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Online gaming as an healing ritual - Maurice van den Dool

Meditating / first brainstorm

Botanical Garden Leiden

Temperature of the room

Artpiece related to article

Exploring the garden

This was the introduction of the theme of the cultural diversity course. Many people don't have the same chances as others, but how is that in the class? I was actually expecting some differences, but some subjects I did not realize that there is such a difference within a group of people. For instance "rasism at job-applications". I never felt higher then anybody else. Especially not because of skincolour, race or background. I was surprised how big this issue still is.

We also did some close reading. Space place gender, by Massey Dorreen. What really caught my attention, was the fact that the modern technology brings new ways of living with them. For instance mail. People were used to send letters, but since the introduction of the internet, people can just send letters by e-mail. That way we can even communicate with someone on the other side of the globe within seconds. That technology driven rituals, I would like to dive more in to.

After the close reading, we grabbed one statement of the statementcollection. It was about evolving technology. So we made a collage about that people know where they are travelling, and think to know the country after one visit. We envisioned that by writing prejudices about traveling to a country. For instance; "hold the tower of Pisa. Otherwise it will collapse". Unfortunately no photo. Whoops.

I started this session with 15 minutes of meditation. I never meditated before, so I watched a beginners video, and just went with it. It was a really weird experience. I felt relaxed afterwards, but while I was meditating, I felt like I wasn't doing anything usefull. Maybe that is because it was my first time. I felt relaxed afterwards, and more open for new input.

I started thinking about what I wanted to research. I was thinking about something with interaction, something with technology. This is the word-web:

Entertainment industy

A ball-throw-game to get to know all the names of the classmates. Very fun, but also very difficult.
And a little meditation time, to open up out minds. It helped to open up.

The sensory tour was really "eye-opening". Ironicly. Humans are so used to use vision, that other sences are less dominant. While walking the sensory tour, I felt weird, seeing nothing. I heared all kind of leave-noices, sometimes people walking by, and my own footsteps. I became more aware of what I hear. Also I focussed more on touch. Touching leaves/plants, and sometimes even guess the right one, because of my pre-knowledge of my sight. What I really noticed, is that you are more aware of what is in your close surroundings. Even the texture/feeling of the gravel pathway to the pavement pathway. All that kind of differences become more dominant without sight. On the other hand, you have no idea where you are in the context of the space. I have no idea what route we walked, and also no idea about the whole context outside the close surroundings. That is where we "miss" sight.
Since I am a spatial designer, I would really like to implement this into an installation project. That is a really interesting subject to work on.

I am a gamer for practically my whole life. So you could say I am very interested in playing games. I read an article of Vice, and saw this video of Fox news, which both state that gaming is bad for people. Is that really all that negative? There are also a lot of positive effects of gaming. That is what I want to show. Just as a reaction against the negative attention of gaming in different news media.

What I want to try, is make a ritual of my game-time, and use it in new games. I chose Minecraft, so I can build together with one of my gaming-friends. We are going to build everyday, 6 hours a day, to create something spectecular within Minecraft. This to research the outcome of making gaming a ritual.

We have all seen a newsitem about online gaming. About how bad gaming is for our society. About how violent the content is, and how young people would copy these violent behaviour in real life. But is online gaming really that negative? Isn’t that just one side of the story?

So what is suggested is that gaming can cause violent behaviour. Well, wether that’s true or not, there is positive influence too. For instance behaviour such as social interaction is actually stimulated by online gaming. Think about the many people that you can meet throughout a game of League of legends. Or though matches in Rocket league? You allready have one interest in common; playing games.

Sometimes in-game interactions can even lead you to a new friendship. You get to know the people who you are playing with regularly. They become a part of your daily relaxation time. Time that you could spend on any mentally healing activities, like watching tv, netflix, or reading a book. But you prefer to spend it with your gaming-buddies.

Since we are not lonely gamers anymore, we also get to know all kinds of people around the world. To give an example: This is Jaidy. In game known as Jai_Jai. He is one of the first people I met online. We know eachother for about 4 years now, and we still don’t know what the other person looks like.

Anyway, he is from Canada, 18 years old. I met him though Rocket League. Rocket league is a game, where a team of 3 people are playing soccer with cars against an opponing team. How better you get at controling your car, your positioning, your passes, vice versa, your rank goes up. Untill you reach Grand Champion. That is the highest possible rank in the game. We were playing a Gold-match at that time, and we were working together very well. We added eachother on steam (gameprovider) and discord (gamers version of skype).

We started voice chatting to get better at Rocket League, and became a permanent team. Through the process of playing the game, we also became friends. Since then, we call eachother almost every day. Just to have some chill gaming-time.

Last 4 weeks I tried something new. Jaidy was playing the game Minecraft. A game where you can arrange blocks in a certain way, that it becomes an environment. Jaidy even calls it: making art with digital legos. He is in a professional build team, which provides environments for the Minecraft Marketplace. A minecraft map-store of microsoft. I joined his build-team for 4 weeks, to create a daily build session ritual. We were working on one project every day for 6 hours, and this is the result:

It is a futuristic energy drink industry site. On the southside is a workers-home area. On the west and eastside is the transport area. On the center-side is the industry site, and on the north-side is the harvest-area. Although the project is not finished yet, it was really fun to work on it. By making this game-time a ritual, I was very relaxed throughout the whole day. The process itself was really fun, because we were actually creating something nice within a game. Also the precision of choosing the right blocks, the brainstormsessions about where we should build the certain area’s, and the teaching-moments of Jaidy, when I was doing something wrong. It was all really enjoyable and relaxing. And after all: mostly positive influences.

This essay is mainly about the connection between “A Global Sense of Place.” Space, Place, and Gender, by Doreen B. Massey
and my practice.

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