I’ve been reading Bryan Alexander’s The New Digital Storytelling and it feels strange, for some reason, reading about gaming at the same time I’m reading about storytelling on Flickr, Facebook, Podcasts, etc. Gaming, meaning video games (I think?), both casual and non-casual (black tie?) games. Maybe I’m missing the forest for the trees, but to me, video games have very little in common with the kind of experimentation that I find myself doing for ds106. Photography, photo manipulation, sound recording/editing/production, video scripting and construction, these are all ways in which I can take my own experience and do something expressive with it.

This expression allows me to communicate with a community but it also allows me to reflect, later, on the meaning of that thing. This opportunity for reflection is important, and powerful. These are new mirrors, new ways to communicate with the world but also with ourselves about the world and/or anything in the world including ourselves. We can make things and then think, why did I make that thing?

I made a song (for TDC7)–or that’s what I meant to make, a song–called “Dead Soldiers,” because that’s what people call empty bottles, right?, “dead soldiers.” But listening to it again, it has a vaguely middle eastern quality to it (and I mean this is the crudest, most ignorant, most “oriental”ist way), and that, tied to the title and the weird voice-in-the-bottle sound in the middle of it directs me toward an interpretation of those things that has something to do with America in wartime. The song is too silly to be haunting, and yet there is an echo of hauntingness, an echo of that disturbed feeling, for me. None of this arrived until after I had made the song, listened to everyone else’s and then mine again. This reflection is possible because I can re-experience the thing I made, reflect on it, examine it in the light of other people’s creations.

Video games are, by construction, not of this kind, experience-wise. To paraphrase (probably? badly?) Tom Bissell’s awesome book Extra Lives, it would take hours or days to re-engage a particular moment in a video game, to see what was really in it, to see it with fresh (or more worldly) eyes, to linger. Where was the other Freeze Beam hidden? Better flip through Nintendo Power. What did it feel like blowing Clone Hitler’s plane up at the end of Bionic Commando? Old YouTube videos (most of them narrated) are your closest approximation.

I’m not slagging video games, okay. Ask my Level 85 Gnome Mage what I think about video games. But with Flickr/Facebook/The Rest, each creator is a peer. And in video games–casual and black tie–most people are subjects, they are ruled.

Alexander’s book doesn’t say these two categories–my distinction–are the same at all, it just seemed a significant enough distinction to articulate.