Those of us not following the Fiscal Cliff chatter were
paying requisite attention to Zynga’s end-of-the-year announcement outlined on
TechCrunch that the company would be shuttering eleven games, or pulling them
from the app stores or not accepting new players to PetVille, Fishville,
Forestville and others. The constituents
not in mourning could be found on the Zynga site bashing executives for producing
a series of me-too, copycat games that were destined to die on the corporate
vine when the blue-suited, cost-cutters came to town.
Others, more emotionally invested in the notion that family
connections can even extend to fictional creatures who populate the rugged
digital landscape, expressed outrage that Zynga killed their pets or, at the
very least, did not give them time to download lovable Spot. One gamer with no obvious ironic intent
advised fellow players to only get open source pets and run them on their own
servers. The family who had time to dress their pets in
PJs and bunny slippers and apply a little lipstick to their cheeks was the
decided exception.
From a psychological point-of-view the jury is still out on
the effect such imaginary pets has on the real lives of individuals. From my study of psychology, I think such
projection, play, and creativity is healthy and, short of us all becoming Spot,
necessary. The late Dr. James Hillman, a
psychologist, writes in his Healing Fiction how we are constantly exposed to a
pandemonium of images and from these come our art and our sanity. In this context, Zynga might or might not be a
helpful partner.
I have long been amused by Freud’s acknowledgement in 1934 that
his job was “to translate the inspirations offered by modern literature into
scientific theories.” After all, Freud
won the Goethe Prize for literature and not the Nobel Prize for science.
The notes Freud took while famous patient Dora told her life
story on the couch behind his back became a case history. The style in which the father of psychology
actually wrote these case histories was literary and, by the author’s own
account, they were closer to dramatic stories than scientific fact. Or in the vernacular, they were fiction, which
doesn’t mean they weren’t true. Modern psychology owes more to literature than
to science, as every parent who has been involved in the Oedipal wars already
knows.
Dr. Hillman, one of the most original thinkers in this field
in the last fifty years, extends Freud, differentiating between case history
and soul history. The case history is a
biography of historical events. The soul
history spontaneously invents fictions and “inscapes” without major outer
correlations; it is reported best by emotions, dreams and fantasies. The case
history presents a sequence of events; the soul history is about imagination
and play.
I have looked in vain for Dreamville, the ideal original,
finding rather a company that sells hoodies inspired by a 1950's cartoon about
dream chasers. But no sectors, even our nighttime dream and
fantasy worlds, are safe from SEO. The
online Dream Dictionary has identified 5,300 dream keywords that to date have
at least 20,000 possible meanings. The
Dictionary has only scratched the surface of our collective unconscious.
Dr. Hillman has warned us about this attention to the
literal and about assuming every image or dream has a one-to-one correspondence
to events we experience in daylight. In
his words, the difference is between image as presence and image as
presentation or between symbol and allegory.
Nonetheless, even with this psychological proviso, there
might be a way for a prospective new Zynga venture we’ll call DreamMe that
marries the essence of crude SEO mapping with the personal, interior landscapes
of our psyches revealed in dreams, nightmare, fantasies and similar niceties. This is not a stretch. I note that Dreamvale, available on iTunes, is
a perfect dungeon crawl involving four players and six levels. I could envision a similar dungeon crawl, for
example, based on Carl Jung’s Psychological Types that would enable you to find
your true Self. If that is not demanding enough, how about a
dungeon crawl through Jung’s world of alchemy and encounters with the sleeping
king, the wild man,, and Hermes, among others. I should advise that these figures represent
projected psychological conditions and killing the monster means we are putting
the shadow sides of our psychology behind us. In other words, the Gamer grows up.
In the meantime, until developers seize on these very
pregnant and free business ideas, there’s always Dream:On, the app for those
who want no more than to dream of strolling the countryside, flying, or lying
on a sun-drenched beach. It’s as simple
as that.
Spot can be summoned at will.
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