Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence of Gaming

[icycalm]

http://insomnia.ac/essays/baudrillard_on_gaming/

I'd like to say a few things about this article later on, but for now observe how, in his entire oeuvre spanning four decades and more than thirty books, and while touching on games many times, the greatest philosopher since Nietzsche never once mentions "narratives", "art" or "messages". Indeed, the amount of stupidity required for someone to confuse games with narratives, art and messages is a thing of wonder. For Baudrillard, the huge distance between games and these irrelevant concepts is so self-evident, it doesn't even occur to him to bother bringing it up. And that is why all my articles have been, and will be, ultimately directed to children. If people weren't children, there'd be no need to explain these things.

[icycalm]

Baudrillard was ambivalent towards videogames, whilst I know exactly how I feel about them, and can even fully explain the reasons for Baudrillard's ambivalence.

Can you do this right here? Or is that off-topic?

http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?p=9693#9693

Baudrillard was ambivalent towards games because he hadn't managed to fully work out their place in the grand scheme of things. Other people are content to simply throw their lot with the pro-games crowd or the anti-games crowd, simply by instinct/prejudice/etc., without any investigation and without really understanding what's going on, but Baudrillard was far too smart and far too honest for that. On the one hand he could see that games were unhealthy, as well as an inferior form of living to the pre-digital era (which is why he calls games a "cool" passion, in contrast to the previous "hot" passions)... but on the other hand he could respect games as a, let us say, 'manly' alternative to the slave game (the consumer society). To put it in Baudrillard's (highly confusing) terminology, the consumer society operates on the principles of production and exchange, while videogames are governed by "symbolic" exchange -- which is not really exchange at all but a cheeky way of saying "war". So while war, and all the passions that went with it, have been effaced from the consumer society (or, in my terminology, the slave society), at least in videogames it lives on, but of course in a much inferior form (since videogame war is not really war).

At this point many other issues come in -- nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, cloning, artificial intelligence, etc., and complicate the matter a great deal, and Baudrillard never actually managed to come to some conclusion. He simply arrives at the same point, again and again and again, in book after book after book, and throws his hands up in the air -- but of course in a very poetic way, etc.

[icycalm]

Note also that Segata Sanshiro agreed with Baudrillard:

Sanshiro is a serious man with a firm sense of duty, who believes that playing video games is one of the most treasured activities in life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segata_Sanshiro

[ronan]

And that is for sure an argument from authority =D