Le piattaforme di gioco sono scatole empatiche
(di Luigi Marrone)
“ L’umanità ha bisogno di maggiore empatia ”.
Titus Corning, Segretario Generale delle Nazioni Unite.
da Blade Runner di Philip K. Dick – P.82 – Fanucci Editore - 1996
Titus Corning, Segretario Generale delle Nazioni Unite.
da Blade Runner di Philip K. Dick – P.82 – Fanucci Editore - 1996
Il Mercerianesimo è la traduzione adottata da Riccardo Duranti, traduttore di Do Androids Dreams of Electric sheep? Di Philip K. Dick (Fanucci Editore – 1996) per il termine Mercerism. Duranti spiega che la similitudine morfologica con il termine Cristianesimo ne sottolinea maggiormente il carattere religioso più che politico/ideologico. Ma cos’è il Mercerianesimo?
Si tratta di una sorta di pratica mistica, attuata mediante l’interfacciamento ad un dispositivo chiamato scatola empatica. Nella San Francisco descritta da Dick, non possedere una scatola empatica nel proprio appartamento, cosi come non possedere un animale di cui prendersi cura, è sinonimo di immoralità e anti-empatia. Tale considerazione è in primis una reazione alla dis-umanizzazione dilagante in una companies forced to breathe air radioactive, to emigrate to Mars by sharing the life-androids with friends or stay on Earth to die because of genetic defects.
The box is made emphatic by a device with two handles and a prehensile display screen (CRT TV simple as Dick specify): Baroque technology then, but not very functional.
chief actor is Wilbur Mercer, the character shown by the empathy-box.
pinching handles, and looking at the images on the screen, this gray and ragged old man, a sort of Jesus Christ by definition, begins his performance with a climb from the realm of the Tomb which is composed of bones and dust, to the steep slopes of a mountain that, according to the aspirations of "connected", would transform the experience of effort to get into the mystical ecstasy, sublimation of the ascetic and finally their potential for individual and collective.
ANALOGY - The similarities with the dynamics of fruitive playful digital worlds is obvious: you continue to see Mercer on the screen (a character from a VG is not controlled by us) to the empathy that swallows the boundaries of our reality. The details of our apartments fade, the image you suck audio-video and television so it absorbs our minds and our spirit to have a bearing on the physical plane (Videodrome - David Cronenberg).
But Wilbur Mercer is in fact not at all easy climbing. Opponents called the Assassins, an untouchable and frightening presence identified as bad, get him with stones thrown from above, which in addition to slow the rise earned him bruises and lacerations on the body. Empathy with Mercer is so high that the same interface to the box empathic accuse real wounds of injured in the same points Mercer.
What is interesting is the mystical dimension of Mercerianesimo. The empathic connection with the box is essentially a time of spiritual sharing and Multi where you can "feel" "users" connected at that moment, their thoughts, their joys and sorrows newspapers: the empathy-box then becomes a sort of telepathic medium for the realization of a collective consciousness through a mystical and emotional communion with the Other. For the novel is a fusion of ritual practice, not to feel alone and be a force in social life next to the wreckage: the similarities with the feeling of faith and practice of prayer as a community of Christian believers are legion. It can be said then that the empathy box, through an avatar named Wilbur Mercer catalyst, is a container that has a moral function: it collects feelings, emotions and moods transcending the individual single and sending them to the links shared, thus contributing to a state of mystical cosmic-com-group participation. In the novel, even the UN seems to agree, saying that the merger of empathic mercerianesimo reduces the rate of crime by making citizens more aware of the conditions of their neighbor.
ANALOGY - Analogy with computer-games is obvious: for example, to a room where you are in multiplayer chat, not necessarily during a game session, which gives a share links to the sharing of his states' mind, sublimation and while promoting the dynamics of mutual empathy (or less). X-Box Live, the future home of the PS3, the MMORPG or persistent worlds like Second Life, etc. ... are similar to social networks where you can talk about, put into circulation its own personality and often comforting to life's questions.
The analogy is that it is more than marked.
Another parallelism is given by the longevity of Wilbur Mercer and the Avatars of the Games. The fall in the pit of Mercer and his face again the challenge of climbing enhances the concept of resurrection after the failure, after the symbolic death and the Game Over before another game.
In the novel by Dick Wilbur Mercer and empathy play a box of psycho-social implemented through the work on the existential despair of the interface. While these instruments operating in different psychological contexts, video games, lived in single player or in co-operation, as well as the entertainment unfold moments of cultural exchange and sublimation of certain mood states, and in case of software ludo-educational tools for the acquisition of useful knowledge on the pragmatic level-real.
Buster Friendly hates video games. An important figure for the economy of the novel by Dick is the show-man Buster Friendly, always ready to ridicule video and radio phonically Wilbur Mercer and empathy box. Towards the end of the novel make Buster Friendly public the scoop, revealing the astonished spectators that Wilbur Mercer is not just an old drunk actor, movie some years ago in an ad hoc study spectacularly created by filming most of which were used by a broadcaster to create the mysterious contents of the box empathic, thus giving birth to mercerianesimo.
Wilbur Mercer is thus a sort of television program screened box empathic, a mono-thematic programming consists of many short films from the simple power of suggestion which in themselves have nothing mystical.
After the revelation of the followers mercerianesimo are upset because, as stated on pg. 77: Wilbur Mercer is not a human being, this is clearly an archetypal entity from the stars, superimposed on our culture through a kind of cosmic matrix ...
Buster Friendly therefore enjoys the fun of the religion of human dependence on external technological manipulation. He delegitimize Mercer and mercerianesimo (as well as the religious aspect that it has taken) simply because of the stage fiction (and fiction are digital VG). The box empathic simply creates a consensual hallucination with pictures and sounds, hiding the nature of the artificial construct of the projected contents.
But what then is deducted from the novel is that it actually fears Buster Friendly Mercer because it was not the sensitivity and empathy required to melt, he represents the threat that would make him and others like him a small but important thing: not to be human. The Buster Friendly-man show is in fact an android - a synthetic organism, an entity characterized by a lack of human quality for Dick fundamental empathy for others.
ANALOGY - Buster Friendly plays the role of critics of the experiences from the use of interactive entertainment content today. He takes the figure of Ministers, the art critics of the fundamentalists and non-videogame inveterate (Assassins, bad for the culture medium), ie all those individuals androids to the VG and gamer as chronically unable to empathize, always ready to dismiss them angrily with the ineptitude of those who is uprooted to make the slightest step to understanding. This is unfortunately a structural deficit, a deficiency that would require a cultural engagement difficult.
This leads us to reflect on the ambiguity of an integral that tends constantly to minimize the significance of the VG on human emotions are however always willing to scagliarvisi against fearing the impact on the social level (due to alleged operational models and influential on the psyche).
In the novel by Dick Wilbur Mercer and empathy play a box of psycho-social implemented through the work on the existential despair of the interface. While these instruments operating in different psychological contexts, video games, lived in single player or in co-operation, as well as the entertainment unfold moments of cultural exchange and sublimation of certain mood states, and in case of software ludo-educational tools for the acquisition of useful knowledge on the pragmatic level-real.
Buster Friendly hates video games. An important figure for the economy of the novel by Dick is the show-man Buster Friendly, always ready to ridicule video and radio phonically Wilbur Mercer and empathy box. Towards the end of the novel make Buster Friendly public the scoop, revealing the astonished spectators that Wilbur Mercer is not just an old drunk actor, movie some years ago in an ad hoc study spectacularly created by filming most of which were used by a broadcaster to create the mysterious contents of the box empathic, thus giving birth to mercerianesimo. Wilbur Mercer is thus a sort of television program screened box empathic, a mono-thematic programming consists of many short films from the simple power of suggestion which in themselves have nothing mystical.
After the revelation of the followers mercerianesimo are upset because, as stated on pg. 77: Wilbur Mercer is not a human being, this is clearly an archetypal entity from the stars, superimposed on our culture through a kind of cosmic matrix ...
Buster Friendly therefore enjoys the fun of the religion of human dependence on external technological manipulation. He delegitimize Mercer and mercerianesimo (as well as the religious aspect that it has taken) simply because of the stage fiction (and fiction are digital VG). The box empathic simply creates a consensual hallucination with pictures and sounds, hiding the nature of the artificial construct of the projected contents.
But what then is deducted from the novel is that it actually fears Buster Friendly Mercer because it was not the sensitivity and empathy required to melt, he represents the threat that would make him and others like him a small but important thing: not to be human. The Buster Friendly-man show is in fact an android - a synthetic organism, an entity characterized by a lack of human quality for Dick fundamental empathy for others.
ANALOGY - Buster Friendly plays the role of critics of the experiences from the use of interactive entertainment content today. He takes the figure of Ministers, the art critics of the fundamentalists and non-videogame inveterate (Assassins, bad for the culture medium), ie all those individuals androids to the VG and gamer as chronically unable to empathize, always ready to dismiss them angrily with the ineptitude of those who is uprooted to make the slightest step to understanding. This is unfortunately a structural deficit, a deficiency that would require a cultural engagement difficult.
This leads us to reflect on the ambiguity of an integral that tends constantly to minimize the significance of the VG on human emotions are however always willing to scagliarvisi against fearing the impact on the social level (due to alleged operational models and influential on the psyche).
The sentiment is understandable, moreover, Wilbur Mercer physical cause to others what he accuses physically, so ...
In fact Mercer is the elevation of cyberspace on the life of our inner cyberspace, namely the human spirit. Just as the protagonist says about Mercer in the final pages of the novel: "So this is what Mercer sees (...). Life that we can no longer see; life carefully buried almost up to the front in the carcass of a dead world. In every tiny grain of the universe Mercer probably can not see the invisible life. Now I know. And once I learned to look through the eyes of Mercer, maybe I will not stop more .
As if to say that once you learn to play, maybe is not to stop anymore.
It 'called invisible life that life can not be seen, but which is operating separately in each human being. Hear it, blending their own than others, creating a powerful collective spirituality, a common cyberspace within, from inside to outside and vice versa, is what we practice unconsciously interfacing to the network, whenever we're connected whenever we enter a room, sharing our time on Xbox Live, Home, Second Life, etc. ...
Everything we need, perhaps, is really of mutual empathy.
Philip Kindred Dick may be right.
In fact Mercer is the elevation of cyberspace on the life of our inner cyberspace, namely the human spirit. Just as the protagonist says about Mercer in the final pages of the novel: "So this is what Mercer sees (...). Life that we can no longer see; life carefully buried almost up to the front in the carcass of a dead world. In every tiny grain of the universe Mercer probably can not see the invisible life. Now I know. And once I learned to look through the eyes of Mercer, maybe I will not stop more . As if to say that once you learn to play, maybe is not to stop anymore.
It 'called invisible life that life can not be seen, but which is operating separately in each human being. Hear it, blending their own than others, creating a powerful collective spirituality, a common cyberspace within, from inside to outside and vice versa, is what we practice unconsciously interfacing to the network, whenever we're connected whenever we enter a room, sharing our time on Xbox Live, Home, Second Life, etc. ...
Everything we need, perhaps, is really of mutual empathy.
Philip Kindred Dick may be right.
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