This Is Your Brain Online

Do you suffer from a fear of social contact? Do you have difficulty concentrating or sleeping? Do you spend around six hours online… and, when offline, do you occasionally miss the time you spend surfing these glorious tubes?

Final question: Despite these other pressing health concerns, are you on the Internet RIGHT NOW?

Hmm. I’m no doctor, so I’ve referred your case to my friend Dr. Yang Yongxin. He thinks you should be shocked repeatedly.

In the brain.

I can hear your collective sighs of relief now. At least he’s not going to be strapping electrodes to your nether bits, right? And your nipples are safe too. So it’s nothing weird, just a quick little zap to the cranium, thus eliciting a seizure. We’ll keep it up until you no longer want to go on the internet… or, I guess, if the internet goes away.

In a case of what I might refer to as “news of the weird,” if I thought unwilling ECT was more weird than, say, horrible and ethically unsound, a doctor in the Shandong Province of China has been experimenting with exactly this, sometimes conducting his experiments on unwilling participants. I can’t say I fully blame him, either. After all, there’s been a long history of using it to correct delusional kids who have trouble separating fantasy from reality.

China has stepped in and outlawed the procedure, recognizing that Yongxin has crossed the fine line between regular old-fashioned quackery and cartoonish super villainy. Apparently this guy was also administering shocks to patients who broke any of his house rules, including eating chocolate, locking the bathroom door, or sitting in his chair.

To be fair, it does look super comfy.

I don’t mean to suggest that there is no room for outlining pathology when it comes to new technologies, or that work towards understanding these conditions is in any way unwelcome. Consider the work being done to understand the Japanese phenomenon of Hikkikomori, a shut-in community made possible through extensive technological connections. But there is a danger to thinking that we have easy answers to these questions… or that drastic solutions are the only ones available to us.

Yes, Yongxin is a kook, but he isn’t alone. A quick glance at sites like Warcraft Addiction and WoW Detox show that commonly the issue of ‘playing too much video games’ is framed not just as a compulsive problem, but as a mental disorder rivaling alcoholism or drug addiction. Agree or disagree with such thinking, it’s interesting to see the extent of their diagnoses: Warcraft Addiction opens with the disclaimer that they are “not professional therapists,” and then go on to provide opinions based off of ‘years of study of the addiction.’ WoW Detox provides a link for a ‘situation in which there is no hope.’ It leads to a suicide hotline.

This is how it works, people.

If nothing else, the case of Linyi City’s psychiatric hospital’s unwilling electroshock is a reminder that snake-oil salesmen are an endlessly inventive bunch. When all you are doing is pulling treatments out of thin air, anything and everything can be cured. But the specific lesson here is that to overreact to a misunderstood problem may lead to a cure more harmful than problem itself.

- Rook

Signifying Violence, Part Deux: Lost in New York

Why, if we've dispatched millions of goombas and koopa troopas in our gaming lifetimes, do some symbolic acts of violence come to matter, and others come to be dismissed?

In part, there is the matter of signification. In most early video games, death and violence serve as handy referents to the act of playing and progressing, but contain none of the symbolic weight of the actual acts. The earliest model of this is found in arcades, where 'lives' referred directly to play-time and performance: In playing against the clock, and your own dime, the notion of the "free man" evolves directly from Pinball's "free play": the literal notion of a free bit of playtime.


When games moves from arcades to consoles the system of "points" quickly went from being a chief arbiter of performance to a vestigial limb of earlier media, but the notion of playtime as finite and operating within a window of opportunity remained. Death in this context is a soft reset, a do-over: Fall a thousand feet onto rows upon rows of jagged spikes? Yikes. Well, just don't do it again.

Similarly, when you "kill" a sprite, it flickers for a moment, and disappears. Not disappears in a "Your soul will be dead before your body: fear nothing further", Nietzsche-type-deal. It's a time-out: according to the rules of the game, it's gone for a little while. Die and start over, and everything's back to status quo.


It's only when the signification of death and dying are brought to the fore that this transaction comes to have any type of moral weight. To suggest that all you are doing in Mario is "killing things" isn't just disingenuous, it's downright Froot Loops.

Pictured at down-right: Froot Loops

This isn't to say that the signification of violence and death are possible in a game-space where respawns and points-for-killing are the norm, only that an environment like this functions as a kind of null-space: You get what you give: Consider a game like Stainless Games' Carmageddon, a proto-GTA sandbox racer where the way you generate points is by hitting people with your car. Here is a game boating "motorized carnage", where the very goal of the game is to slaughter people. Here, people don't flicker and disappear when killed: They explode like blood sausages in a microwave.

As a caveat, blood sausage is actually quite delicious.

Though made in 1997, and boasting the graphical wizardry of the mesozoic, we have here a game capable of inciting widspread revulsion, to the point of moral rejection: For some time, the game as ported to countries like Germany changed the 'people' sprites to zombies, thus hammering home this basic pillar of ethics: It's okay to kill everyone, so long as they're already dead.


Of course, in either case, no act of violence is actually being committed: It's a matter of whether violence is being signified, or not. And it's here that we encounter the moralistic questions raised by individual playership: Do I want to be playing a game where you can kill people? Where you must? Which has the greater capability to offend: The game that insists we do something that offends our morals, or the game that simply offers it an option within a spectrum of action? Next week I hope to look at games that are conscious of this type of signification, and attempt to put it to use in one form or another.

- Rook

Signifying Violence, Part 1: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomberman

In Zork, one of the original text based games, many short commands would produce numerous replies - a type of conversational easter egg that acknowledged how frustrating navigating this type of space could be.

If, in a fit of pique, the player typed "Kill Self" they game would reply: "It is forbidden to commit seppuku." At once acknowledging the action and dismissing it, it framed the question of action in games as a matter of mediation. What one could or couldn't do isnot 'forbidden' by social customs, but by the game itself. The game space may be malleable, but the player is indestructible.

Other games of the time were also toying with the boundaries of what you could and couldn't kill. At the end of Taito's Double Dragon, after all the enemies have been vanquished, both players must fight each other to determine who ends up saving the captured ladyfriend. In a final twist, co-op becomes versus, and the player you've been playing beside for hours suddenly becomes one more thug to smack down.

Another early game where it is definitely not "forbidden to commit seppuku" is Hudson Soft's Bomberman, a game wherein one plays a bomberman, whose job it is to bomb other mans with bombs. Much of the game is spent ducking around corners to hide from bombs you've laid, as nothing distinguishes your enemies' bombs from your own. By the time you're in the thick of things, there exists no real boundary between you or your opponents actions: The only question you ask yourself is whether any given nook will, or won't be blown to smithereerns.

In these cases, the general rule that these games will protect you from yourselves is broken, whether by allowing counterproductive play choices, changing the rules of how players interact, or not differentiating a player's attacks from an opponent's. Ultimately the "video" part of video games relates to mediation: How much, or how little, one can do within the parameters of a program.

But the moment that interactivity is expanded to a point that includes changing the way that one negotiates a game-space (through bad decisions, or altered rules) suddenly you enter into an ambivalent realm, where a host of questions apply: What happens when it's not men, but children and prostitutes, than you can kill? At what point is it a moral decision, and upon whose behalf is good behavior enforced?

On Thursday I'll be looking at some later games in which interactivity (in terms of what you can, or cannot do) applies directly to the gaming experience, and tackle some of the questions that are raised.

- Rook

A virtual affair to remember

Recently I’ve been noticing a story about Second Life buzzing about a number of news outlets. For those keeping track of reportage on gaming and virtual interactions, it represents more of the same: A “Tales From the Wired” parable that serves up online misbehavior at its most titillating. Broken down simply, this tragic tale of lust and betrayal plays out as follows:


- A man and woman met virtually on Second Life. They began a virtual relationship (This may have been in virtual spring, when a young man’s eFancy turns lightly to iLove).

- The virtual couple met in real life, and got Honest-to-God actually married.

- One day, the woman caught her actually husband virtually canoodling with some hussy. (That is, an actually hussy, virtually, as opposed to a virtual hussy, actually, which would be one of those inflatable ones).

- Because of the man’s virtual philandering, the couple has gotten Real-Life No-Take-Backsies divorced.

All clear? Virtually?

I read the story originally at The Times, where the story was headlined with “Second Life affair leads to Real Life divorce…” In skimming the dozen or so other news outlets that have taken up this story, the telling has generally been the same, focusing on the ‘real life’ consequences of this gent’s ‘virtual affair.’

Like so many of these types of tech culture reports, the tone is one of restrained incredulity. “Can you imagine… Two people who took a game so seriously that they got married? Gosh, you couldn’t do that in ‘Frogger! And then, because of some play-pretend affair, now they've called it quits. Maybe instead of their ‘Second Lives,’ they should have focused on their normal ones like the rest of us!”

What fascinates me of how the story is reported is the wide divide maintained between the virtual and the actual. In the articles detailing the behavior of the two, the point is driven home that in this case, the result of something purely virtual has spilled out, messily into the ‘real world’. Some headlines carry the terms in quotations, as if picking up something odious with a pair of tongs. The Telegraph claims that “Woman divorces husband over ‘virtual’ affair..”, where the Sydney Morning Herald states that “Couple divorce after virtual-world ‘affair’”.

All told, does a ‘virtual’ affair differ from a virtual ‘affair’? The former suggests that for all its virtuality, something tangible did in fact occur… where in the latter case, it isn’t an affair at all, but the ghostly semblance of one, meted out in some pixilated Candyland. The result of all this ambiguity is a real mess, one hinging upon conflated meanings of the virtual.

Yes, the virtual is unreal, but in a different way than unicorns and leprechauns. When it comes to the already-messy world of human interaction, a rose is a rose is a rose, even if it happens to be a cyber-rose plucked fresh from the inter-dirts.

This rose is The Matrix.

If there is a semantic point to be made here, it’s that in these cases 'virtual' is not equal. What was one once a fanciful term relating to the specific realm of simulation (i.e. the vaguely paradoxical ‘virtual reality’), the term has come to be a catch-all phrase for action and interaction on the internet.

In the most concrete cases, ‘virtual’ simply means done via a computer: Consider such mundane tasks as virtual banking, or virtual shopping. You aren’t transferring virtual money or buying virtual goods, you are making actual decisions in a virtual context.

On a singularly abstract level, ‘virtual’ denotes relation, dealing in essences and almosts. If you were to log onto a real estate website and receive a virtual tour of a prospective house, you would be getting an approximation of the house’s look and space, represented virtually.

Finally, on the other end of things, we have virtual as the antonym of actual - something that is defined by its illusory or false nature. Thus a ‘virtual’ death in an online game is not death in any actual sense, and does not relate to anything outside of its own context.

These divisions aren’t cut and dry, but they show a real range in what we might consider to be virtual conduct. And its no accident that the most concrete representations of virtuality skew towards the serious business of finances and transactions, where more fully abstract interactions often fall within the realm of play.

So imagine a woman divorces a man because he is addicted to pornography - we can understand that there is something tangible there, something of consequence and weight. Yet catch a man fiddling around with another woman online, a circumstance in which there is an actual other woman on the other end, and suddenly it becomes farcical.

In no other circumstance could the ‘realness’ of this type of infraction could be called into question - say, in the case where a man is caught sneaking calls to 1-900 numbers: “Well, sure, I was having sex with women over the phone… but none of that was real, you see? It happened in the magical realm of my imagination. The $3.50 a minute, on the other hand? Disturbingly real”.

So this isn’t a case of a virtual affair, but rather of a real affair, committed virtually. The infraction is a real one, and it should be no surprise to anyone that its consequences have played out in reality. Of course, anyone still skeptical that this woman had no actual reason to divorce her husband might look no further than their now-well-publicized wedding photo for further proof:



As you can see, dude looks bad in a bow tie.

- Rook