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Academic Journal on Computer Games
Espen Aarseth writes: "The world's first academic journal on computer games, Game Studies, is now online. With several international conferences and a peer-review journal, 2001 is the year that the academic world finally takes computer and video games seriously."
What, and give up the one you were going to do on the virtual societies of MUDs?
In my experience, most academics in the field of computer science consider game development to be an waste of computing resources and expertise.
I had to fight hard to get my university to allow me to develop a PSX game for my final year undergrad project and I was lucky that my supervisor was not an old-school stick-in-the-mud, and was very supportive.
I ended up with a great mark (80percent) and a lot of decent experience which got me a job in the games industry. A lot of my contemporaries ended up doing 'suggested' projects - i.e. donkey work for lecturers who wanted some kind of utility to make their lives easier.
I'm pretty anti-academia and I think my main reason for being like that is that I saw these guys (university fellows, doctors, lecturers, or whatever they want to be known as), who really should have known better, acting like they were supreme masters of computing when really the stuff they were doing was stuck in the 70s. Game development is, by necessity, cutting-edge stuff.
I'm not arguing that there is not room for more 'traditional' computing, but the way these guys dismissed game development, you got the impression they considered it something that was only for people without the intellectual capacity to do something more 'academic'. In reality, the average big-budget game these days requires more combined knowlege and skill, across a multitude of disciplines, than almost any other type of software development.
Some great developments have come about through videogames. I'm sure you've all heard about how interested the military was in Atari's tank war game, or DID's combat flight sims. I'm sure there are lots of other examples of gaming technology going mainstream a few years down the line
The bottom-line is that "fun" is very difficult to quantify and it can't be expressed in mathematical notation. Therefore, the thinking goes, it ain't science. Therefore, it ain't academic enough.
-Sy/\/apZ-
Game Institute offers courses (non-trivial ones at that) for the aspiring game maker. They look pretty good, and I've heard good things about them, but I haven't done one myself.
:)
The thing about game development is that is rapidly turning into its own kind of engineering. Large projects neccesitate good engineering practice. However, there is reputedly still remarkable reluctance on the part of developers to adopt coding practices that have been the norm in other development fields for some time (the adoption of C++ for one, but I realise that can start a flame war, so don't).
I don't think it's reasonable to say that game development is an academic discipline - a reasonable acid test is whether there is active research in game development. There's loads in graphics and visualisation, probably a bundle in audio techniques, and a lot of AI... but these are all ends in themselves, rather than explicitly contributory research to the field. Most implementations of research techniques are very heavily tailored due to the contraints placed upon the games developers by technology.
That's not to say that game-development doesn't take skill - clearly there are some incredibly bright people working in the field. It certainly warrants its own journal. Maybe we'll see some standardisation bodies
Henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
People have stated that games are "science"...and that they are "feats of engineering"...but, what's missed is that to a large degree they are also works of "art" and as a whole comprise an artistic medium. There are journals analyzing film-work, television, music and such from a cultural, social, and/or humanistic academic standpoint. It was important for this distinction (in both ways) to happen with respect to gaming as well...
It's about time this happened. Computer game programming has evolved since it's inception from an amusement of a few engineers, to a legitimate commercial enterprise, to a force in the marketplace and finally to an area of academic research.
In fairness for those who look on this with skepticism, the computer gaming industry integrates a variety of areas of research which together can be applied to computer gaming, buy are legitimate areas of study seperately: Mathmatical modeling, Graphic Arts, a whole variety of areas around AI research from the 70s, and the study of sociology, in attempts to create acccurate simulations of human responses. Aparently, all we really needed was some motivation to study these areas, and the pursuit of entertainment is just such a motivator.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Tons of time and resources are devoted to all sorts of games. Algorithms are researched and revised constantly in order to make them more efficient. I'd have to say that even though the "high-society" may not enjoy reading about the latest Sims expantion, I still think that there is quite a bit to be learned from the people that code them.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
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. 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.
Then again, it cuts both ways---a lot of the technology available for Real Work[tm] was driven by games. A lot of the nice engineering design and visualization packages only started becoming useful on PC platforms after 3D accelerated hardware for the PC started becoming affordable---and we all know that PC 3D video performance is driven by gaming requirements. Also, many games have gotten use as more serious software---flight simulators being used in real pilot training, for example.
The possibilities of increased academic interest in gaming are interesting, because making a really good game requires a lot of useful investigation: user interface design, efficient graphics manipulation, improved realistic rendering, etc.
I think this is a strange place to host the 'academic' face of the videogame industry. Norway has not been known for their great VGI culture, nor their profusion of products. Perhaps this is their way of breaking into the field? Or is the site mearly hosted in .NO and run by established members of the industry?
In any event, as a professional game designer, I am not amused by the hoity-toity leap to exclusive peer review journals cluttering up the landscape. It seems the best games come from the underground, the fresh blood seems to come out of the garage. Well, the current culture of academic arrogance has killed any chance of a new Thomas Edison appearing on the Science and Technology horizon, and I'd hate to see the trend develop for video games. Or we may never see the next John Carmack!