[advanced media aesthetics] Toward a Cultural Theory of Gaming: Digital Games and the Co-Evolution of Media, Mind, and Culture

Summary

According to the notion of Tomasello, human species has own distinction with the primates. It’s the joint attentional scenes. Through the joint attentional scenes, human kind accomplished the ability to understand one another as an intentional agents and the object of communication. During this process, joint attentional scene diversed into two different types. One is the mimetic games and the other is the narrative thinking. And also the games work as the cultural ratchets throughout the human history. In this way games, narrative and media coevolved.
As a second condition for her argument, Murray borrows Donald’s concept of the coevolution of cognition and culture. According to Donald, the process of cultural development can be categorized into four different steps.

Episodic culture; discrete episodic structure and recall
Mimetic culture; the understanding of one another as intentional, conscious agents & symbolical communication
Mythic culture; communicate through symbolic forms of representation & understanding the world in narrative form.
Theoretical culture; abstract formalism and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as print and computers.

In Murray’s view, we are in theoretical culture. As a result of this coevolution, “we can think about the history cognition as based on a succession of symbolic media patterns.” And “we can think of the superset of all media as a single language, a paradigm of symbolic communication, and a union catalog of expressive symbols of every kind.” Through this we can handle the computation-based media as expressive symbols.

In this article, the origin of games can be dated back when human nature accomplishs her own prominence. If this is true, we can imagine games not the isolated medium but the multi-layered multiplicity which combines manifold medium in itself.

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Toward a Cultural Theory of Gaming: Digital Games and the Co-Evolution of Media, Mind, and Culture

Janet H. Murray
Georgia Institute of Technology

POPULAR COMMUNICATION, 4(3), 185–202
Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Abstract
Digital games are an expanding popular cultural form and the focus of a new field of scholarship that has been concerned with defining games and establishing boundaries between games and other phenomena. Studies of the coevolution of human cognition and culture can throw light on this discussion by putting gaming into a longer human perspective. Although 2 chief theorists of this field, Michael Tomasello and Merlin Donald, have not explicitly focused on games, their work has suggested that games could have played an important role in shaping the human mind and human culture, by expanding and preserving adaptive cultural patterns, furthering symbolic thinking, and expanding and preserving the expressiveness of symbolic media. Digital games can be understood as carrying on the same functions, using the new affordances of the computer.

Quotation

p.185
… “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.”

p.186
The shape of videogames is, therefore, tied to older cultural forms and the pleasures of videogames seem to be rooted in our age-old attraction to games in general.

p.187.
Games have not been treated as an expressive genre, such as theater, poetry, or folk songs.

Recent attempts to provide a definition of games as the basis for serious study of digital games have produced struggles with a few key outlier cases that make it difficult to see the boundaries between games and non-games.

However, such a solution runs into the even more contested category of play (Sutton-Smith, 1997).

The boundary between videogames and other forms of digital media is also becoming confusing.

p. 188
Michael Tomasello (2000) explained this compressed time scheme as the result of a single change in human cognition: the ability to understand cospecifics (other members of our species) as intentional agents like oneself. This foundational change underpins symbolic communication and allows us to engage in cultural learning. Culture is the key element here, because the human advantage over other species lies in our ability to share and transmit knowledge and patterns of behavior across historical time and in the raising of children.

[directiveness; not only in a current time-space but also in other time-space, indexical.]

• Point or gesture to outside objects for others.
• Hold objects up to show them to others.
• Bring others to locations so they can observe things there.
• Actively offer objects to other individuals by holding them out.
• Intentionally teach other individuals new behaviors.

p.189
Tomasello further believes that the ability to follow on the attention of the adult leads to the child recognizing when he or she is his- or herself the focus of the adult’s attention and
gaze, and this begins to lay the framework for an understanding of the self as an actor in the social world. This cognitive leap, which happened for the species in relatively recent evolutionary time (the last 250,000 years or so) and for the individual at 9 to 15 months old, forms the basis for the communicative cultural tasks that make up the bulk of human achievement. It is the basis of sharing, negotiating, learning, and symbolic communication.
The framework in which the cognitive achievement of understanding intentionality leads to the acquisition of culturally transmitted knowledge is called a joint attentional scene.

What are they fun? What is the primary motivation to engage in them?

What is it about a game activity that is intrinsically enjoyable to those who choose to engage in it? What do games offer in return for limiting the exploratory delights of play?

p.190
Indeed, the three defining characteristics of a joint attentional scene are similar to the social situation necessary for gaming:

• Shared limited focus on external objects or behaviors (or both)
• Mutually witnessed intentionality among participants within the shared
context
• Symbolic communication between participants
[object, share, communication]

The ability to form this joint attentional scene makes it possible to engage in the activities characteristic of games: to treat abstract representations consistently, behave according to negotiated rules, and limit one’s actions and attention to the game pieces and game actions to what “counts” in the game by screening out other stimuli and actions.

Joint attention organizes two fo the core activities of games: turn taking and synchronizing behaviors.

• An understanding of the self both as an agent and an object within a community of other intentional agent–objects
• The ability to shift perspective from one’s own point of view to the point of view of others, to imagine what someone else is thinking, and to see oneself from the point of view of the other
• The ability to intentionally teach and learn, which is the foundation of all human cultural development

p. 191
She interpreted their mirroring interaction as a kind of dialog without language.

It says no by saying yes.

Finally they describe their actions as they do them: “I jump” or “big jump!” while jumping off the box.

The pleasure of the game lies as much in the communication as in the actions, and it lies particularly in the matching of language to action, and in the choreographing of both into a patterned social interaction. The pleasure of games reinforces the adaptive behavior of symbolic communication around patterned social behaviors.

p.192
Perhaps in these imitative interactions they are experiencing both their similarity to others and their separateness. Perhaps they are learning that we each are intentional agents of action and that playing together is a very pleasant thing (Malcom, 2000).

These early games are based on mutually elaborated patterns that serve the same purpose as written rules. They are intrinsically social and can, in fact, be understood as a celebration of the social—of the very presence of other intentional beings. The pleasure derived from sharing attention and witnessing and enacting intentional acts forms the framework for mastering complex physical and social skills. Spectatorship is as much a part of the experience as active performance, and in early games it is an alternating spectatorship: You do, I do; you do, I do. The elaboration of joint attentional scenes into ever more elaborate games sets up opportunities for performance, for presenting the self as a performer in a socially constructed arena, and for incorporating multiple individuals into flexible but predictable group structures.

… we can think of Ring Round Rosy as the paradigmatic game.

It synchronizes the behavior of the group, which is one of the key requirements for survival in a culture of hunting.

p.193 THE COEVOLUTION OF GAMES, NARRATIVE, AND MEDIA

If we accept these theories of early cognition then we can think of games and stories as driving and coevolving with the development of language, leading to the development of more complex social patterns, more complex causal thinking, and more elaborate symbolic culture.

• The understanding of one’s fellow creatures as intentional beings, leading to the exploration of joint attention, which can be understood as the birth of mimetic games
[intentional beings]
• The understanding of overt events as the result of invisible causes, which leads to abstract thinking about causal patterns, which can be understood as the birth of narrative thinking
[mimetic games]

p.194
… the elaboration of symbolic communication, starting with gesture and vocalization and developing into spoken language, which can be understood as the birth of media.

[
episodic culture; discrete episodic structure and recall
mimetic culture; the understanding of one another as intentional, conscious agents & symbolical communication.
mythic culture; communicate through symbolic forms of representation & understanding the world in narrative form.
theoretical culture; abstract formalism and is based on massive externally stored memory systems such as print and computers.
]

p.196
Human children play rule-governed games by imitation, often without any formalized instruction.

Yet the more on thinks about the elements of cultural cognition the more game-like they seem.

The process of cumulative cultural evolution requires not only creative inbention byt also, and just as importantly, faithful social transmission that can work as a ratchet to prevent slippage backward.

Games seem to be well-suited to role of cultural ratchet, preserving patterns of behavior from one generation to the next through the intrinsic pleasure of shared attention and imitation.

Many patterns that are rigidly enforced in games are also the basis of general social organization, such as turn taking, following the leader, exchanging property, team formation, conflict containment, and collective focusing on common goals. The win-lose pattern of games seems also to be adaptive in motivating repeated practice and competitive effort.

p. 197
As Donald (1991) pointed out, human cognitive advancement is closely linked to the development of media of communication.

Games have been, and continue to be, useful in directing our attention to all of these media, allowing for exploration of new means of expression and preserving outdated media forms for later reuse. Games can be seen as a means of coevolving our minds and our media, of assimilating new technologies of inscription through exploration of their capacity for symbolic representation, and of preserving and expanding symbolic expression by making symbolic systems the explicit focus of activity.

p.200
… the history of human cognition as based on a succession of symbolic media patterns:…

… we can think of the superset of all media as a single language, …

The computer is the most capacious pattern-making medium we have ever had.