Yesterday the New York Philharmonic played in North Korea . This is monumental because this is the first cultural exchange in years between the two companies that didn’t involve the words “nuclear” or “failed”.
It’s being touted as an act of normalization of relations between the two countries, and I don’t doubt this. It was a very good thing. The United States uses military games as a way to simulate combat, and also as recruiting tools. There is no doubt, and no question, that video games involve egregious conflict. In countries where the world plays a game, we remain competitive. But they also provide some potential for normalizing relations far beyond the norm.
Anyone who says the culture of Japanese video games and cultures doesn’t pervade beyond a convention of teenagers hasn’t understood how swiftly and soundly our animation studios have been won over, how commanding the Japanese car brands have been, how well Sony is marketed. We couldn’t dream of hostile relations with Japan , and it was done over commerce and art. More than just a fad, this endurance shows a real, globalized and mutual cultural exchange. It didn’t change the game, it made the game bigger. Both countries are still competitive, many of our companies lost. That doesn’t mean Japan won, necessarily, as their recession last decade was violent, and the loss of the last great war reminds them.
It’s a lot harder to kill someone who played music for you. It’s a lot harder to beat up somebody you play Halo with. There’s a humanizing factor when you interact with someone. It goes beyond gaming, which can be competitive, but as Europe has shown… countries that fiercely play soccer with each other have a much harder time killing each other. When a country’s soccer team stops playing, you know what’s going to happen next. But the fact of the matter is, for those that care about soccer, you know where Manchester United are from. You know where the stadium is from Belgium . The world fills in slightly based on YOUR interests, not in spite of them. Largely, maps lack the entertainment value of Tetris or a physical sport. This is telling. In a gaming world, people of different nations and beliefs will be united under the belief that teenage boys on Halo are the greatest evil on the earth.
This is not a solution for world peace, but it is a blueprint for how our generation could be more competitive and more peaceful than the ones before. The protest folk singer/songwriter Pete Seeger said recently that unlike Vonnegut and other thinkers of the last age, he is very optimistic because the free flow of information has a truly revolutionary potential. This is not an opinion to take lightly.
And I agree. World of Warcraft is a great many things, but if you know you play with a fellow from New Zealand , you are more inclined to know the spot on the map. Know the spot, know the person, and your brain kicks slightly, you may look at the map. Knowing the various capitols of the world is important. Learning that you got a thumbs up from a fellow 7 year old for your fire lizard-possum creature from a small city outside of Moscow ? You’ve learned 4 things with the latter: Where Moscow is, where the ping came from, where you are in relation, and that a human noticed you. No classroom can teach that last part, the part that personalizes the memory, makes it more permanent. But games? They’re doing it right now.
It should come as no surprise that Americans lag with geography. And we can’t teach geography in the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego method. But with information and the internet (which my sister has navigated, if memory fails, since the womb) we have the potential for her to see where her friends are. You can’t make it about pen pals, because those are lame and would never work. You can’t make it into a map-based video game. You can make it about friends, and points, and colorful cartoon characters, and teach geography as some random accident. That’s the goal, in my opinion, the random accident of learning where your friend is, and having that spot in your mind. It is more effective and permanent memory encoding than a training program, and it doesn’t have that explicit warning sign kids see that learning is happening.. It doesn’t destroy a competitive nature, in fact games encourage it. When I look at sites like Neopets, you see the potential, the pervasive nature of the internet, and learn that we have the potential for a cultural exchange that wouldn’t make things like the New York Philharmonic any less important. It would make them a lot more expected
And that, my friends, may be quite impressive.
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