Mimetics: 1. The problem of automation
or “Why Adults Stop Playing”
Introduction
In our last reading regarding the article “Approach to a Concept of Mimesis in Games” I proposed two points on which to advance regarding the mimetic theory : the structure of mimesis and the means to facilitate it on the one hand, and the difficulties to enter the mimetic state on the other.
https://medium.com/game-theory-workshop/approach-to-a-concept-of-mimesis-in-games-be9bbd7a0196
Today I want to face the second problem, about the contemporary difficulty to access this state that I have chosen to call “mimetic”. We need to consider a few things before we tackle the main body of this article.
Let’s apply a quick practice of Mindfulness as it is known today, or just presence:
Who am I? What makes me be? Where was I born? How does that influence me?
Perhaps whoever reads this is a member of what is called “western society”; perhaps they belong to the other, “oriental society”. Lines, after all, drawn on a map. What we do have are cultural circumstances. In different parts of the world, societies change. For those who have never seen beyond their own world, their own country or province or neighborhood, it seems that there is a solid order of reality. There is a clear notion of right and wrong, good and evil, legal and illegal. And these truths are expressed through institutions such as family, school, university, religion, the state, and the status quo.
For the person who still lives inside the egg of his personal little world, they will believe that this is the only way that things can be. Because their parents told him “how things work”, school taught them “this is true and this is not” and faith said “this is right and this is wrong”. And yet, we have clear evidence — as soon as we open our vision to the whole wide world — that this truth is more elusive, much less concrete, since in different societies the rules and standards change. Sure, we can proceed to evaluate everything that differs with our notion of “right” as bad or wrong. We can lead Cultural Crusades against the rest of the world in the name of our true god. Or, just maybe, we can begin to develop a suspicion:
That not everything is as clear as we were taught to believe.
Once we process the deep disappointment that this can produce, the possibility opens up for us to broaden our gaze across the world and not only learn about the multiplicity, but also look for common factors in each society. Likewise, we can analyze in a more critical way what operates within our own, and how it affects us. Suddenly natural orders are revealed as artificial, and if something was done by the Human then it can be undone, or re-created, by the Human.
Within our contemporary ultra-technological and capitalist society we face a clear series of challenges. They begin to influence us from a young age and shape the future of our adult life. And in the process of living this adult life, of pursuing certain goals and taking certain risks, we can find ourselves in a complication when it comes to enjoying or participating in phenomena such as mimesis.
Mimesis, to take up where we left, was initially conceived as a state that can be given in the game as in other circumstances. It was tentatively defined as an instance in which “the game is lived” or “played as if it were real.” This, in other words, means that there is a cognitive and symbolic redirection from the real to the “fictional”. In our Approach we also talked about the imitative character of mimesis, and that as soon as it is possible to generate a structure that allows the connection between the person and the environment, whatever happens is real. In this way, the game and the video game acquire the character of a symbolic conductor that allows a person to connect with aspects of the human, of what we are.
However, this connection is not infallible.
The treasures of the mimesis are elusive if the subject is not prepared to access them. There are factors that separate, hinder, frighten, or hide the path that leads to this connection. These issues are intrinsic (the internal, emotions and consciences, mental configurations, etc.) and extrinsic (society, culture, pressure from third parties, fundamental needs).
Both categories will be our object of analysis today.
The Problem of Automation
This prelude gave us a foothold to the main object of this article, which is the problem of human beings to enter the state of mimesis.
We talk about the “ego”, the mind out of control and the economy of attention. To these we add three more: cultural conditioning, the socio-economic structure of work and personal life, and the inclination to automation by our biological brain.
We will approach the same preliminarily, and from them will derive some more.
For the practical purposes of this article, I will not dwell deeply on each element but will approach them like the toucan that glides over the relief and sees the thing. In subsequent works we will delve into each particular point as necessary.
Ego
As for the ego, we can characterize it very quickly as a concept presented in Freudian psychoanalytic theory and subsequently taken up by the ramifications of various schools of modern psychology. The term refers to the cortex of being, to the semi-rational, semi-conscious construction of the “I am” that we present to society and that works as a mask. It is a reflective self-perception, like someone who looks in the mirror. The first problem, sponsored by the ego, is that as soon as it is magnified it takes progressive possession of the subject’s consciousness, substituting the knowledge of oneself, of one’s “internal self”, by the rationalized construction of its unconscious projections, social claims, imaginaries, fantasies, neuroses and crystallized ideas of morality, truth and good. As soon as the ego overflows the real self and assumes control of the person (we are not going to enter into psycho-phantom terminologies) it behaves like a crust, a wall or a separation that inhibits the individual from being themselves and therefore connecting their inner being with the outer being, the “god-within-one” with the “god-outside-of-one”, “Whole”, “All”, “God” and so on. This ego operates as a dam, which in its composition pretends to be what it is not. In that illusory truth, which is a flat lie, the emptiness that separates the worlds is built. What the ego perceives as a threat to its integrity will be discriminated against, and what complements it will be exaggerated. And in that operation there can be no sincere contact with reality. And then … there is no mimesis. Perhaps for more than one reader this concept of the ego is new, for many it can be confusing, and for others even threatening (the same mind, when dominated by the ego, defends itself from the threats that compromise it).
Mind out of control
As for the mind out of control, this is a typical and ongoing issue within spiritual practices (meditation) but also in any sphere of life where an activity benefits from concentration and is impaired by distraction. This theme is complemented by the economy of attention and says thus: a cultural trend has historically been deployed — that of rationality as a fundamental element of human identity. Since the enlightenment of the eighteenth century and incipiently since the dawn of Humanity in an endless number of cultures edifying our current one, “Reason” and the faculty of rational thought, logos, have taken the scene of human essence. It is through the mind, through the capacity and exercise of being rational beings governed by logic as opposed to instinct and impulse or mystic psychosis, that the human being is superior to the animal and finds dignity in himself. It is through reason that the Human commutes with God, with the matrix of reality, and surpasses and frees itself from all the chains that confine the chaotic and material world of pleasure and suffering.
We know this logic even if we have never studied it, because it is our cultural heritage. We are children of Western culture, settled in Ancient Greece, in the Great Rome, in the European ecclesiastical reigns and the geniuses of the Renaissance. Since the development of logic in science and with it, the final conquest of the world. Human beings have linked their value and identity to their ability to be logical, to be rational, and to make use of this practice to claim their legitimate right not only over oneself but over the whole Earth and, if they can, all Reality. We will not deepen into the problem of instrumental reason; it only goes without saying that in the rise of science and power linked to the ability to use reason for practical purposes, the exercise of consciousness was replaced by the uses of utility. The overvaluation of the mind and its faculties closely linked it to the exercise of science and its victories. This has caused a gradual and profound devaluation of the other components of the human essence. The body and matter have been despised for centuries and millennia by binary ideologies and it manifested itself in a particularly bloody way during the Middle Ages with the rise of monotheistic religions. The spirit lasted until the conquest of science in the painful episode of its war with religion, a war caused by the latter. That conflict generated a symbolic resentment that even to this day causes an inhibition to the approach of spiritual concepts in Western culture — or are you going to tell me that most of those who read “God” do not think, contemptuously, of the Christian god guilty of the inquisition, burnings and repression until today still in force?
With this inflation of the mind over the body and the spirit, there remain the emotions that have been forever neglected by cold reason and which are attributed to the terrain of the childish and the “feminine”. In this context, we live in a society where the mind and its devices are highly valued and inflated, without even going into the question of our high degree of technologization and advanced knowledge. On many occasions we ignore the other components of the human being mentioned above. The mind, thus, eats the rest of the being, dominates it and twists it. There is nothing to contain it since the mind is ruler of itself, and as soon as the human being does not know the means for self-control and the harmonization of its thoughts, they run rampant and uncontrolled in a progressively neurotic state. In chaos, the rest of the elements rebel, and the mind does nothing but scream and juggle uncontrollably with something that it does not understand, because in most cases it is either denied or disdained. Covered, it can be, for entertainments like a game or pleasures like playing the accordion.
Economy of Attention
We mentioned the economy of attention. What is this? Our market today is an information market. There are many jobs and products that are sustained by the amount of time that a person spends on their consumption. Social networks, apps, blogs, even this article, all demand time and attention from a person and they all do it at the same time. Or has your cell phone not rang more than three times since you started reading this publication? Does your email not give you notifications, over and over, of things you’ve already subscribed to? Or maybe it’s a speaker outside your house, tied to a truck, pronouncing the new product of the hour. You can go out and there and you will find advertisements everywhere for this movie and that product, all of them demanding your attention. And as soon as our cell phone vibrates and we brainlessly check it, we barely remember what we were doing before, and then finds ourselves scrolling uncontrollably between ads and adorable videos of cats. We are conditioned, and are slowly being conditioned, to jump from distraction to distraction, consistently re-configuring our brains so that we cannot hold our attention for more than five minutes on one thing and seek the excitement of “something else.” There are interesting and terrifying scientific articles on multitasking and its effects on the human mind, and I will make sure to review them in a later article.
When our attention is constantly demanded by invisible agents, it is very difficult to stay focused on a particular activity. How can we enter flow and much less mimesis if we are stopping the current, the connection with the symbolic conductor, to check out an empty notification?
Contemporary Western Culture
Culturally speaking, there has been an inclination to consider childish acts of play and recreation as adults. That is, there is a differentiation between the “adult” and the “infant” and their respective activities. The child plays, therefore playing is childish. And what the adult does corresponds to adulthood. The two do not mix. The self-respecting adult (for there is truly no rite of passage or consensus on what makes an adult, only an economic and family notion perhaps) does not enter the child’s sphere. And it is in this separation that adults gradually cut themselves off from those activities such as play, expression and recreation, except in particular and not entirely clear cases such as art and some socially accepted forms of competitive games and activities. These “adult” activities have a clear inclination toward those means of survival, adaptation, and domination — that is, means to ends. The game has no end, it is an end in itself, it does not have a product of palpable benefit for the productive adult. And it is as soon as the adult adopts a productive mentality or worse, a productive identity, they will devalue everything that does not have a secondary economy and does not serve the purpose of progressing in their material and social enterprises. It is needless to overextend in this explanation in order to suggest that the game does not belong only to the realm of childhood, and such separations between children and adults is social and fuzzy, and that the effects of such a breach are negatively remarkable. Disdain and disgust for the game separate the adult from its natural ability to re-create themselves, to get out of their own ego (since the game is played by beings, with temporary egos which we call “roles”, such as in the game of “Police and Thief”) and enter the dynamics of a form of movement that is pure and dedicated to itself. Without play there is no mimesis. Without play there is no re-creation, perhaps only spiritual practice remaining as way of release from the prison of the enlarged ego.
It goes like this: the adult immerses himself in a game that believes to be real, the game of society, and immersed in its logics builds an avatar (an ego) to participate in it. As soon as you forget that your avatar is a creation, and identify with it, you separate from yourself and become a stranger to your own heart. The sphere of the infant is denied, unable to return to the games of recreation, linked to a productive cycle where he or she is the product and the consumable that will feed the jaws of civilization. A consumable good for the good of the nation. Or perhaps nobody could really define this as a “good” if it is properly analyzed, and it is an unconscious automation — a vacuum suction that nobody warned us about, nor did we expect, and slowly turns us into fitting boxes stripped away from our human essence and dignity in order to serve no one but an illusion: the colossal “society”.
Life and work in contemporary western culture
In my research and interviews with volunteers, it became clear to me that one of the main difficulties of playing, connecting with the game and going further is a very simple one: there is no time, there is no energy.
The current productive structure uses the human being as machine and battery; the form of our society and its economy demands that the human being must be used as labor force, faithful horse of technology and civilization, and reshape our sphere of interests in order to fit the need for sustain and productivity. Is this fair? Is this correct? It demands another analysis. What is clear is that it can be seen as coercion until it is accepted voluntarily, that is, we are forced to work and dedicate our lives to something that we do not necessarily like, enjoy, or allow ourselves to express ourselves as humans. Emotions, ideas, inspirations and creativity.
When we leave work we are tired. We have the time between the office and the house, the trip on public transport or the car, dead time anyway, to prepare dinner and go to bed to start again the next day. In this scheme without energy and without time, who can find the motivation for an activity that has no productive “profit”? Even if it could, chances are the mind and spirit are too worn out to connect with the reciprocal activity of playing a video game that surpasses the aesthetic complexity of a Match-3. Thus, the only games that really have an appeal are those classified as submission, time-killers, where we can empty our minds full of the problems of the day… And those of the night that still await.
The solution to this problem is complex. It is not the subject of this article, but it is a problem that we must solve ourselves as a society. We must engage the objective of redefining the production cycle to create a lifestyle that is more suited for the human of the 21st century.
Biological automation
Finally, we come to the problem of automation.
Our mind is in charge of cataloging, accommodating, defining and saving. We want to optimize the processes we carry out so that they cost less energy. That is, it automates. This is not a mystery; just look at breathing, blood circulation, and many other processes. Do you get up in the morning and decide on your own what to do? Do you consciously go through each act of your daily routine, or is it rather transferred like a dream from station to station, from the bathroom to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the dressing room and
from the dressing room to work or university? This is a great faculty. It is very practical. It really helps us integrate techniques, learn easily, and avoid wasting energy on a lot of activities and processes that don’t need it. However, when we live on autopilot, we are not there. Probably we will entertain ourselves with some mental problem or idea that we did not raise, but “only emerged”, while our brain is in charge of doing this and that. And if we allow this to go on too long, we will soon discover that we live an unconscious life, that we decide little or never for ourselves, not really, and that we hardly have control over what we do. We may even discover that we don’t know what we want, and we only respond to stimuli. A painful existence, if we should ever be conscious enough to perceive it. And the brain is always automating. It wants to be in control. Learning to dominate our mind, as we discussed earlier, can be especially difficult if we identify with it, with our conscious ego, and believe that it is all that we are.
Life is not something that should be optimized to the maximum; that is a need only for trivial, small, repetitive tasks. For the rest, life is to be lived. To love, to discover, to redefine and recreate. When we automate we lose ourselves, when we live on autopilot we are not really there and if we are not present in the now, if we do not live the moment with all our concentration, there is no mimesis. Because mimesis needs a present human. Here and now. The risk of automation involves optimizing life to the point that we are not living it — we just watch time go by.
Conclusion
Is it really worth depriving ourselves of that transcendental experience, which may well give us a new dimension for living and fill it with meaning, sensation, emotion and novelty?
At the end of the day, the real point of the problem, why we adults are finding it harder and harder to get into mimesis, is the one that rests on the following question:
If I recognize these problems, if I read these questions and detect sense in them, and in that sense I see a correlation with my own reality, if I am victim or perpetrator of these actions and these separations — why not embrace change? Or perhaps now I am inspired by this clarity, I propose to live my life more, and then the phone rings and I forget it… All again.
Thank you for reading.
