From day to day, people go through the motions, and do their major and menial tasks to get them through the day. Then the next day they start over, maybe doing something that is different but for the most part the same day. Yet, are the seemingly “meaningless” actions they do really meaningless? The repeated physical actions that people do each day influence them without them realizing it. You ever wonder why when someone goes to church, or temple they know almost inherently how to conduct themselves in an appropriate fashion. Sociologists and anthropologists alike have found that, “social behaviors are often learned without conscious intellectual understanding” (Penny 74). This can be applied to ritual and virtual reality. In videogames, participants unconsciously learn the game. They aren’t memorizing everything the game displays, it’s more of a passive absorption. In ritual this is the same thing. The repetitiveness of ritual helps participants learn how to behave within that ritual. Participants in ritual and virtual reality adopt certain identities to help them act accordingly within those respectful situations.
In video games a gamer may adopt many different identities to suit the game they are playing. Yet, the constant debate is whether gamers can draw the line between the identity they have while playing, and the identity they have outside of the game. The main focus on this debate is violent videogames. Many say that violent videogames influence the players without them knowing, and change them so much that they become more violent outside of the videogame.
Yet, videogames can be a cathartic experience for some people. Participants get to play out their violent urges through the game Rene Girard states:
Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons, however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. (Girard 241)
If we apply this theory to videogames, then violence will find a way to come out in participants who play violent videogames. The “violent” identity they adopt while playing the videogame can become their identity while not playing the game.
The formality of ritual also adds to this adoption of identity. The formality that is present during ritual and games is not present in the outside world. The formality of the ritual comes from “liturgical orders” (Rappaport 428). These “liturgical orders” include fixed sequences of words and acts. However while these events are so formal, what does that do for the ritual? Are participants not just concentrated on the rules, and “correctness of act, recitation and chant,” therefore, “Their primary concern, if not obsession is with rules” (Staal 484). Staal believes that ritual is meaningless, and that participants don’t really concentrate on the sacredness of the actions and recitations that they are doing. Instead the participants need to realize that essentially ritual is only an activity that has no goal, or meaning (Ibid 487).
Events are not sacred just because the presence of something that is deemed sacred. For example, right now as I write this paper, I am sitting in a study lounge and behind me three girls are sitting at a table, lighting a menorah and saying prayers. The ritual happening in this room is not particularly sacred to me just because the presence of a sacred object, the menorah, or even the utterances of prayer. In the words of Arnold Van Gennep, “Characteristically, the presence of the sacred (and the performances of appropriate rites) is variable. Sacredness as an attribute is not absolute; it is brought into play by the nature of particular situations.” (Van Gennep 530)
The identity that participants adopt within the confines of video games is inherently affected by formality as well. Video games have a narrative as rituals whether it is meaningful or not. There are games with a very loose narrative such as Pac-Man, where the object is to avoid the ghosts chasing after Pac-Man and eat as many white dots in the maze that you can. On the other hand there are games in which the narrative governs the game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, or the controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG. In games and film alike we “willingly suspend our disbelief” and become absorbed within the game itself and the protagonist’s struggle. We “give over our choice-making power,” and “passively allow the narrative to lead us where it will,” and eventually “we are taken to places that we might never reach in our actual lives” (Perlin 12-13). With this suspension of disbelief, we are unconsciously letting the narrative and all the other aspects of the game become real life in a sense. We become the protagonist that we are playing. His struggles become ours as we embark on somewhat of a spiritual journey. With the story we allow it to take away our right to make choices or our “agency” (Ibid 14).
We can compare ritual again to violent rituals such as sacrifice. According to Girard all sacrifice has an underlying commonality, which is internal violence. Girard states, “all the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress” (Girard 244). Yet, when you take a look at sacrifice, whether it be human or animal, sacrifice is trying to prevent the one thing that it itself contains, violence. The slaughtering of an animal or a human is violent. Sacrificial rituals perpetuate violence among its participants because they in turn are partaking in an act of violence, even though it is said to be sacred. If someone were to murder someone and when the police asked the murderer why they killed the person and they said, “I killed them because I was trying to prevent God/gods from becoming violent and instigating violence within society” the police would think the person was deranged. Yet, a human sacrifice within a ritual context is acceptable?
However, Walter Burkert contends that through the irreversible “act” of sacrifice we are transformed, we reach a new plane (Burkert 64). By seeing sacrifice it is possible that we have a greater appreciation for life, and want to live it the best we possibly can within our community. With this Burkert states that, “a sense of community arises from collective aggression” (Ibid 62). However, the sacrificial ritual must be based on seriousness. While many sacrificial rituals are theatrical they can become so obvious to the other participants of the ritual that it negates the function of the ritual itself. The ritual must be rooted in seriousness because the other participants may, on impulse, want to imitate the violent actions outside of the ritual world, again undermining its function. To parry this, Burkert contends that there must be a, “regression from symbolism to reality,” in order to preserve its meaning and sacredness (Ibid 65).
Violent video games are becoming some of the most popular and controversial types of video games on the market right now. According to the popular gaming website IGN, the first day sales of the new installment in the popular Call of Duty series, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, were an estimated 1.23 million units in the UK, practically doubling the previous record holder Grand Theft Auto IV which sold an estimated 631,000 units (Reilly). People’s lives literally get taken over by playing games such as Modern Warfare 2. I have many friends who have logged thousands of hours playing these popular first person shooters (FPS). Again going along with Ken Perlin’s idea that we in some ways “become” the protagonist, this could be the reason for the popularity of such games. Gamers, “pursue immersion to temporarily escape the stresses of everyday life, or vicariously enjoy the exploits of fictional characters as an antidote to the mundanity of their owns lives” (Douglas 196). Video games and rituals alike look to give the participant a transcendent experience. While video games look to take you out of your “mundane” life and experience something exciting, rituals on the other hand look to connect you with the sacred.
The repetitiveness aspect of video games and ritual also adds to the identity that participants adopt while being a part of each situation. In ritual, repetition is one of the main aspects that is said to get the goal of the ritual across, if there indeed is a goal. The redundancy of repeating different utterances is one way of achieving this goal or message. For example in a Catholic church service, to which I have been to many a time, the priest may pronounce a prayer and at the end of each prayer the congregation may repeat the prayer or a phrase such as, “Lord have mercy,” which emphasizes the priest’s prayer. The redundancy of these utterances or phrases can have a double effect. The negative effect is, “various kinds and patterns of repetitions that occur sometimes bore[ing] us with their seemingly insistently unvarying recurrence,” or the positive effect in that they are “sometimes subtly stimulating in us a sense of creative variation and attentive expectation” (Tambiah 504).
Repetition is part of the procedural rhetoric of video games. Through these repetitive actions you learn the point of the game and gain flow. It’s like the saying, “practice makes perfect” goes. Obviously repetition with anything will make you better at whatever you are doing. The military realized this with the advent of video games. In the mid-90s the U.S. licensed rights to create a Marine Doom based on the popular game Doom in which you fight alien like beings. The game was controversial for its graphic violence, even though it’s nothing compared to the graphicness of violent video games today. The game was similar to the classic Duck Hunt, except the gun is a plastic M-16 and what you are shooting are not ducks, but people (Penny 75-76). If the Marines use videogames in hopes of influencing their soldier’s actions in the real world, it can be said that video games can influence anyone who play them in relation to their actions outside the game. Yet, I’ve played video games like Call of Duty and I’m not going to go out and shoot someone. It depends on the context in which the games are used. The Marines in this case are using them as a professional training tool, even though videogames in general are not designed to train the individuals who play them. If I were to pick up a weapon I am pretty confident I couldn’t use that weapon in a proficient manner just from simulating shooting a weapon in a videogame. Yet Simon Penny contends:
So, in the spirit of “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” we are drawn to the conclusion that what separates the first person shooter from the high-end battle simulator is the location of one in an adolescent bedroom and the other in a military base. And having accepted that simulators are effective environments for training, we must accept that so too are the desktop shooter games. The question is: what exactly is the user being trained to do? (Penny 76)
This is exactly the problem people have with violent videogames. With all of these theories taken into account people opposed to violent videogames believe that playing these games will influence the players to commit violent crimes because they have been essentially “trained” to use weapons, different evasive tactics, learned ways to devise a plan that will be successful, and learned to be merciless when killing. However, the line must be drawn somewhere. I don’t believe Columbine happened because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold played violent video games. They obviously had issues that were deeper than videogames. The game made about the Columbine School Shooting, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! developed by Danny Ledonne portrays the school shooting. Ledonne didn’t develop it to offend people or advocate violent video games. According to Ledonne he wanted to make something that showed the side of the shooters and how much of an atrocity what they did was. He wanted the player to become the killers in a sense to see exactly what they were going through when they were shooting their fellow students. Obviously Ledonne got a lot of hateful criticism for making this game as seen in the documentary Playing Columbine. Yet, Ledonne was asking the player to adopt an identity that facilitated his goal for the game, not telling kids to go out and shoot up their schools.
Having one’s own identity is important in life. Participants in videogames and rituals can adopt an endless amount of identities which in violent videogames’ case we hope they leave the identity with the game; unless of course you are the a Marine playing Marine Doom. Ritual and videogames are inseparable because of their immense commonalities. Everything about one can be related to the other. In the end, the identities adopted during rituals and videogames are interchangeable. The influence of ritual and videogames on life outside of these constructs is evident. However, it is up to the individual to determine if they let those identities influence them.
Works Cited
Burkert, Walter. 1983. “The Function and Transformation of Ritual Killing,” in Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 35-48. Translated by Peter Bing. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Douglas, J. Yellowlees and Hargadon, Andrew. “The Pleasures of Immersion and Interaction: Schemas, Scripts, and the Fifth Business.” First Person New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 196. Print
Girard, Rene. 1977. “Sacrifice,” from Violence and the Sacred, 1-15,17-33. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Penny, Simon. “Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation.” First Person New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 74-76. Print
Perlin, Ken. “Can There Be a Form Between a Game and a Story?” First Person New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 12-14. Print
Rappaport, Roy A. 1979, “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” from Ecology, Meaning and Religion, 175-180, 188-195, 197-200, 208-214, 216-221. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic.
Reilly, Jim. “First Day Modern Warfare 2 Sales To Top 7 Million?.” IGN XBOX360. 11 November 2009. IGN XBOX360, Web. 16 Dec 2009. <http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/104/1044456p1.html>.
Staal, Frits. 1979. “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26(1): 2-22.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1981. “A Performative Approach to Ritual,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 1979 65:116-142.
van Gennep, Arnold. 1960 (1909). The Rites of Passage, 10-13,15-25. Edited by Monika B Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
