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Integral Research
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Press Play to Grow!
How Could Video Games be Designed to Facilitate
Personal and Spiritual Growth?
A Mixed Methods and Integral Study |
A word of caution and further reflections
From all the entertainment media existent today (music, movies, books, web, cartoons, theater, etc), the video game industry is the fastest growing and one of the most popular, pervasive and profitable segments in the already “trillion-dollar-a-year” (Bryant & Vorderer, 2006) entertainment industry (Yes, equal or more than movies!). This expansion has been so great that some of the big brand video game companies are even struggling to use the word "game" nowadays due to its intrinsic associations to the concepts of “young” and “play”, opting instead to use the term interactive entertainment in order to accommodate the broader role of new video games in the emergent market.
However, it is very important to note that like other types of media and trends, the successes of the rise of the video game industry can also be accompanied by a series of potential abuses, misuses, dangers and pitfalls.
Due to issues of space and a primary concern on focusing on the main topic of this research - which was to explore how (not if) video games could be designed to facilitate personal and spiritual development - I did not explore in depth the important and already extensive discussion related to the potentially negative aspects of video games such as addiction, violence and other unhealthy themes and effects. Based on that, I covered most of the “dignity” of the potential of video games in relation to facilitating inner development, but not so much of the potential “disasters”. I also did not dive into the question of whether video games should be used or not to facilitate personal and spiritual growth as an alternative to other existing venues.
I consider video games as a being just another (new) potential tool or medium of storytelling and communication, independently of their current contexts and contents. Like many other media, their influence and effects could have both its pros and cons, and may be highly relative and dependent on players' inner levels of growth and maturity, as well as the social contexts in which these video games are played. I say that especially in relation to the developmental uses I intended to explore in my research topic, which according to different situations (and players) could also bring potential problems not envisioned yet.
It is well observed and documented that people coming from different levels of inner growth and maturity (morals, ethics, emotional, interpersonal, spiritual) - but with highly cognitive capacities and talents - can make negative, unhealthy or unbalanced use of various technologies and media. In the case of video games, this phenomena could be illustrated from players getting stuck in addiction patterns and exhibiting violent behaviors to people purposefully using video games for anti-social, egocentric, fundamentalist and even terrorist agendas. Potential issues of video game "collateral effects" use have been thoroughly studied and analyzed, such as the possibility of some video games to promote or exacerbate violence, aggression, addiction, physical injuries, sense of “disembodiment”, alienation, fragmentation, emotional problems, interpersonal issues (due to addiction). Possibly other individual, material, cultural and social problems intrinsic to life will certainly continue to exist, appear, disappear and/or co-exist with all the great potentials that lie ahead in the path of technological, individual and collective human growth and evolution, being video games just one of the aspects of this wave.
By saying that, I am acknowledging the sometimes fuzzy but certainly strong and purposeful impulse of evolution in both nature and humans affairs, either in the world of inner personal and spiritual development, or the world of technology and video games, or any other world "out there". And, most importantly, in the “worlds that those worlds” could co-create by bridging and integrating their different perspectives and bodies of knowledge, as suggested in my main research topic - which is also one of the fundamental integrative drives of Integral Theory (Wilber, 2007).
The pros and cons of an emergent technological revolution
As I said during a recent class presentation: “I don’t know what could be the negative extent of some of those potentials issues, neither what’s really going to happen in the future. The only thing I know is one thing – That there is no way back!”
I also believe that it is already too late to close our eyes and deny the gradual and significant influence that video games have already conquered (and will increasingly do) in our culture and society as a whole, especially in the younger - and not so younger – population (the average age of a gamer in 2007 was already 33 years-old). Given the fact that millions of users throughout the world are already playing video games of different themes for different purposes, my intention in this research was to add into this fully blossoming and unstoppable trend a new set of applications that could bring an extra layer of qualitative, deeper, meaningful and even healthier use of this revolutionary powerful media.
Whether some may like or not, we are already fully immersed in the information technology age, meaning that a lot of aspects of life that we were accustomed with are gradually and radically changing as time goes by. I envision video games and virtual reality simulators as natural followers of the revolutionary advent of the Internet, gradually bringing into the foreground of our daily life a second wave of radical transformation in the way we deal, use and interact with technology.
There is a common historical pattern related to how human beings tend to initially react to radical technological innovations (Johnson, 2005; Kurzweil, 1999), which happened with the advent of the telephone, TV, movies, among many others. For those who still remember, there were also a lot of recent doubts and skepticism in the beginning of the Internet. Many people actually doubted that the Internet could be a powerful and useful media, as many visionaries initially claimed. However, the inaccuracies of those doubts are quite flagrant nowadays.
Besides or instead of navigating through websites, this time we would navigate within immersive 3D environments including experiencing a more fully engaging sense of embodied interactivity and communication capacities though new kinds of brain-mind cybernetic interfaces. Those interfaces would eventually include the intriguing option of plugging our nervous and sensorial systems directly into these virtual worlds. Maybe some of our most farfetched sci-fi dreams seen in the Star Trek and The Matrix series were not as impossible or so far ahead as we imagined… As Ken Wilber (2008) suggests, this potentially revolutionary advent could mark the transition from our current 1st Tier (Spiral Dynamics) techno-economic mode represented by the informational age into new kinds of "brain-mind-computer" interfaces and linkages that would underlie the techno-economic mode of the 21st century.
The challenges and pitfalls to accomplish these educational and developmental goals through the video games of course are still great, but the current and future opportunities may be even greater, and much closer in sight than we might think. In a recent lecture at the Game Developers Conference 2008 in San Francisco, California, Ray Kurzweil (2008) – a futurist and one of the World’s best thinkers and authorities on technology - stated that “in the acceleration of technological progress, there is no industry in the world matching the video game industry today.” As odd as it may seem, the field of video games is today in the leading edge of technological advances in the planet. In his predictions, within 20 years the “games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality” (Kyllo, 2008, ¶3).
In resonance with other lead game designers, Kurzeil (2008) thinks that the term “video game” is already “limiting because it makes it sound like as if its an unimportant part of life ... but it's been growing and taking over more and more aspects of human interaction and learning and creativity … [because] play is how we principally learn and create” (Kyllo, 2008, ¶18 and 19). In his view, Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) video games (and virtual reality simulators) could also develop a more “dynamic, self-organizing, decentralizing communication” … [creating] new, emerging forms of intelligence.” (Kyllo, 2008, ¶21).
As optimistic and farfetched some of Kurzeil’s predictions on video games and technology may possibly appear at a first glance, I see some of them as being quite feasible to be manifested as time goes by, although I envision those implications and applications related to inner growth from a different approach.
Although exploring in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999) important implications and applications related to human evolution, intelligence development and even spirituality (including cognitive, biological, behavioral, cultural and social perspectives), Kurzweil (1999) seems to not take in deeper account the relationship between this technological growth and some of the human developmental aspects related to personal and spiritual growth explored by this research. These aspects are mostly related to inner subjective developmental patterns (or laws) and subjective realities that also undertake a parallel line of evolution with those cognitive, biological, behavioral, cultural and social realities.
As with other forms of media and general human affairs since the modernity era, video games have been also victims of the phenomenon of Flatland (Wilber, 2000), including lack of deeper meanings of play (Gordon & Esbjörn-Hargens, 2007, p. 37), absence of deeper developmental messages (especially past the heroic and mythic developmental stages) and over focus on objective (especially visual and technological) improvements.
I believe that one of the main underlining reasons for this situation is also the fact that the entertainment industry and especially the video game industry are relatively very young in age. After going through a quick exponential growth in the last decades, these industries have been somewhat “stuck” as a culture in certain developmental psychological levels, worldviews, patterns and even blinds spots, which in a way is part of a natural cultural and social process of growth and evolution that could be applied to both individual, collective and institutional realities. Ironically, among other developmental tools, it is through video games that this pattern could be also seen and challenged in very productive ways, so new paradigms and worldviews could be brought forth into full awareness and manifestation.
The Big Three
As we step into the 21st century, technology and entertainment seem to be doing pretty well together, complementing each other through exponential growth and creativity. Just think about the advances of the movie and game industry, and exploration of entertainment through a myriad of technological devices.
At the same time, technology and education seem to be going through the same route. The momentous growth of the Internet and E-learning are good examples of a marriage that promises to be long lasting. However, only it is only recently that attention has been given to the potential merging of entertainment and education, specifically related to technology.
Some experts and academics have been discussing the potentials of this union more seriously, which at first glance may sounds like an oxymoron. Although the concept of merging entertainment with education seems to be a stretch in our modern and postmodern society, this union was nevertheless common sense in pre-modern societies (Wilber, 2007), where the big three of arts, morals and sciences (the beautiful, the good and the true) were still part of an indivisible and dynamic unit, although still undifferentiated.
However, after a period of great fragmentation and specialization, we are starting to see a gradual reintegration of these three branches in all kinds of cross-disciplinary areas, through various types of multi-functional knowledge and devices. I envision that video games could be one of the prime potential candidates for an effective integration of the Big Three of arts-beautiful (entertainment), morals-good (inner growth) and science-truth (technology) into a multi-functional media.
Could video games' intrinsic power of interaction and engagement facilitate the practice, absorption and integration of developmental messages and practices in a much deeper and joyful way, maybe never accomplished by other medium of communication and storytelling in the past?
I really think so...
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