Go Nation was a fairly enlightening, but, like with many things China, really depressing to read about. Perhaps the most striking thing to me about weigi‘s use in China was its integral place within the idea of masculinity. In that, weiqi, which reflected certain ideals of culture, was also a major cultural product of China, making it a major point of nationalism. This in turn pushed weiqi in to the arena of China’s image of nationalist masculinity. Though I think we’ve discussed many games that are viewed as cultural/national products, there don’t seem to be as many examples that come to mind as being inexorably bound to any given population’s sense of identity like weiqi is. The only immediate other would be Soccer, and even then Soccer, while clearly overwhelmingly significant in places like Brazil, isn’t nearly as specific in its cultural location or function as weiqi. China has a propensity for just turning seemingly nice things into horrible devices of the state, I guess.

China is really scary and depressing to think about, so we’ll talk about the only slightly less scary thing to talk about, Gaming’s role in identity development. I don’t think its a far reaching claim to make that games play a often huge role in the formation of identities, especially after coming from Go Nation. The fact that we, in America, can clearly associate traits with a label as seemingly innocuous as ‘football player’ or ‘MMO player’ supports that, in my mind. Beyond that, simply being a ‘gamer’, which is even more vague, also has loads of intellectual baggage that go along with that. While this is definitely skipping over a ton of important psychology, we can pretty easily extrapolate that people’s definitions of any given label, in this scenario what type of game someone plays and identifies with, has huge a effect on how they shape themselves.

We can take this a bit further and actually look at how people pull meaning from what they do inside the games they play. I the most basic instance, there is a huge difference between those who play games casually versus seriously, ignoring the artificial stigma many ‘gamers’ have against casuals. Someone who plays World of Warcraft once a week with real life friends is getting a fundamentally different experience than someone who raids or does player versus player competitively, and will form different aspects of their identity that deal with WoW based on their playstyle. This also gets back into last week’s discussion of expression in games, and serves as a perfect compliment in terms of dealing with ways in which games interact with the self.