It was called Duck Duck Goose, and it was a drop off childcare center in Nashville that my parents would employ once in a blue moon when they couldn’t access any of our usual babysitters. The place was always full of kids of all ages, separated between two large corrals lined with that soft vinyl cushioning you find in inflatable playgrounds for hire. The preschool kids were assigned to the corral on the left and the kindergartners and up played in the one on the right, which was generally more rough-and-tumble but had better toys like Legos and slingshots with foam balls.
When you looked toward the back, however, you could see it: a small room with a mini amphitheater of sorts where the pre-teens and kids who couldn’t drive yet hung out, and within that room was a large CRT TV with a Super Nintendo. As a six-year-old, I managed to con my way inside during one visit to watch them play Super Mario World. I recall standing there, gobsmacked, as a kid controlled a character on the screen and told him what to do. This was my first encounter with videogames, and it was the single-most captivating and interesting technological innovation I’ve ever encountered. To this day that simple act of “use hands to make thing on screen move” still delights me.
Now, that alarming screeching sound you hear is the noise of my mom’s tires peeling Nashvilleward to either burn Duck Duck Goose to the ground or salt whatever resides there now. My parents’ tolerate/hate relationship with videogames was a large point of contention for us growing up, but I neither hold it against them now nor even think that they were wrong to feel that way (and I will be borrowing a fair bit of their playbook in the coming years). I’ve had a long time to play and think and write about games since that first encounter in Duck, Duck, Goose, and I have arrived at the conclusion that… well, they’re alright.
Sidebar: Videogame is one word. It is its own thing. I have spoken.
A wise man once said you should rate life at about a 5.5. Any lower and you risk burying life’s joys in cynicism and blinding yourself to your blessings. Any higher and you will become too attached to its pleasures, fruitlessly compounding the pain of death. Videogames deserve a similar outlook. Dismiss them too readily and you bar yourself from a medium that synthesizes nearly every form of creative expression into a sea of brilliant, wonderful instances. Regard them overfondly and you will fall prey to time-wasting, psychologically manipulative gameplay mechanics, fickle industrial values, and an artistic field that can never really exist for its own sake, beyond the grasp of commercial demands.
I’m here right now because my creative taste is compromised by videogames. I freely admit this, and I have no desire to reform myself. I have “put away the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up,” as the old don said. And I have also put away the fear of needing games to be taken seriously or even respected. As a field, videogames provide more than enough ammunition to prove their harshest critics correct on many points, but I know where to find the good stuff, so who cares?
Here’s what matters: I also work in classical education, and it’s not really just a job to me. I’m pretty well stuck in at this point. My world is decorated with great works and ideas that have persisted for millennia. I esteem tradition to an extreme degree by most people’s standards. I don’t look forward for guidance, I look back. So, the question is: what is the classical view of a novelty as young and historically foreign as videogames? How do I reconcile my affection for them with the values of my vocation? How would I characterize them in “the grand scheme of things” and what would I tell parents who are concerned about their influence and looking for a kind of institutional response for these things? This will be our subject for the next two weeks.
Obviously, I’m not going to speak for classical education as a whole. No one can do that, except perhaps, I dunno, Andrew Kern? I wouldn’t care to waste his time like this, but my guess is that if you asked him about videogames he’d hit you with the Mariah Carey:
Here’s what I can do, however: go back to first principles and see where videogames fit in, and pair that with my experience to gesture towards an answer.
Recall that the first result of classical education is constructing the microcosmos (you can read my three-part series from last year on this here, here, and here). In brief: everything that exists comes from The Logos (Christ) and is bound to a logos (word). Together, logoi can constitute a mythos (story), and by sharing a mythos, we draw connections between logoi, expanding our understanding of their meaning and creating a microcosmos in our minds that holds all of these meanings and connections together. When there is common meaning and connection found within a group, it creates ethos, which is the culture engendered by the mythous of the people (or in our case, the school). Let’s pick one logos to use as an example:
Logos: dragon
Meanings: winged, fire-breathing, reptilian, huge, evil, greedy, scary, passionate, secretive, miserly, misunderstood (this one is postmodern, but worth noting for another time)
Connected logoi: Erebor, Eden, Seraphim, Hungarian Horntail, Komodo, Ferelden, Ricky Steamboat, Eustace Scrubb, King Ghidorah, “Here there be…” etc.
This was just off the top of my head, but if you give it a moment’s thought for yourself and see what you come up with, you’ll see that the number of meanings and connections one can make from one logos to another is nearly endless. As a culture we made this a whole thing just for Kevin Bacon.
Whenever I talk about these things, I tend to focus most on logos and mythos because those pieces of the microcosmic equation are the easiest and most interesting to write about, but it’s the third piece, ethos, that is the most important here. Ethos is the culture, the spirit of the people, and it’s created when logos and mythos influence the decisions children make, when they are “made real” by action, and action is most frequently produced in play.
You don’t need another Pollyanna like me telling you how important play is for children but make no mistake: it is. Very. Our students at Omnia spend more time playing outside than they do working on any other subject during the day, because that’s where they become human; that’s where the microcosmos becomes incarnate.
It’s important to lay this out to understand how videogames influence the microcosmos, because first and foremost, games are played. They establish forms, rules, limits, and goals. They give the player tools, influence, and a place to experiment, compete, and challenge with them. These days, there’s an astonishing level of diversity among those goals and places. The earliest videogames started out asking players to aim for high scores on tiny levels that couldn’t spill the banks of their screen, but depending on the title in question now, they could be asking players to map out entire worlds, fictional or historical, disrupt galactic economies, play in rock concerts, master arcane spellbooks, navigate relationships between different characters, master the hairpin turns of the best race courses in the world, and ever more esoteric pursuits like unpacking all your belongings after a move or annoying people as an errant goose. Heck, many games these days mix most of those elements together into one title.
Videogames can be almost anything now, but what’s consistent about each of them no matter how wildly different they are is that 1) they primarily trade in images, and 2) the worlds they present are discrete places that can only be engaged via an interface. These two consistencies have far-reaching implications for how games affect the microcosmos.
Regarding the first consistency, the trade in images is a debate unto itself, but for our purposes here I will assert that images are less elastic than logoi are- they direct the mind towards a particular concept of something rather than allowing the mind to make organic connections with other logoi and form its own image. Images have a much stronger and more influential effect on the mind than logoi do, because they give us a form, and our mind naturally assumes that anything with a form can be known. What’s known is germane unto itself, and therefore it dominates our understanding until another image descended from other logoi comes along to broaden that understanding.
So, the implication here is that a microcosmos that is fed primarily with images has a harder time expanding on its own, because logoi precede images, and while images can influence each other, it takes logoi to imbue them with meaning. To wit, a child raised on Barney the Dinosaur is in for a much ruder awakening when they watch Jurassic Park or visit Sue at the Field Museum than a child who has read books about dinosaurs.
I must note a key distinction here: obviously, images are overwhelmingly prevalent in children’s literature, and this is so because they help the developing child’s mind. The difference here between literature and games is that the microcosmos is naturally on a trajectory where it goes from benefitting greatly from images and illustrations to being able to read and synthesize logoi without needing them. You can have books without images, but you can’t have videogames without them. They can’t operate on a purely “logi-cal” level, even if, ironically, logic is what drives their programming.
Sidebar: There’s a secondary effect at work here, in that a medium that trades in images constitutes its own section of the microcosmos that can only really grow and influence itself, irrespective of the whole. Imagine a shrub growing on the side of a tree and you’ll see what I mean. The color of its leaves may make its way into the trunk, but by and large, it exerts no influence beyond that. Case in point: this won’t mean anything to most people, but every person who plays enough videogames knows what it means when they see yellow paint on a ledge. That’s the kind of microcosmic development you get from games: esoteric, specific, and specialized. Read: not universal.
Regarding the second consistency, a videogame’s interface- the controls, the menus, and the boundaries of interaction contained therein -is the essential element that compensates for a game’s “logi-cal” deficiency. The process of “entering into” a game’s world requires taking the interface into your hands and operating from there. When this is done, it transmits analogical thought to digital action. Our minds submit to the form of the game as we play it, and we are limited by its rules and programming. Part of what makes games so quixotic and engaging is experimenting with those rules and testing the boundaries put in place by the developers.
What this means is that each individual videogame possesses its own unique ethos. To be sure, there is a lot of overlap across genres and design conventions, but the key point here is that when you are playing a videogame, you are fundamentally at a remove from the action because of the interface, and this creates a situation in which consequences must be artificial and enforced on the game’s own terms. In other words, the rules and limits and choices we make in games really only apply to the games themselves, and any incarnate ethos derived from games is either happenstantial or incompatible with real life.
Let’s use death as an example. Death and bodily harm in games is a consequence only insofar as it allows you to either keep playing the game or progress further in the game’s world and story. Likewise, killing and violence in games is only consequential insofar as it removes obstacles and/or defends the player. You don’t need me to tell you that taking this mindset to the playground doesn’t last very long. It’s digital pretend, and children correct themselves very quickly once they realize that real life violence and danger has incarnate consequences.
However, because those consequences don’t exist in games, players develop a separate ethos when playing, one which ignores consequences because they “aren’t real,” and this ethos has knock-on effects that can cause issues in a person’s speech, their demeanor, and their ability to healthily interact with people and regulate themselves. I don’t want to emphasize this too much, because the interface of digital communication is more to blame than games themselves, but we are all familiar with the stereotypes of the gamer who can’t talk to women, the chat lobby that immediately has to be muted because people are speaking scabrously, and the people who can’t control their emotions because games have not accustomed them to do so.
All of these issues are real, and they require a healthy community to temper them and reorient the person toward The Good. In short, games offer a wide variety of stories, experiences, and wonderful curios that can accentuate a person’s microcosmos, but their reliance on images and interfaces means that they cannot develop it, and they cannot produce a healthy, living ethos.
Accordingly, videogames do not have a place in the school. Not because they are intrinsically bad, but because at best, all they can do is supplement. Now, I have used games here and there in my classroom over the years. I once had a second-grade class design their own puzzles on graph paper which I then recreated in the Nintendo game Pushmo, and I have long used the strategy game Into the Breach as my Friday “everything else is done and we need something fun to do” activity, because it’s digestible and a marvelous little exercise in tactics and letting students use a part of their brain that they don’t often get to in my classroom.
Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, videogames are apocryphal. That is, they are “for the home.” Next week, we will discuss that side of things. Thanks for reading, it’s good to be back. Christ is risen!
Part 2 is now available here.
May our Lord illuminate the righteous path He has laid before each of us and compel us to walk it dutifully and with joy.
Sharing with my godson, who is writing/designing/building a game!