3. The Passionate Worker and Deeply Meaningful Work

Elias ([1970] 1978: 153–154. Original emphasis omitted) suggests that the “task of sociological research” is to make “blind, uncontrolled [social] processes more accessible to human understanding by explaining them, and to enable people to orient themselves within the intervowen social web—which, though crated by their own needs and actions, is still opaque to them—and so better to control it.” This is an ambitious scholarly programme, to both explain social processes and to educate an audience regarding their nature so they can better “control” their behaviour. Yet this programme is helpful when examining the nature of games and play in the differentiated society, at least if the interests for, for example, video games are to be explained in functionalist terms.

George Simmel (1955) argues that society does not only suffer the consequences of conflict, but also ascribe a social value to conflictual relations: “conflict contains something positive,” Simmel (1955: 14) proposes. A society characterized by comfortable harmony and the lack of discordant views easily declines or fails to exploit its full potential, Simmel suggests, and therefore any society “needs to some quantitative ratio of harmony and disharmony, of association and competition, of favorable and unfavorable tendencies” (Simmel 1955: 15). In traditional society, such desire for conflict was frequently directed towards skirmishes and armed conflicts (see, e.g., Clastres 1994), in many cases with devastating consequences for, for example, European societies. In the era of de-traditionalization and rationalization in Max Weber’s sense of the term, conflicts within as well as between societies are channelled into various sports activities, Elias and Dunning (1986: 46) argue: “[S]port is closely bound up with the conditions of civilization in society at large and thus with the interplay of civilizing and de-civilizing.” In a society that increasingly relies on what Elias refers to as Selbszwang, self-control, rather than Fremdzwang, external disciplinary practices (Bijsterveld 2008: 250), the stress generated in society needs to be handled in one way or the other, Elias and Dunning (1986: 65) suggest:

In advanced industrial societies, leisure activities form an enclave for socially approved arousal of moderate excitement behaviour in public. One cannot understand the specific character and the specific functions which leisure has in these societies if one is not aware that, in general, the public and even the private level of emotional control has become high in comparison with that of less highly differentiated societies. (Elias and Dunning 1986: 65)

Sports, and more recently, video games, are thus leisure activities that contemporary societies provide to offer “a type of excitements which does not disturb and endanger the relative orderliness of social life as the serious type of excitement is liable to do” (Elias and Dunning 1986: 71). In this way, Elias and Dunning (1986), assisted by Simmel’s recognition of the social value of conflict, provide a functionalist justification for video gaming. In lieu of alternative justifications, this qualifies as a useful conjecture regarding the tolerance of games that depict and actively involve the gamer in violent acts that are otherwise subject to strict law enforcement and normative control in everyday life.