Digital Citizenship.

I watched V for Vendetta again this evening (a belated 5th of November viewing with friends) and it got me thinking about a few different things.  Most prominently, what is the role of the citizen in the modern society?  Surely voting, paying taxes, and staying informed of politics belong on that list, but these could also be in the same list as the role of the citizen in the modern government.  (I would argue, possibly, that those are different things.)

Now, I’m not going to go off ranting about something I know nothing about – namely, political philosophy – but regardless of who you talk to, being a good citizen requires activity.  It requires action and engagement and choice.  To some degree, it requires risk.  It requires intellectual fortitude and the willingness to create your own opinion, independently from what others say.  In many cases, it requires overcoming great obstacles.

Sort of sounds like what we require of a player.

I am consistently impressed by the players of video games.  The endurance, the mental acuity, the curiosity and insatiable desire to create.  People have spent hours upon hours crafting Minecraft worlds as complicated as a scale model of the Enterprise.  Players have cracked every code, found every secret, discovered every bug imaginable in any game ever released.  We have been amazing citizens of the virtual world.  But what about our own? 

Essentially, what I’m getting at is this: does our playing video games enhance our ability to engage or does it give us a false sense that we have, in fact, contributed to something.  I suppose it’s an age-old question.  This fantasy that we experiment with, does it inspire us or delude us? 

I once watched a documentary called Monster Camp about live action role playing.  Some of these people were legitimately inspired by their time spent as Gregor Elfkin, Slayer of Demonath.  Their ability to act brave or self-sacrificing or clever as Gregor empowered them to be more brave, self-sacrificing, and clever as themselves.  Others, though, were clearly living in a fantasy, spending more time developing and being another human being rather than developing themselves.

So which is it?  What is an increasingly player-made culture doing to us?  Are we practicing the skills of engagement we need to handle this world?  Did World of Warcraft help inspire the Arab Spring?  Is Angry Birds, in some small way, an antecedent to Occupy Wall Street? 

Or are we having our inner need to be a citizen satisfied by something that does not, in fact, contribute to anything?