Slashdot Mirror

I work kind of in this area as a researcher, so maybe I have a rosy-glass view, but the arguments seem a bit dated to me. Sure, in say 1999 this was a problem, and not that many people took games seriously. But in 2009? Yeah, people still like to kvetch ("games are rarely taken seriously blah blah and we aim to change that" is a standard opening move if you're writing a paper), and maybe the average person on the street doesn't, but there are plenty of inroads:

There are journals and academic conferences on games, in both the humanities and computer science.

MIT Press has an entire division of books about videogames. I'm currently reading one about the Atari 2600, which, yes, even covers its role as a cultural and artistic platform.

There are initiatives and companies to use games for "serious" purposes. The U.S. Army in particular takes them seriously and funds development.

Braid sold over $1m, despite being a kind of weird arty game made by a single guy. You can even get an MFA doing fine-arts stuff related to games.

Heck, Gamasutra itself frequently publishes about games as art, and it's semi-high-profile (at least to the extent that getting linked at Slashdot once a week counts as semi-high-profile).

I mean yeah, I'll agree that far more people respect, say, film than respect games. But it's not as if this is some novel argument and nobody has ever thought about taking games seriously before. Also, to some extent, it's the fault of people not making more interesting games: Hollywood may be crap, but there are a lot more innovative indie films out there than innovative indie games.

A good interview with Will Wright that talks a little bit about Go.

Go, at it's heart, is a game of cellular automata. From the simple local rules incredible complexity emerges. To date there have been a few academic papers that deal with creating cellular automata rules for playing, but with little success. Very strong local play, but lousy global play.

I think the trick to a successful Go playing program is to harness the local cellular automata knowledge in a higher order algorithm. Perhaps to use the cellular automata to give likely next moves and then do a deep search on them.
Human Go players do this already -- reading, i.e. looking ahead involves players searching through likely play combinations to find the one with the most profit. They find the likely play combinations through a feel of shape or of other criteria, then narrow it down to see if their short list of play combinations works or does not work.

Whether Aarseth is correct or not, he is certainly not an amatuer.
He is the author of Cybertext which is cited in practically every paper on videogames.
He is also the co-founder of the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen as well as the co-founder of Games Studies an academic e-journal about videogames.
Finally, he is Associate Professor, Principal Researcher at the Center of Computer Games Research at the Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication at the IT University of Copenhagen which is pretty much the largest group of videogame academics in the world.

So again, whether or not he is right, and i haven't yet read this latest article so i don't have an opinion, one cannot correctly say that he is an amatuer.

..."A Postmodern Analysis of Slashdot Editor's Comments" and plan to use the following quote as an example of the phenomenology of desperate attempts to start a flamewar that are so transparent they inevitably fail:

Is there plenty important being done in this field, or is it possible that academic study of videogames can tend towards overanalysis?

Is it possible that there is plenty of important work being done in a field of study which can tend toward overanalysis? You mean, like statistics? Or philosophy? Or biology? Or literary criticism? How about the humanities? Or law? Or history?

How about the latest news on the SCO lawsuit? Or the value of Open Source technology?

I'm so glad the readers didn't rise to the bait here (obviously intended to re-ignite the non-controversy started when skotos criticized a single chapter from Richard Bartle's densely significant book).

God save us from steaming heaps like the semiosis article. Anyone who takes it seriously will be spoiled forever, for game design and literature.

kaszeta wrote:

You're right, and studies of many game-driven (or at least game-related) computer science topics already are fairly common at academic conferences and meetings.

True, but conference papers aren't nearly as valuable to the professional career of the academic. Since few humanities academics work at well-funded research centers (or at any kind of research center at all), few humanities academics can afford to attend the kind of big conferences in which the proceedings are all published (thus providing all the speakers with a "publication").

I've sat through uncountable presentations on 3D-modeling, polygon reduction, texture mapping, landscape generation, networked real-time simulations, etc., in which the author(s) made it clear that computer games were one of the primary motivations for the study.

Okay... but consider the mission statement from the Game Studies home page:

"Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games. Our mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming."

Articles on computer games do get published from time to time in mainstream humanities journals such as Computers and Composition or any of the journals that focus on postmodern cultural studies, but it's true that many of them do tend to fixate on those aspects of computer gaming that support independetly existing postmodern theories, or else they look at the gaming culture as an isolated subgroup, the way an anthropologist would. Of course there are probably scores or hundreds of exceptions to the sweeping generalization I just made, but many humanities folks still think that clicking on a hyperlink is somehow more interactive than turning to page 24 of a Choose-Your-Own Adventure novel; Aarseth's book Cybertext argues strongly for the notion that hypertext fiction is not the only kind of cybertext. This is likely not news for the Slashdot crowd, of course, but professors in departments outside of CS and AI programs need to hear it.

Perhaps some of the articles in this first issue show the literary lens through which humanities folks look at computer gaming activity... but I think it's wonderful to see a journal that intends to focus on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of computer games.

Speaking more generally, and not directly in response to kaszeta, I would say that to express disappointment with Game Studies simply because it does not look like a promising place to swap AI algorithms and Quake mods is, I think, to miss the point.

Dennis G. Jerz
Department of English
University of Wisconsin -- Eau Claire
Literacy Weblog
Interactive Fiction Call for Papers