A Personal Look at Gaming’s Effects

Gaming changes you can believe in

Do games affect and change us? Do they define us? For the most part, gamers [and game's critics] have wrangled with that question through the proxy topic of violence and gaming. And for most gamers, the answer to those questions, particularly the latter is ‘no.’ But violence is just one aspect of us, and it doesn’t allow other, perhaps more subtle and less controversial influences on us.

Other areas have been dealing with how what do, where we live, what we consume influences and defines us in different ways. Gaming seems like both an environment and a medium–something we live in and live through. It’s also an object. Sociology and contemporary philosophy has shown and argued that the things we act upon, the places that we act in wind up reacting and acting upon us. Because I’m lazy and because I don’t want to write a dissertation, I’m going to leave that history and discussion at that simple but functional summary.

For a while now, I’ve tried to write on this topic in a personal way, most of the attempts stashed away as drafts in WordPress. Part of it is all the baggage that this sort of discussion invokes. But a lot of it is that it’s a constantly changing target. I’m changing. Games are changing [in ways that could have an impact on gamers]. My relationships are changing. So, I’ve flailed at trying to nail down how I’ve changed through gaming. I’ve talked before about how I’ve played games in ways other than intended. And sometimes, like good movies, games have manipulated me.  Even though we vehemently deny that violent games make gamers violent, there’s no denying that games, in fact, affect us. Just a couple of accessible examples:

• Games affect us emotionally. I think just as we go to movies to be scared, amused, or stimulated [take that in whatever sense you want], so we do the same with games. For example, for many gamers Fallout 3 affected many gamers emotionally, such as looking out on the vista of a destroyed Washington, D.C. [I'm reminded of Hitchcock's technique of getting audiences to react emotionally by framing action scenes in locations that we associate with security, such as a national monument or a church.]
• Games change our skills. This is obvious but worth pointing out, such as the research on strategy games developing critical thinking.

It seems that we want to make general statements about how gaming affects us. Yes, I believe that some people do become more aggressive as a result of playing violent games, but not most and certainly not everyone. I think the point is that we should be intelligent gamers, just as we should intelligent consumers of news and other media. We should not assume that we’re always the agent, just we should not assume that we are passive receptacles for whatever message a game has. But I find generalizations to be less useful, more debatable, so I’ve been thinking about specifics, which, as you might expect, center on me or my kids. I’ve touched on this topic a couple of times, talking about how my daughter uses games and comics to establish her identity.

For example, recently, I have found that gaming has been reflecting me in a different way than I have perceived myself. I’m the youngest of 6 children, with 24 years between me and the oldest. By the time I was born, in fact, half my siblings were already married. And my mother in particular always introduced me as ‘the baby’ of the family. As a result, I’ve always thought of myself as a kid, even into my 30s. Honestly, even into my 40s. I didn’t think of myself as immature or necessarily young, but I had this self-image of a kind of kid. And I don’t mean the Peter Pan thing either. It’s different than that.

But many things have been chipping away at that image. I started getting gout a couple of years ago, something I’ve associated with old people. I sprained my wrist skating, and it took me nearly 4 months to recuperate.

My eye sight getting worse was one of the bigger blows because, besides being the youngest, I was also the only one among my parents and siblings who didn’t wear glasses. Besides never having a cavity, it was something that I was proud of. I used 1600 resolution on my computers . . . until about 2 years ago. Then, my eyes got worse and quickly. I had headaches while reading paperbacks, and I had to start using reading glasses.

But it’s been gaming that finally toppled that self-image. I was never great at FPS games, but I held my own. Now, I sit firmly at the bottom . . . the last kid that no one wants to pick for the team. When I play with my kids, they see things well before I do. Platformers that I played fairly well are frustratingly tough. And I don’t have the free time or even the endurance to play for hours. For example, I truly enjoy Monster Hunter 3, but I’m having  a hard time seeing and reacting in fights with monsters. I’m still enjoying games, but I’ve had to reset my expectations. I no longer think of myself as a kid, as ‘the baby in the family’ in any way now. I’m a middled aged gamer. And that’s not a good or bad thing . . . it’s quite simply different.

It’s rare that a single game influences me to think differently. That’s not to say a game doesn’t make me think or challenges me. But there’s no watershed game that really changed me. [Monster Hunter 3 or World at War are memorable games in how I viewed myself, but they were almost more like highlights in a progression.] Rather it’s the experience of gaming in general. In a couple of future posts, I want to explore this topic in more specific ways because perhaps more than affecting me in isolation, gaming in general has affected my relationships.