When video games became a major force in popular culture, in the early 1980s, everyone noticed.
What Sherry Turkle noticed and elucidated, however, went a step beyond the popular thinking. In
her influential first book on new media, The Second Self, she exploredalongside careful
consideration of other aspects of popular, professional, and academic computing culturehow video
games were a telling way in which children, teenagers, and adults encountered the computer.
Turkle, approaching computing from the discipline of psychoanalysis, considered how the computer
enables people to enact personae that are different from the ones they use in non-computing
situations. While others concerned with the social world were decrying video games as an evil
influence, Turkle asked players about their experiences to determine why they played video games.
She discovered that these games play a social and psychological roleand, more precisely, that games
provide a way in which children as well as adults can take on different roles that are important to
them psychologically. The computer is not merely a tool used to accomplish tasks, Turkle explained,
but an object that enters our individual and social lives; how we interact with computers influences
our outlook on the world and our perspective on ourselves. This idea is explored in Turkles book Life
on the Screen in a different way, in the context of internetworked computing. Chapter 7 of that book,
in particular, considers how explicit role-playing on MUDs allows play with aspects of the self.
In the selection that follows, Turkle also closely considers the nature of games themselvesnoting
several features that distinguish video games from sports and even from the previous dominant
arcade amusement, pinball. She also considers, as Brenda Laurel has, the fantasy game Dungeons and
Dragons, an important and little-studied antecedent to the computer adventure game that created a
rule-based world in which play took place.
While adventure games which integrally involve stories are an interesting category, Turkle reported
that adults found the stories associated with arcade video games to be cute or funny but basically
irrelevant to their play. Further, while children project themselves into the roles of their characters
more strongly, the story aspects may have had little influence beyond that. Yet video game makers
of the last few years, desperately calling for more integration of stories, have not leant an ear to
game-players as Turkle did. Designers hold out hope, instead, that action-oriented games, which
people clearly do not play for narrative reasons, can be enhanced with good storiesas if story
might be the deus ex machina that could arrive to save an otherwise incomplete gaming experience.
NM
Spacewar!
, the first
modern video game, and
Adventure
, another
computer game mentioned
by Turkle during her
description of Dungeons
and Dragons, are included
on the CD along with a
selection of other
historical computer and
video games.
This focus on the shape of
the simulation and
interaction, rather than
the details of the content,
is also characteristic of
the analysis of Bill Nichols
( 43).
The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and
reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-
create. What kinds of personae do we make? What relation do these have to what we have traditionally
thought of as the whole person? Are they experienced as expanded self or separate from the self? Do our
real-life selves learn lessons from our virtual personae? Are these virtual personae fragments of a coherent
real-life personality? How do they communicate with one another? Why are we doing this? Is this a
shallow game, a giant waste of time? Is it an expression of identity crisis of the sort we traditionally
associate with adolescence? Or are we watching the slow emergence of a new, more multiple style of
thinking about the mind? Sherry Turkle, Life On The Screen (180)
Further Reading
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. 43
625 the
NEWMEDIA
READER
Original Publication
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 6492. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Video Games and
Computer
Holding Power
Sherry Turkle
I watch a thirteen-year-old girl in a small family caf� in New
York Citys Little Italy. Four electronic games lined up near the
door clash with the murals of Italian seacoasts. The child too
seems out of place. She is angry and abusive to the caf� owner
when he asks her if she would like something to eat. Get the
fuck away from me. Im fucking playing your fucking games.
The man shrugs, apparently used to the abuse of thirteen-
year-olds.
The girl is playing Asteroids. A spaceship under her control
is being bombarded by an asteroids shower. There are
separate control buttons for steering, accelerating, and
decelerating the spaceship and for firing its rocket guns
against threatening asteroids and enemy ships. The player
must keep up a steady stream of missiles as she maneuvers
the ship. The finger on the Fire button must maintain a
rapid staccato, an action that is tense and tiring.
The girl is hunched over the console. When the tension
momentarily lets up, she looks up and says, I hate this game.
And when the game is over she wrings her hands,
complaining that her fingers hurt. For all of this, she plays
every day to keep up my strength. She neither claims nor
manifests enjoyment in any simple sense. One is inclined to
say she is more possessed by the game than playing it.
The children playing with Merlin, Simon, Big Trak, and
Speak and Spell at the shorediscussing whether their
computer games could really cheatwere displaying that
combination of innocence and profundity which leads many
of us to believe in Piagets model of the child as philosopher.
The scene on the beach had an aura of charming solemnity.
The scene in the caf�, like that in thousands of arcades and in
millions of homes, is more violent. Somewhat older
childrenfrom around nine or ten onare in a relationship
to the machine that seems driven, almost evoking an image of
addiction. Children musing about objects and their nature has
given way to children in contest. Reflection has given way to
domination, ranking, testing, proving oneself. Metaphysics
has given way to mastery.
For the girl in the caf�, mastery of her game was urgent and
tense. There is the sense of a force at work, a holding power
whose roots are aggressive, passionate, and eroticized.
There has been controversy about video games from the
days of Space Invaders and Asteroids, from the time that the
games holding power provoked people who saw it as a sign of
addiction to become alarmed. The controversy intensified as
it became clear that more than a games craze was involved.
This was not the Hula-Hoop of the 1980s. By 1982 people
spent more money, quarter by quarter, on video games than
they spent on movies and records combined. And although
the peak of excitement about the games may have passed
with their novelty, video games have become part of the
cultural landscape.
Not all of the arguments against video games can be taken
at face value, for the debate is charged with feelings about a
lot more than the games themselves. Protest against video
games carries a message about how people feel about
computers in general. In the past decade, and without people
having had anything to do or say about it, computers have
entered almost every aspect of daily life. By 1983 the
computer had become so much and so active a part of the
everyday that Time magazine chose it to fill the role usually
given to a Man or Woman of the Year. Only one other gift of
science has been so universally recognized as marking a new
era of human life. That was atomic energy.
It is an understatement to say that people are ambivalent
about the growing computer presence: we like new
conveniences (automated bank tellers, faster supermarket
lines), but on the eve of a new era we, by definition, do not
know where we are. The changes have been rapid and
disquieting. We are ill at ease even with our children, who are
so much at ease with a technology that many of us approach
at arms length. They take it for granted. To them it is not a
new technology but a fact of life. They come home from
school and casually report that they are learning
programming. The comment evokes mixed feelings. Parents
want their children to have every advantage, but this new
expertise estranges them. It seems to threaten a new kind of
generation gap that feels deep and difficult to bridge. And so,
34. Video Games
500 34. Video Games
1984
501
;
for many people, the video game debate is a place to express a
more general ambivalence: the first time anybody asked their
opinion about computers was when a new games arcade
applied for a license in their community or when the owner
of a small neighborhood business wanted to put a game or
two into a store. It is a chance to say, No, lets wait. Lets look
at this whole thing more closely. It feels like a chance to buy
time against more than a video game. It feels like a chance to
buy time against a new way of life.
Video games are a window onto a new kind of intimacy
with machines that is characteristic of the nascent computer
culture. The special relationship that players form with video
games has elements that are common to interactions with
other kinds of computers