The religious games course I am teaching has slid along two primary chains of thought. One runs from games, to play, to antistructure, and the other from religions, to the sacred, to the carnival. We open with the family dog (selectively bred into taxonomical entrapment), we meditate on biting, and we end up among wolves. And along both paths, after three months of work, the question was now how play might actually turn Earth and make way for new life.
And today we had the amazing good fortune of meeting Bill Talen, his wife Savitri who organizes, choreographs and manages much of the Church of Life After Shopping, and their beautiful child, over Skype. These are some of the loudest(, funniest) and most creative voices against the exploitation of the Earth for the sake of unreflective consumerism, and if you have not yet seen the documentary "What Would Jesus Buy" on their pilgrimage to expose Mickey Mouse as the Antichrist during the 2003 Christmas parade at Disney Land, do yourself the favor (it is on Netflix instantwatch, there is no excuse).
So, having wondered a little about how we might reflect ethically, meeting Reverend Billy got me wondering about the ethics of playership more generally. Perhaps all of this digital death is not detectable inside of the games because the violence is being outsourced. Maybe Mario can kill impartially because the violence is being experienced and mourned elsewhere. So, new question: What is the human cost of a single Goomba's death?
For some great preliminary answers I ended up reading Annie Leonard's Story of Electronics .
For all of our talk about immaterial capitalism, the computers which empower our digital play are material devices assembled and "recycled" under conditions of hidden, but nonetheless quite material poverty. The ratios can never be assembled because both the virtual battlefield and the sweatshops that make them possible always recede from the analytic gaze, but there is an economy lives at work here. If we could measure the popularity of a game by the number of enemies killed, and then determine the cost in silicon chips of those games, and determine the labor and environmental costs of those chips we would be able to see a flow of life and death like Mauss describes in The Gift.
In Annie Leonard's original flavor of "The Story of Stuff" I found a surprisingly clear reflection on the spiritual meaning of economies of this sort (though one that sees only the production of life, not the reciprocal economy of death) by Victor Lebow, so I thought I would offer the whole quote here. Enjoy:
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumption patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today is expressed in consumption terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats - his home, his car, his patterns of food serving, his hobbies.
These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only 'forced draft' consumption, but 'expensive' consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and therefore constantly more expensive consumption.
Victor Lebow, "Price Competition in 1955" Journal of Retailing 31.1 (Spring, 1955), 7-8
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