Transcript for:
Exploring Identity in Gaming and Society

When we think about identity, we need to think about identity in a far more flexible, multiple and also changeable way. Gaming and other activities are very often situated in a world for which people use the label virtual. Virtual meaning not real. So you have virtual world and the real world. There's nothing virtual about a 16 year old who spends three and a half hours a day gaming.

And of course gaming again very often involves an entirely different identity, the use of a highly specific form of language, where you need to know all these words. phrases and expressions that make you a member of that community. And it is usually also a thing you do alone, at least physically alone.

You sit in your room in front of your computer, but you might be connected with your... Now if you would say to people who are gamers you're not allowed to game for a week it's a very very big punishment because it's an identity thing. I am a gamer and being a gamer means being involved in this with a certain regularity so it's a really important element of your social life as important as having food or having sleep right and if you withdraw it even if you say well it's just a game or it's just for fun or just a hobby or you know it's nonsense like you know dad would say you should be doing your homework it's experienced as an attack on your identity because you are being denied what you really are or at least you are being denied a very important dimension of who you believe that you are those are new identities they did not exist before and we need to start addressing them as real, not just real, but also important. So the old idea is like an onion.

So you have the essential me inside, deep inside, then there are layers of roles that we have to play. The role at work, the role when I go out, the role when I go shopping, so that's not really me. And so the real self then, incidentally, is the self that you only define.

develop at very specific moments in your life. For instance during the weekend, me time or we time. Holidays are branded, marketed as about this is the moment where you will be able to be yourself, the real self.

Now how often and how frequently and how freely can we be our real self? I find that idea highly problematic. The reality is that we are f***ing uniquely ourselves, but in a variety of ways.

And we have to be. We have to be uniquely ourselves. An example that I very often give, or at least a question that I ask my students is, imagine that you want to date somebody.

Alright? you fancy some individual and you try to date him or her. And it works, you have your date and he or she during that first date gives you his or her CV. The CV.

And it says It's all in there. Everything you need to know about me is in there. Would you accept it?

Would you go on dating that person? Usually students say, no of course not. A CV is not made for that.

And then the question is, are you unreal in your CV? Are you lying in your CV? Is that not you? Is that not your real you? And that's usually when we begin to understand that we have to be somebody different when we write a CV than when we go dating.

or that when we become a member of a hobby club for instance, for instance that you start playing, I don't know what, badminton, right? And you're really not good at it. So you begin like a novice, like an apprentice, you first have to learn the most basic things and little by little you become more senior and so on and so on. All of this is being ourselves, and really ourselves, uniquely yourself, but in a variety of different ways.

Whenever we enter a new social sphere like the badminton club or imagine that at a given moment you become very ill like you you have diabetes and that's a new stage of life in the sense that you begin to see new people you have to learn a new Rhetoric about you have to learn new words, new practices, new forms of knowledge, new relationships like with not just medics but also with the supermarket in the sense that you are not alone. able to buy the stuff that you used to buy. So you need to redevelop everything. Of course you do that through a learning process. And what do you learn?

You learn norms. What is it to be normal as an individual? who has diabetes.

And you did not have the resources for that. You had to start from scratch. Usually when you get a diagnostic, you were not prepared for that.

There was nothing in life that ever prepared you. You may have a vague idea, but that's about it. This is one of the reasons why I also attach very, very great importance to learning in this new world, in this online, offline world. Because with the multiplicity of norms and identities of people, course we begin to see that there is an escalation of the modes of learning.

Most of the learning we do is informal learning online, which we do on the basis of YouTube clips or on the basis of being a member of a Facebook group or of you know any other highly resourced network online. One of the things that I discovered when I was working on the Durkheim and Lien. Internet project was how in a lot of what we do even now we implicitly assume the world, the social world as it was imagined by him.

So his world or at least the way in which he thought that society ought to be imagined is in very many respects you know still the way in which we imagine our own social world. Why is he important? He is important in the sense that whenever you try to reflect on this new world in which we live, you know, these big changes in society that are the effect of the online-offline nexus, we obviously have to start somewhere. And I chose Durkheim not necessarily exclusively, but it's just a gesture as well that enabled me to go back to the classical theory of society, A, but and B also examine the implicit ways in which we still adopt it and use it. The world or society as he imagined it was a moral world.

So in other words when we think about social groups and social relationships and social structure in general we need to think about norms. So sort of rules that we know are there but also rules that we very often internalize and also impose upon our own behavior. behavior in order to be seen as normal, a normal member of not just society but specific groups within society. He was the one who basically developed that idea. Second idea is a, or a very big idea, is the organization of labor.

So the fact that modern society is no longer organized on the basis of villages and regions, you know, and religion and so on and so on. At least he believed it wasn't. But that the dominant organizing driver in any society now is the organization of work. In the sense that there will be people who do specific things and others who do entirely different things that also socially that leads to trajectories. So for instance learning trajectories, we want to become, I don't know what, a doctor or a lawyer, so we need to do all sorts of normative things in order to get there.

there. And these two ideas of course are still useful in the sense that when we look at this new world in which we now live, it's a world in which you see escalations of norms, so an enormous mushrooming of normativities in almost every domain of life. And of course the Internet is a huge driver for that, a huge engine for the production of these norms. What is it to be normal as a human being?

I don't know what, a fitness practitioner for instance, or a vegan, or a barbecuer. Well, on YouTube you find hundreds of instructive materials, you know, that are very explicitly aimed at giving you these norms. So you see the relevance. Second thing is of course increasing, how should we call it, specialization.

So all of us, when we construct ourselves as human beings. get the Increasingly specialized. It's no longer just enough to be an automobile driver.

You need to be knowledgeable in almost every aspect of the market of automobiles. For instance, if you drive a BMW that's not a neutral thing. thing. You need to specialize that. You need to be able to say something about not just the BMW, why it is better than other cars and so on, why you prefer the blue over the black version or why you chose this particular engine.

engine type and so on and so on. So you have to be able to speak about the car, but also about yourself. I'm a BMW guy.

We no longer just buy commodities, we buy the narratives that surround these commodities. And it's these narratives that are worth a lot of money. It's the narrative, so in other words, the way in which a particular commodity enables you to speak about yourself as a particular... human being.

The reason why I went in the direction of Durkheim was that at one point you know I really began to understand the enormous influence he has had and it's not that he's mentioned very early because he's not an easy author. He's frankly boring okay and I should not say that but he's arrogant there's enormous arrogance that speaks from that work. He was also not known to be socially relatively conservative, normative as well in the sense of he was a moralizer. Like he wrote a beautiful book on education which is called Moral Education. So education in his view was not just the way in which you know children ought to be trained in knowledge, they had to be trained in the norms of society.

Okay, these days you know we would be very hesitant in making making these claims. he was absolutely open about it. So he's not somebody who would be overtly and explicitly referenced, for instance, or cited, but whose basic ideas have been the stuff of so many other works and have become recycled and recycled all the way into social linguistics. And so what I did was in a way working my way from social linguistics back to the social theories that we usually adopt and apply and it brought me to Durkheim.

There are very important things that we can now see clearly as being a massive contribution but evidently I mean he lived long before you know long before mass media were the things we now have let alone social media the internet was not imaginable for somebody like him and so we also need to update his work and add all sorts of new things say, onto it because we are witnessing really fundamental changes in society, changes that of course could not be anticipated by him. So the interesting thing, but not just about Durkheim, but about almost every first generation sociologist, was an acute sense of change and in that sense, and I sometimes invite my students to read stuff from the early 20th century by Simon for instance, and I ask them to replace the word society. by the word internet.

Okay? And very often you have a sense that you're reading something that was written a few weeks ago. In the beginning of the 20th century, that first generation of sociologists had an acute sense of the world falling apart.

The old order was no longer there, and the new order was not yet ready. So they had a feeling that, you know, the old system of society, which was largely... rural, religious, based on non-industrial labor, agriculture, and so on, with traditional male-female relationships, the relationships of authority and inequality in society with a very clear aristocracy, for instance. That old order was on its way out, and the new order wasn't yet completely ready. And so all of them had a sense that they were in a vacuum, and that society was losing, in a way, its direction.

And for all of them, a lot of their efforts was what we would now call ortho-sociology, like orthopedagogy. It was an attempt to restore or reconstruct or rebuild, in a way, a society that wasn't yet there. So that acute sense of social change that we now have, which is an effect of the presence of the internet, social media, insecurities of our society, about all sorts of things, like social media, who knows what we're doing?

We now have the Facebook scandal and so on. So we begin to realize that our world is really complex and really chaotic. Well, interestingly, these old people in the early 20th century had exactly the same feeling.