3min chapter

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Jung in the World | Technology & the Self 3: Myth, Archetypes, and Avatar Personas in Online Games with Patrick Jagoda

Jungianthology Radio

CHAPTER

The Importance of Critical Language in Video Games

As human beings, we're meaning making machines. And it sounds like this gets baked into games. People kind of get to discover meaning as they go. I wonder if we are mindlessly engaging without really develop any deeper consciousness about what we're doing and why we're doing it. So I actually think games literacy is something that needs to be taught or at least engaged in.

00:00
Speaker 2
So I'm fascinated by your examples, which are really apt because they go right to the heart of how we create meaning. As human beings, we're meaning making machines. And it sounds like this gets baked into games. And so people kind of get to discover meaning as they go. One of the things that I wonder about when I think about the digital culture is young wanted people to understand that the way toward wholeness in their lives was to merge as much as possible and as often as possible, the unconscious with the conscious in order to be whole, to raise what was from the unconscious into consciousness. And all of these elements that you describe seem like, oh, wow, this should be a little consciousness engine, but I'm not really convinced that the digital realm delivers more consciousness. Do you have thoughts on that?
Speaker 1
Can you say more about that? What do you mean
Speaker 2
by the? I think, oh,
Speaker 1
sorry. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I can, I can amplify that a little bit. In other words, I wonder if we are mindlessly engaging without really develop any deeper consciousness about what we're doing and why we're doing it and we can derive lessons from that. Is it, is it, is our experience in the digital culture just a distraction? Or is it how we're making meaning now? And is that meaning helping us become more whole? It's a big question.
Speaker 1
It is a big question. I mean, look, I teach courses at the University of Chicago that are focused on game studies. So we analyze games in the way that people might analyze poems or novels in a traditional English classroom. And something that I found is that our students come in with like vast archives of knowledge of different video games. I mean, many of them have played more games than I have and certainly no games that I don't know as well. But many of them haven't had an opportunity to take games seriously as cultural objects, as objects of creative interdisciplinary production. And so I think that maintaining a kind of critical language or consciousness about video games requires some degree of literacy beyond playing the games themselves. Some people already have that, right? They play games, they analyze them deeply, they think and live with them. Other people might play, say the first person shooters like Overwatch or something or League of Legends, which require a great deal of strategic and tactical thought and hand-eye coordination, but they may never have spent a day in their life thinking about the deeper significance of those kinds of games. So I actually think games literacy is something that needs to be taught or at least engaged in. It's not something that comes naturally just with playing games.

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