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<div id="content"><h1 id="introduction">Introduction</h1>
<p>This Special Issue has been an attempt to understand games and
rituals. Instead of an introduction, we will try to unravel this
mysterious journey as well as keep questioning and collaging.</p>
<p>We mapped the common characteristics and the differences between
games and rituals in relation to ideology and counter-hegemony. We
practiced, performed and annotated rituals, connected (or not) with our
cultural backgrounds while we questioned the magic circle. We dived into
the worlds of text adventure games and clicking games while drinking
coffee. We talked about class, base, superstructure, (counter)hegemony,
ideology and materialism. We discussed how games and rituals can
function as reproductive technologies of the culture industries. We
annotated games, focusing on the role of ideology and social
reproduction. We reinterpreted bits of the world and created stories
from it (modding, fiction, narrative) focusing on community,
interaction, relationships, grief and healing.</p>
<p>The eventual outcome of this process is a console, a magical object,
a wooden container, a promise of healing. How can the unpacking of
games, rituals, ideology and superstructure in relation to witch hunting
become the midwife of a healing box? How can practices of healing and
care work as counter-hegemonic acts which cure and liberate our souls
and bodies from patriarchal and capitalistic fetters?</p>
<p>We didnt manage to provide you with comprehensive answers or
conclusive statements. The truth is that this wasnt our plan. Our
intention was to create openings for debate or even conflict, to map a
territory, to invite those who would like to join us.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“What if you are playing tetris and the tetris gods give you
something apart from the usual seven tetrominoes, like an unexpected
pregnancy or the end of capitalism?” (Stephen).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Starting with rituals, we claim that they can be understood as
instruments in the struggle for the exercise of power. Organized by
<em>repetition</em>, they (re)connect the individual to the collective,
creating a vision towards a given perception of society. Participation
in this creative act is determined by several factors: a rituals
function, its relationship to hegemonic power, a collectives politics
and objectives, etc.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in
conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this
ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled,
course of things. Ritual relies for its power on the fact that it is
concerned with quite ordinary activities, that what it describes and
displays is, in principle, possible for every occurrence of these acts.
But it relies, as well, for its power on the fact that, in actuality,
such possibilities cannot be realized” (Smith, 1980).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Ideology talks of actions: I shall talk of actions inserted into
practices. And I shall point out that these practices are governed by
rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the material
existence of an ideological apparatus(…)Ideas have disappeared as such
to the precise extend that it has emerged that their existence is
inscribed in the actions of practices governed by rituals defined in the
last instance by an ideological apparatus” (Althusser, 1970).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Similarly, videogames create worlds. Often, those worlds mirror our
own, reproducing certain ideals and values as norms through their
narrative, game play, design. This trimester we explored world-building
characteristics found both in rituals and videogames. We critically
considered those worlds, identifying the key points and elements through
which specific videogames and rituals circulate political, cultural and
social values. While this world-building might be interpreted from an
angle of implicit and explicit bias rooted in hegemonic values, we
investigated the generative, creative possibilities of such
characteristics.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“The main task of mass culture is to create, reproduce, and
manage particular kinds of subjects — workers, consumers, individuals,
citizens — required for current conditions. To perpetuate their own
existence, mass media must succeed at representing the violent coercion
of capitalist systems as natural laws: Of course you have to pay rent to
live inside; of course you have to buy food to eat; of course you have
to work if you want to survive. The production of a fungible, disposable
and migratory working class requires the alienation and atomization of
communities into individuals, which involves destroying the village,
kinship structures, indigeneity, and many other previous forms of
meaning-producing structures, leaving a gap which ideology must fill.
While the fundamental structures of domination — racism, patriarchy,
heterosexuality, etc. — form the bedrock of this ideological apparatus,
the complexity of the always expanding and changing capitalist system
requires an equally flexible set of subsidiary tools capable of rapidly
adjusting ideology en masse. In general, media emerge not to meet the
demands or desires of individual users but to accommodate what the
predominant mode of production requires” (Osterweil, 2018).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Our intention was to look into rituals and their overlap with video
games as a way to explore “forbidden” or otherwise lost knowledge erased
by oppressive systems (e.g. witch hunts). Understanding games and
rituals as gateways to alternative ways of relating to Nature, each
other and (re)production of life, labour, etc, we played together by
writing fan fiction and spells, developing rituals, analysing and
creating games together.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Sims as social reproduction: some values are certainly given by
the game (make money to buy nicer things, progress in your career by
doing tasks that improve your skill, charisma is a skill but not
kindness) , but also ideology is put into the game by the player. The
player chooses what to reproduce and often share in the “gallery” or on
social media. Community being so important in this game then means that
the crux of the social reproduction is happening when the choices you
have made in the game are broadcasted. Did you create a heteronormative
white thin nuclear family that made a lot of money? Or did you choose to
play differently?” (Ada).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“The Communist Party of Second Life (CPSL) aims to be a Marxist,
internationalist and revolutionary organization for all communists in
Second Life. The CPSL aims to spread understanding of Marxism among SL
citizens, to organise support in SL for the class struggle in RL,
including all struggles of the working class against imperialism and the
bourgeoisie, its state and wars” (keksakallu.klata).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“The act of the modders appropriation of the pre-existing game
is also similar to Michel de Certeaus cultural poaching. De Certeaus
everyday bricolors make do with remixing the privatized spaces and
products of consumer society that they find themselves inhabiting and
using. Rather than being passive consumers, ordinary people invent
varied subversive tactics for stealing back the given of everyday life.
De Certeau writes, Everyday life invents itself by poaching in
countless ways on the property of others” (Schleiner, 2017).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, we explored the figure of the witch as a magical
practitioner, as a resisting body, a border figure. <em>“Federici
presents the witch”as the embodiment of a world of female subjects that
capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient
wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned
the masters food and inspired the slaves to revolt.” Behind the witch
hunt, she uncovers a joint effort by the Church and the state to
establish mechanisms of gendered control of bodies that immanently
resisted newly instituted regimes of productive and reproductive work”
(Timofeeva, 2019).</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge
of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the
borderline of the village, or between villages. But sorcerers not only
exist at the border: as anomalous beings, they are the border itself. In
other words, the borderline passes through their bodies” (Deleuze,
Guattari, 1980).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>How does the understanding of the hunting of the witches that
happened a few centuries ago in relation to the figure of the witch as a
marginal, rebellious entity shed light on contemporary witch-hunting?
How does this knowledge provide us with tools of empowerment,
emancipation and resistance, and make us reimagine counter-hegemonic
practices of collective care and healing?</p>
<figure>
<img src="wall.jpg" alt="Never stop questioning, never stop mapping." />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">Never stop questioning, never stop
mapping.</figcaption>
</figure>
<h6 id="documentation">DOCUMENTATION</h6>
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