FarmVille, they say, has its own time-space. My 16-year-old daughter is a newcomer to FarmVille, and upon my suggestion that she should go to our farmhouse and work with real soil and fertilizer, she replied, “I would if it was possible to harvest your products in two hours!”It is not the necessary muscle stretching that detracts digi-youth from real life situations; it is the patience of a farmer that they lack.
The time-space of FarmVille does conflict with the real time-space of its players. I have heard of colleagues waking up in the middle of the night or rushing out of the editorial meeting in order to meet the deadline for harvesting their eggplants!
FarmVille is a collective dream dreamt in an electronic brain with certain rules. But it has the potential to conquer actual reality. A skillful FarmVille player can always convert his or her virtual grapes into real money and buy real grapes. The rules of the virtual market are even wilder than the real market. This new phase of capitalism does not respect any labor laws. Children are over-employed in FarmVille. Families are destroyed because of this and similar “second life” occupations.
This is not a column satirizing the absurdities of the inexistent realities of the digital world. I am trying to analogize FarmVille and ArmVille.
ArmVille is a collective dream dreamt in the garrisons of the Turkish army. You never know who is the actual dreamer, but the dream itself is persistent and has its own time-space. Its time-space often conflicts with the real time-space of the outer-civil world, but it has the irresistible power to conquer actual reality. The dreamers of ArmVille live anachronistic lives. In a real-life situation, stationing a colonel and a major next to the house of the deputy prime minister and not expecting immediate police intervention is sheer stupidity. In ArmVille, it works. In real life even a terrorist, let alone a trained army commander, knows that it is idiotic to carry paperwork during an illegal wiretapping operation, especially if one is not good at swallowing papers without chewing them! In ArmVille, they do that. In real life, it is moronic to keep the blueprints of the next military coup d’état on top of one’s office desk. In ArmVille, Gen. Şener Eruygur did that…
The dreamers of ArmVille are not 16-year-old digi-boys. They are colonels, generals, ex-generals, university rectors, businessmen, journalists, policemen, politicians… Their dream is persistent and resilient. They wake up in a further phase of ArmVille even when they think they are awake. This is so because the acquisitions of ArmVille are convertible into real money, power, title and rank.
Several defendants of the Ergenekon case have been diagnosed with illnesses that exist only in ArmVille, and thanks to those illnesses, they managed to evade imprisonment.
In real life, the army prosecutor prosecutes members of the army. In ArmVille, the army prosecutor is the army’s prosecutor. He prosecutes civilians in the name of the army, and when it comes to the criminal “good boys” of ArmVille, they are not only freed, they are also promoted.
They say Col. E.Y.B. and Maj. İ.G., who were detained by the police in front of Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç’s house, were released by the army prosecutor. They say the two were carrying documents of illegally gathered information about the president, the prime minister and several other ministers.
ArmVille it is!
Which way goes to CiVille!?
