I had this great talk with Broughton yesterday. Here is a man whose career has ranged from military to medicine to art to society. I went in paranoid that the paper I am supposed to be presenting at his conference Saturday is a lumpen mass of statistics, nothing more, which in my understanding of the Frankfurt School (the goggles I have been wearing all semester) amounts to a potentially evil means of extracting meaning from humanity. We talked about things that came up at GDC — the ways in which games are narrative, are systems, are realistic; more on that later.
I expressed my worries about games and addiction and he said that games can’t be anything but therapeutic, as they are a magic circle space where the troubled can go to work out their problems safely. I worried that I didn’t have any indication of the meaning of the game literacy practices of the students I am studying, of the identities they develop around games, which seemed troubling to me in light of the fact that this is a cultural studies conference. And I did go on a tear about how I worry that the games industry is more focused on creating narratives to control the player, rather than loose play spaces where players can work out new meanings.
And at the end he essentially said, What you have is a good solid piece of empirical sociology. I haven’t seen enough of those lately. They’re good for setting the basis of further study. Bring it in and present it, I think people should hear it.
How can a solution coming from such a complicated man be so simple? I will have to meditate on this. Perhaps not as a means to further procrastinate on the Foucault reading, though.
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