British jihadists join a real life shoot'em up.
There was an
interesting article in the August edition of “Premier Christianity” magazine by Martin Saunders about computer
gaming entitled “The Gospel According to
Minecraft”. I was particularly struck by the following comments by Saunders
in connection with video gaming pundit Jane McGonigal (My highlights):
McGonigal argues [that] gamers are just people who’ve
discovered a more compelling lifestyle in the online world. As video game
avatars, they can be faster and stronger. Yet the ability to perform superhuman
feats isn’t what hooks them in; it’s the sense that the game offers them purpose.
MocGonigal writes ‘Gamers want to know where, in the
real world, is that sense of being fully
alive, focused and engaged in
every moment? Where is the gamer feeling of power, heroic purpose and community? Where is the heart-expanding thrill of success and team victory? While gamers may experience these pleasures
occasionally in their real lives, they experience them almost constantly when
they’re playing their favourite games’.
Increasing numbers of people are finding the antidote
to the frustration and emptiness of their real-world lives in video games,
rejecting an authentic but disappointing world for one that has been engineered
to make them happy. Digital culture expert Josh Jost also believes that gamers
are searching for qualities that they lack in real life. He identifies these
are ‘significance’ and ‘the belief that life matters’
What interests
me here has less to do with video gaming per se than the human social motivational
complex revealed, a complex especially apparent in the connotational content
of the words I have emboldened. We see in these words why video games, by
connecting with overriding human emotions, are so popular. But coming back to
the real world from the video game the average person may suffer an overwhelming
sense of anticlimax: The words that express the real world experience may be more
like this:
Purposelessness, aimlessness, emptiness, boredom,
humdrum, routine, listlessness, insignificance, social anonymity, social fragmentation, no sense of belonging, alienation, estrangement, thwarted ambition and aspiration, trivialization, unimportance, inconsequential, irrelevance, marginalisation, ineffectual, powerlessness, disengaged,
hopelessness, demystification, profanity, failure…..
Western societies
are good at keeping people relatively safe, comfortable and prosperous, but with
it often rather bored and unfulfilled in the deepest sense of the word; especially those of a restless seeking spirit. An unsatiated
human motivational complex seeks fulfillment in finding purposes that matter. Religion has the potential to satisfy this
complex, but it also has a well-known downside: Sects and cults exploit this complex
and use it in perverse ways. Many migrants at the French port of Calais are endangering
their lives in hazardous attempts to cross the channel to Britain illegally. And
yet in the light of the above quote it is no surprise that many British
Jihadists have left their safe, comfortable and prosperous country to fight in
a war they have little chance of winning. It is ironic, but really no surprise when you think about it, that Britain, the pluralist sardine tin country that so many are trying squeeze into, should become an exporter of terrorists!
Relevant links:
Relevant links:
