The universe, life - may they be real or illusion - belongs to everyone, everyone can see what I see and own what I own, or at least, conceive themselves seeing it and owning it. But what I dream nobody can see besides me, nobody can own it besides me.

Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet

So years and years after my first attempt in Second Life, I try it again. I log in and try to move my avatar around, of course in a clumsy way, since I am used to games where I can move avatar and landscape separatedly. As any new interface, it requires a bit of patience.

I move around and fly, a bit grumpy already because in fact I am floating, not flying. I enter in a Buddhist construction, I realize it is a zazen-do. Soon I see an altar with a pointing ball I can click to “meditate”, and on the other side of the room, the meditation cushions on the floor with a name indicating them as “zazen”.

I do enjoy the absurd character of certain virtual worlds, but this design construction is unfair and unrespectful to the Buddhist Soto heritage, since the meditation cushions, where you meditate, are called zafu, while zazen (the practice of meditation) is not performed in front of altars, but in front of the nothing.

I guess I am not zen enough to deal with Second Life.

I am going to write this not as an expert of a field, but as a foreigner of fields and culture, since my favourite place/locus will always be “outside”.

While watching north american sports, it always surprises me how they seem to be a symbolic expression of male force. Football, Rugby, Ice Hokey, Baseball, those sports that are predominant in North America, and that are not much popular as soccer is for the rest of the world. In these four sports, men hold huge sticks (I don’t know the names in English) or wear bulky gear, both gear and sticks contribute to this image of vilirity. Players seem huge gladiators in an expression of brutal force. To cheer for a team is also an expression of masculine power.

It is also not difficult to find out that in North America love can be a game – or something subjected to rules. Dating, matching (what a word!), and living with a partner are easily ruled or even translated into game metaphors (and I won’t ever forget the dating section in Chris Crawford’s The art of computer game design book, in which he describes dating as a game). In sexual relationships, men score, hit (the box) and cheat, just like in games.

But this is not only the relation between games and love: among the myriad possibilities, there’s also an MMO game on love: http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html

This is one (blurry, I admit) construction of love and games, and I’m going to make another one, equally blurred.

First, since in Brazil romantic relationships are not ruled as in North America, nobody scores, neither cheats. I mean there’s no victory of scoring, neither the drama of being cheated, the cultural construction is completely different. I strongly believe that this contributes to the international stereotype of sexual paradise, while in fact Brazilians care way less for sexual matters than North Americans do, at least it is my impression.

Whenever I see any popular cultural expression coming from my country, I get surprised as well as a foreigner would, since I’ve been away for a long time already. Months ago, somebody sent me the link to a youtube video filmed in São Paulo Morumbi Stadium, where more than 50,000 men sing together “how I love you, I love you so much, the day you cease to exist, I don’t want to smile anymore” cheering for their team during a match. It felt awkward for me to see this blunt explicit declaration of love…. for a soccer team! I’m not used to that anymore (but at least, no matter the international stereotyped image of Brazilian violence, there’s no hooligans in the country).

Somebody might argue that “oh well, this is soccer, Brazilians are crazy for soccer”, and reduce cultural expressions like this to a specific game. I thought so, until the other day, when I was having a msn conversation with a Brazilian friend, asking him if he was still playing World of Warcraft. He used to be an engaged WoW player for years, but then he answers me that sadly he has no time anymore due to a busy work schedule. But it was a surprise for me the way he described it, his answer was something as

“I’m not playing anymore, I don’t have time for it, but I miss it so much. My friends keep telling me all about the new patch and Ulduar and it makes me crave to be there, but I can’t. When I remember WoW, I get tears in my eyes. You can’t imagine the feeling of being with 25 men while killing a boss, I can’t describe it”.

I never thought that somebody would/could have such an emotional bonding with Azeroth, a bonding strong enough to get tears in the eyes by missing it. Undoubtedly, he loves World of Warcraft.
By the way, after this conversation I got to the conclusion that the WoW academic material that stresses the capitalistic, rationalized or corporative gameplay framework misses to address the multicultural diversity of gamers, reducing cultural aspects of World of Warcraft to a North American ethnocentric standpoint.

With all this confusing comparisons, I just aimed to demonstrate how the phantasmagoric notion of “gaming culture” or even the canonic concept of “magic circle” hide divergent constructions of cultural practices and gaming practices.

At last, if I traced this picture, my picture, my intention is not to judge or criticize North Americans neither Brazilians, but to expose two different examples of cultural practices that no matter how familiar they become to me, I will always feel myself a foreigner in these two worlds, worlds that will always be an adventure for me.

It is easy to demonstrate the idea of a heideggerian gestell in WoW dungeons. The environment structure is programmed beforehand, the Internet and bookstores have plenty of tutorials and guides and the players take all the necessary information (maps, tips, creature specificities, item drops, etc,etc) before play, to ensure the safest and best performance. The player HAS to move in certain ways and perform given tasks that are usually known beforehand. In the end, the player’s character wins some experience and honour points and the dungeon name appears on the player’s achievements list. Ding!

But there’s something about play that escapes the technological structure and the “horizon of totalitarian planning” when it comes to digital games. The example here is a player at the Scarlet Monastery dungeon. While this instance is originally programmed for a 5 player run, it is often solo played by high level players seeking money. Usually it takes approximately 30 mins to 1 hour to accomplish it. But this guy tried his own personal achievement: to combat all the opponents (hundreds) in one single fight non-stop without dying:

Instead of an hour, it took 5 mins. This is a typical example of a “big pull”, which is seen by players not only as a technique, but some sort of individual talent or “art”. But this player did at that time (one year ago) something innovative, which is not just a matter of body motor skills (keyboard/mouse manipulation), but also a combination of strategy and creativity. Foremost, he saw and tested a hypothesis out of the “script”, out of the gestell, thinking not exactly in terms of technological affordances, but only questioning how to manage the whole programmed system (the character race, class and talents; the SM site, gear, buffs and protective spells, interface modds) to achieve a personal goal, which, by the way, completely subverts the idea of how a MMORPG should be played.
Even if it is a subversive act, it is not destructive; this player is not a naïve rebel against the system. On the contrary, it demonstrates the player ability to cope with digital technologies (game, website, film, soundtrack) and ingame structure, beyond tutorials and standard objectives. In this relation with technology, it is not a matter of how technology is framed or programmed (thus limiting creativity through the enframing), neither of what technology “allows” him to do (thus it is not a power issue between creativity and system).
It is an issue of engagement, creativity and play, which leads me to a question:
Is that poietic? How can (the heideggerian) poiesis be understood in relation to digital games, since it is a distinct notion from the often discussed homonymous one in the digital arts? Is it possible? Can this type of gameplay be considered an expression of what Derrida called exappropriation? If so, how does exappropriation relates to poiesis?

Another approach could be drawn discarding this dense theoretical articulation, associating this kind of play with the widespread notion of “emergent play” or naming it “subversive play”. But then, as many other topics, it is obsolete to the field, or in other words, “everybody already talked about it”.

When I moved to Montreal years ago, I found out this “Biblioteque et librarie Anarchiste” (Rue St Laurent), which played with my imagination and still does, by the paradox: how can anarchy (an-archy) be archived?