shared experience

In continuing to overthink the consumption of video games I’ve been idly going through André Guindon’s The Sexual Language, which is a Vatican II era explication of sexual morality and meaning that tries to go outside pure “code moralism” and repression to the meaning we give our bodies and our acts with each other. ¹ I was put onto it by my partner, who was put onto it by her grandmother; and I think it’s a really wonderful text that’s opened my eyes a lot on developing a vocabulary for sexual morality outside pure permissiveness and pure interdiction.

That said, so much of it at the start is general, so fundamental, that it’s nice to just ponder as if starting all over again…

But, as God further discloses himself through sacred history, it becomes clear that if, on the one hand, he is no sexed god — a lover-god, a god of fecundity — he is, on the other, a Living God. In his triune personality, He lives a highly relational existence. The Christian God is not a lonesome figure. All his activities are other-oriented: he generates a Son, spires Love, creates men and adopts them as children. These ceaseless loving activities on the part of God are so manifest that St. Paul calls him the “God of love” (2 Cor 13: 11) and St. John writes simply: “God is love’ (1 Jn 4: 8).

We may find in these broad biblical data some very clear, and indeed basic, indications for the whole of our moral orientation. Our life is relational and all real creativity is born out of interpersonal communion. Self-centeredness spells the progressive impoverishment and withering of life and finally death itself. Salvation is in relation to others: the other needs us as we need the other’s salvation. Self-giving love has a divine quality which makes it eternal and beyond all other values (I Cor 13: 13). This is why it has absolute primacy in Christian life (SPICQ). ²

But there are other moments that jump out at me at times — notably a contrast between the sexual language of Augustinianism and Thomism, and then later on a sort of redefinition of chastity I will explicate here:

For Aquinas, virtue signifies the full liberation of human powers, never their suppression, their mutilation or their inhibition. […] Unfortunately, the spiritualist tradition then took over the word “chastity” to designate all sorts of asexual, anti-sexual or de-sexualized realities. For Aquinas, however, it meant an optimum of sexuality which everyone should desire. Chastity is nothing else than an internal and dynamic modification of the sexual appetite which makes it share fully in the meaningfulness of human love. […] In this line of thought, chastity is by no means a kind of sexual mutilation. It is nothing else than what we would today call sexual integration. A chaste person is a fully sexed person, one who is integrally sensual as a human person should be. ³

The current in Guindon’s thought so far is in the underlying motivation in our relating to others, the personal meaning of acts, and especially whether that meaning treats others as an instrument for narcissism. Am I giving myself meaning through the objectification of another? Am I actually relating to this person as another person? Am I giving myself to them, as they are giving themselves to me? Are we relating across the full breadth available in our incarnate, human existence? At this time, in these bodies, in this relation?

To know that — to identify what and when and how — to develop that language, is what is labelled here “chastity,” at other times virtue and I suppose, as he writes, in what we call the process of integration.

Am I looking for something when I’m doing this? Is there something in the way of loving my brother, my sister, in full, here? I think this is a useful test for me; I have so much baggage when it comes to relationships that it’s hard to sort out whether something else is bleeding into what should just be love to love in love.

How’s this about video games?

Well, thinking about our motivations when it comes to how we will relate to others obviously has ramifications for all acts; how we deal with each other sexually is not that weirder than how we treat the boundaries between ourselves and others in other occasions.

Or, really, with just ourselves and our internal relations. At one time he cites a philosopher who says our relationship with our own body resembles our relationship with God. This is a striking claim, because … who has a good relationship with their body, of those I know? I see my body as something I work with, a sort of team I’m on: my body tells me things, and I sort of help mold it alongside its needs. I don’t ignore my body; I don’t force my will on my body. I try to accept what seems to be happening, try to be preventative in my care.

Lately I’ve been going through my syllabus of media during my little sabbatical. And yet lately I’ve been realising my own interactions with my syllabus seem sort of rote, unmotivated. I feel as though I am my own slave, again, and not when it comes to the readings. It’s about the games!

The books I have are points of connection with others. I was recommended most of the books in my list; even if I wasn’t, I have a friend I can talk to about them. But all the games I’ve listed for myself to play are just … solitary exercises in consuming a text. But then in the moment I feel as though I don’t really enjoy the text. It just seems to be “good” to go through it, to check it off the list. Gaining literacy of useless utilities.

You have to understand: I often play through a series in order for no reason at all. I have played three Disgaea games now that I only sort of like. I reason about why one would like them. I don’t really get a lot of joy out of them. I say, oh, 2.5 stars or whatever. Then I just … buy the next one? Why am I doing this? And why in this order?

No one told me to play them, I don’t think; I can’t remember who I’d even interact with after the fact. There is usually not a strong story, and the mechanics while “neat” are just sort of there. So, I just … play them for playing them for playing them.

Why play a retro game? If no one is with me while I do it, and if no one told me to play it, I feel as though I’m just wishing I was small enough that this could’ve, in some other world, been the only world I had. It doesn’t feel as though I’m utilising this for the pursuit of connecting and loving others.

Video games are not an exercise in altruism; but I do think true, honest love can be found in them. I feel as though there’s some sort of fundamental adjustment that has to be made for how I use my downtime, and I think when it comes to video games I should try always to gear it toward loving my friends, and loving people who could become friends.

I used to play Animal Crossing on 3DS just because my friends would want to stop into my town and see how it looked. To stumble around idly with umbrellas in the cyberrain while we lived towns apart. I still do StreetPass online and off just for the serendipity of meeting someone who visits my site and wants to say hello. Maybe I’d find them and they’d have some amazing blog, distributed only through this link, handed to me directly …

Nintendo is a master of this sort of everyday opportunity for connection. And I think my own compulsive tendencies, my own neurosis, lead me into places where I enter into doors too esoteric to be of use for me or anyone else. Would I enjoy playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nine even a little bit? Or would I be curious at first, and then go through it start to finish because I should?

If I were to do such things, it must be for the private pact of fondness between me and someone else. Otherwise, it won’t be pleasurable, connotative, or redemptive of my time. I don’t know how to enjoy video games at this age; I feel as though I need to re-evaluate what I loved about them, and it often was self-expression, interconnection, or being able to imagine.

That was a tangent…

So was the Cybertext article, if you remember. But my sexual language is a separate topic for another time, and I’m not done reading, yet. To be tender and yet sensual, too; to unite the worlds of my kindness and animal desire under the roof of one Human Self. This in itself is a lesson in what it is to master all things in life, and I’m not sure we can; it’s an approximation toward the perfect dark…