kant's theory of reality. She boils him down to saying, " (he) labels as necessary--our bodily sensations--as being social before we can ever experience them" (171). To explain this it is necessary to remember that Kant believed that our sensations were bound by our concepts of them. We can't think on our sensations without these preconceived notions of language, constructs, and social conventions. Therefore when we say that something is beautiful, it is not the beauty itself we admire, but the form of that beauty.

This form is constructed socially and the ideal of a nation changes as the value changes. Wysocki points to the changing trend in art, mainly the focus of beauty, to illustrate this point. But for us, this idea of form is important because the ideal style of rhetor that we created was, and is, defined by the times we live in and the technology available. It is not reality itself, nor is it a trend towards universality. It is a form that we have accepted in this era, and it too will probably pass (eventually).

One thing that Wysocki said that helps me to embrace the openness in rhetoric is, "we use the expected social constructions of form just enough to hold onto what audiences expect, but where we can then also make visible the particularities of our own lives and experience and hence make visible the limitations of the forms we have been asked to grow into..." (172).