We are the virtual champions! (On a Kind of Virtual Good)

Last updated on: December 23, 2020 at 8:38 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

We are the virtual champions! (On a Kind of Virtual Good) 2020-12-23T08:38:32-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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This year we should enjoy whatever is good, even when it isn’t much. Here is an example of a small good:

I am the virtual Super Bowl champion here at Saint Anne’s having defeated virtual competition over the year.

The wizards at EA Sports have provided decades of Christmas gifts and I am thankful to them and Hope! I have developed over those decades an elaborate set of “house rules” that make the game (and the season!) last all year. Sometime about now, I play my last game for the year on Madden and this can end in not making the playoffs (rare, but crushing), losing in the playoffs, or sometimes, when all goes well, winning the House Super Bowl.

The team is always Green Bay and the quarterbacks have been splendid the last quarter century. This was one of those years when my virtual team brought the Lombardi Trophy back to virtual Title Town. Aaron Jones drove in the dagger with 150 yards on the ground and the other Aaron was the MVP (having been robbed of the virtual EA distinction).

The game wasn’t close as the Baltimore Ravens could not score enough points to keep up with the Pack.

The importance of this accomplishment cannot be underestimated, but the group that gathered to watch the big game had a jolly time. There are many, many other things I got done this year, I am polishing up a book on beauty (he says to the patient editor), taught many classes, read some great books, lectured all over the place (California! New York! Estonia!) until COVID closed that down. A good many things that got done after COVID got done “virtually.”

All of them were more important than my big win.

Yet here are two cautions about discarding such little pleasures altogether. First, just because an experience is virtual does not mean that this experience has not positive value. After all, chatting on the phone is virtual: our conversation is being reproduced by machines. When I listen to someone like our California opera friends sing by way of video, I am not there, this is not as good, but there is some good. The harm, such as it is, would come from using virtual experiences to replace all live experiences: never going to a madrigal, because I can stream one. This was a year where streaming was necessary, more often than not, but that should not be a new normal. We should make living, ephemeral, not preserved or filmed beauty as much as possible.

That is our life.

Yet when we have a virtual experience, we, as individuals, are there. We may be somewhat alone, but God is there with the holy angels. Our students, co-workers, friends also are sharing a virtual experience with us in class, even if the ZOOM lags. This is not perfect, but nothing this side of the City of God is perfect. This is pretty good, sometimes a necessary pandemic pretty good.

Things can be better still.

When we share a virtual experience, like a film in a theater or a game at home with friends onsite, then we are having two kinds of jollity simultaneously. The game is amusing us as we pretend that the “on-off” program is “playing” with us. The family and friends are together and rooting around this common experience and that is authentic and fully real. This is why movie theaters should never die: the experience of watching a motion picture with fans (Star Trek premieres back in the day! Seeing the original Star Wars with Dan and Uncle Roddy!) is different from live theater (two way communication with the actors), but not fully virtual. Watching a film with an audience is a different kind of live experience.

Playing a game with the family is a different kind of live experience from playing football. I am not claiming it is as good, just that it is a good.

Finally, any kind of small pleasure from stamp collecting to gaming can consume too much time. Yet I would argue that being human can mean being small and having small pleasures. Not every day is the day to start a school or college program, though I have had a working week of such days. Most days sustain what is and so are less creative. This is still good. When I write, I rarely write something so very good. I hope for one good paragraph someday. I write daily to get better and to provide (I hope!) lesser though real jollity to readers.

And so it is with playing Madden. The game as a game has little intrinsic importance and so easily could be misused. However, if not, then the human genius on display in it, the artistry, and the fun are all small goods. These little goods have added up over the decades and I am thankful.

God is super-abundant in providing pleasures Himself. He made a cosmos and me. He provided us with joys great and small: from the Beatific Vision to the taste of a banana. I do not have to denigrate the one to prefer the other.

The pleasure is never the problem, let us enjoy what we can in this feast.

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