Paul Ramirez

A few years back, David Foster Wallace wrote a brilliant article in the New York Times arguing that watching Roger Federer play tennis could in certain moments amount to a kind of transcendent experience:

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K. The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do.

But I don’t want to talk about Roger Federer. At the risk of forsaking any claims to not being a complete dork, I have a confession: I’m hopelessly addicted to watching replays of people playing video games on youtube. And it gets worse: I’ve never even played these games, haven’t seriously played any video games in a number of years in fact. But damnit, sometimes it feels good to come home from a long day at work and just put on some Starcraft 2 replays.

For those readers still with me after that embarrassing disclosure, I want to try to explore this idea that video games can be a viable spectator sport, perhaps even a better spectator sport than sports themselves.

Let me illustrate with an example.

The clip above is one of the first examples that comes to mind when I think of what DFW calls “Federer Moments” — moments in sports when he says “the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.” Around the same time that DFW was writing this article, the Korean Starcraft pro BoxeR–arguably one of the first publicly known pro-gamers, with annual earnings of about $400,000 a year–was in the finals of a tournament playing against [NC]Yellow. Without going into too much detail, the clip above has passed into gaming mythology as one of the most daring, innovative, and creative plays in Starcraft history, with Boxer going all-in in the early game, utilizing mostly non-combat units to secure a four-minute win in a highly-competitive tournament. It is a BoxeR moment. It is an act which, properly conceived and understood, is impossible.

So competitive video games, too, have these kind of transcendant moments which seem to bend the rules of logic (and not just because aliens are shooting lasers at each other).

But I think there are other reasons that video games have a unique power not just as a sport with these moments, but as a spectator sport. The video-game replay has risen in the last couple years as a true force on the internet. Indeed, cursory glances on Youtube’s most viewed pages show that Gaming category on Youtube gets far more hits than the Sports category. Some channels, like HuskyStarcraft’s, will routinely get 60,000 – 70,000 views for every full replay that they post.Why might this be so?

There are a number of reasons for the increased views on these videos that many other commentators have pointed at–that gaming is becoming more mainstream, for example. But I think there’s one central reason why gaming replays are so uniquely powerful as a spectator sport: Video game replays are unmediated, putting the viewer directly into the eyes of the players. 

One of David Foster Wallace’s primary complaints about watching Federer play on television is that you lose part of the aesthetic that might be felt when watching him play live:

TV tennis has its advantages, but these advantages have disadvantages, and chief among them is a certain illusion of intimacy. Television’s slow-mo replays, its close-ups and graphics, all so privilege viewers that we’re not even aware of how much is lost in broadcast. And a large part of what’s lost is the sheer physicality of top tennis, a sense of the speeds at which the ball is moving and the players are reacting. This loss is simple to explain. TV’s priority, during a point, is coverage of the whole court, a comprehensive view, so that viewers can see both players and the overall geometry of the exchange. Television therefore chooses a specular vantage that is overhead and behind one baseline. You, the viewer, are above and looking down from behind the court. This perspective, as any art student will tell you, “foreshortens” the court. Real tennis, after all, is three-dimensional, but a TV screen’s image is only 2-D. The dimension that’s lost (or rather distorted) on the screen is the real court’s length, the 78 feet between baselines; and the speed with which the ball traverses this length is a shot’s pace, which on TV is obscured, and in person is fearsome to behold.

Video game replays, however, don’t have this problem. The overhead vantage in a replay of a videogame like Starcraft is the only vantage, the same vantage that the players themselves see. Thus there is no foreshortening here–the intimacy of the video is a real intimacy, not an illusion.

And in some kinds of video game replays, this intimacy goes even deeper. My favorite type of video game replay is the live first-person commentary–a video that features the player’s thoughts recorded in real-time as he or she is playing the game.

The video above is not really a famous moment in gaming history. It’s just a guy posting a game of DOTA 2 he recorded live, and it only has about about 746 views. And yet, from about 33:00 – 34:00, he experiences the beginning of a kind of Federer Moment. He’s about to score a Rampage, a rare feat where a player kills five enemies in a row. And, in the middle of all of this, he giddily begins to laugh in excitement. I think the spontaneous laughter here from the player himself embodies all of the power and charm of the videogame replay. Imagine, for example, what it would be like to hear LeBron’s thoughts in realtime as he goes for the dunk or Tebow as he’s throwing a touchdown. The video above, sure it’s mundane–he’s no Korean superstar for a tournament, just a guy playing games–but being mundane makes it somehow more real. By the end of the game, we see that he’s had 28 kills and a single death–an act which, in this world, should be impossible. But through the intimacy of the video game replay, it’s an impossible that we get to share.

The NYT recently ran another iteration of the always crowd-pleasing lament about the lack of quiet in the digital age:

 In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Now he raises important points, but the whole article is written from this outsider, kids-these-days perspective. And in my eyes, all credibility is pretty much lost when he says, “I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook.” Can you really diagnose and prescribe cures for the internet age when you have yet to step foot in it?

A more credible and thoughtful consideration of solitude can be found in Deresiewicz’s older article “The End of Solitude” (and no, I won’t cite him in every post on this blog):

I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she’ll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?

….

Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself.

Deresiewicz’s point here is powerful. That sense of estrangement, even terror when alone sometimes feels very real. However, his solution is unsatisfying–that we should just bite the bullet and get over it. In fact, I wonder if that is even the best solution at all–even Deresiewicz admits that solitude isn’t for everyone.

One way around this is to remember that for Deresiewicz, solitude is merely a means to the ends of deeper introspection, the self-examination that allows us to ”secure the integrity of the self as well as to explore it.” I’ve been wondering if there are ways to enable this kind of introspection while at the same time skirting around the problems of individual solitude.

One idea is to find ways to create introspection in group settings. There is a stigma that introspection implies rejection of society, but it need not be this way. Having groups sit in quiet reflection would allow for introspection while avoiding the loneliness of solitude. Religion already does this in a variety of ways, in forms like group meditation or communal prayer. Even secular settings use group introspection, like pausing for a moment of silence to commemorate solemn events. However there aren’t enough settings like this outside of religion. Perhaps as a solution, groups of friends could simply invite each other to sit together and reflect in silence. Call it meditation, prayer, or just having time to think. Having a group around would be mutually reassuring, but at the same time it would be a dedicated time to reflect.

Not only would this give the individual time to reflect, but it would also create a stronger community in the group. There are analogies to this in one-on-one relationships: one of the strongest signs of a healthy relationship is when two people can simple sit quietly together without anxiety. Among friends, it might take a few times to feel comfortable, but group silence could have the potential to creating stronger relationships among its members. The group silence could even be a gateway to deeper, more personal connection and friendship.

Okay, so group silence is one solution, but doesn’t this just sort of skirt around the original problem–that the internet takes away our capacity for solitude in the first place? It makes me wonder how this idea of group silence might be applied in the digital world.

The attributes necessary for group silence are that 1) there must be an awareness that other people are present, 2) you must be engaged in silent reflection, and 3) you must be aware that others present are also engaged in silent reflection. With these criteria in mind, what if there were kind of a rest stop for the internet? Like, a website to engage in group meditation where you would log in and commit to silent reflection and where you could see a list (or even photos) of others also engaged in silent reflection at the same time. If you cheat and decide to surf the web in another tab, the site would detect this and then automatically log you off. Sure, you could cheat and just go watch television, but the people who would self-select and do this would probably stay honest. Does this exist? Is this crazy? Should I go register onlinemeditation.com?

The New York Times has an incredibly moving article about love between two autistic teens:

She was the only girl to have ever asked questions about his obsessive interests — chemistry, libertarian politics, the small drone aircraft he was building in his kitchen — as though she actually cared to hear his answer. To Jack, who has a form of autism called Asperger syndrome, her mind was uncannily like his. She was also, he thought, beautiful.

(By the way: “also, he thought, beautiful” — those are some damn good commas)

When reading this, I also thought of another kind of love, what William Deresiewicz talks about as the kind of intimacy that can happen between teacher and student:

 The relationship between professors and students can indeed be intensely intimate, as our culture nervously suspects, but its intimacy, when it occurs, is an intimacy of the mind. I would even go so far as to say that in many cases it is an intimacy of the soul. And so the professor-student relationship, at its best, raises two problems for the American imagination: it begins in the intellect, that suspect faculty, and it involves a form of love that is neither erotic nor familial, the only two forms our culture understands. Eros in the true sense is at the heart of the pedagogical relationship…

Now Deresiewicz talks about a particularly intense form of this eros, but you can hear this kind of vocabulary in any kind of discussion about education. Indeed, teaching is assumed to be a deeply empathetic profession. Teachers talk about how much they love their students, how deeply they care about them, etc. And it is a common assumption that teachers get into teaching precisely because of this particular kind of empathy, that if you don’t have this sense of caring then that undermines you as a teacher. If your child’s teacher came up to you and said that they didn’t have a normal (neuro-typical) sense of care or empathy toward your child, you might file a complaint or apply for a transfer for your kid, right?

Circling back to this idea of autism and the shifts in how we are understanding it, this brings up a set of related questions in the education world: Can a teacher who is not neuro-typically empathetic be effective? Does the current educational system have biases toward certain types of teachers? And how might the education reform movement be changing these biases?

I think the first article about love and autism is so powerful because it’s a conversation changer–it’s no longer “can” autistic adults love, but rather “how” do autistic adults love. A similar shift might be imagined in education, where teachers perceived as uncaring or non-empathetic (having a hard time grasping and responding to what someone is feeling) might be seen in a different light. Indeed, it’s already accepted in higher education: the autistic professor who is obsessed with his subject can still be a stellar educator, even if he may not particularly care about his students. So it seems clear to me that teachers who are not what one might call empathetic can be effective. So why do we think a non-empathetic teacher in the university is acceptable, but her presence in lower grades makes us worry?

Perhaps it’s because our system understands our education system through high school as a locus of socialization, a place where we learn social norms and conventions alongside our abc’s. In this setting, the absent-minded professor might not be ideal. But I wonder if this is a bias in the system that might be harming us. What kind of teachers might we be missing if we only prefer those who also have a natural sense of empathy? Those teachers who you see on college campuses that can ignite minds but have a hard time igniting one-on-one conversation? What would be interesting would be a study of some sort of empathy-measure of educational systems and seeing if it correlates somehow to educational outcomes. Would countries with lower levels of empathy have higher levels of achievement. Blanket stereotypes and generalities seem to play this out–Korea doesn’t seem to have a particularly empathetic system in our eyes, but has high levels of achievement–but more research should be done.

Now I have some more thoughts on this that I might go on later, but I’ll cut it short. But let me place a few quick ideas here before I forget:

The education reform movement might be doing a lot to change our understanding of the role of teacher empathy in the classroom. I think there are two important factors: creating standards and methods of evaluation that are more rigorously academic rather than empathetic (common core standards), and creating alternative routes to the teaching profession that might attract individuals who may not have that natural sense of empathy toward students but are highly effective teachers nonetheless (people who weren’t education majors but who are passionate about their subject). Will this change biases about empathy within our classroom?