The Alphaville Herald

i got them old cosmic blues again, mama

by Alphaville Herald on 05/06/04 at 1:27 pm

–humdog

terra nova recently published an interesting article called “American Psychiatric Association Joins the Fray”. many of the comments both within and around the article talk about gaming and/or internet addiction.

seems like our pals in the medical community are keeping themselves busy trying to judge the difference in value between the amount of time required to work up an advanced character in a game (called an addiction) versus the amount of time required to work up, say, a concert quality performance of a beethoven sonata (called discipline and/or art).

such calls have always interested me, because it seems like they are very much in the eye of the beholder.

what i found more interesting was the discussion about how to create an “ending” for a game, or, how a person can know if they have “won” or if
they are “done” with a game. many people in the discussion seem to feel that while endings are satisfying, there are just not that many around.

people who talked about endings seemed to feel that the process or pattern of play in games either do, or should, follow the “hero cycle” described by joseph campbell. for those who don’t remember the hero cycle, it runs something like this:

a person leaves their community, then they encounter challenges, then they
overcome the challenge (like they might kill a dragon or something) then they return home as heroes, and become reconciled to the people that they once left.

after reading this article, i began to wonder if one of the emotionally frustrating aspects of TSO had to do with the fact that there does not seem to be any over-arching reason for spending time on skilling, etc. maybe people get so bored and frustrated because all of the rewards are short-term with no big purpose to them. there is just no meta-pattern or mythic structure to the game at all. you could also look at it another way and say that the game lacks poetry, or what the spanish language calls “duende” — a kind of compelling or haunting emotional power.

more interesting still is news that psychiatrists are using Second Life to create environments that simulate the worlds of psychotics and phobics, in order to train doctors to treat these diseases more effectively by teaching the doctors to understand the patient’s hallucinations and other experiences more fully.

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/06/onlinevideogame.html