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Gaming Academia Gets More Mainstream Press
jimharris writes "Eventually every area of human activity comes under the scrutiny of scholars. After thirty years, it's time for video games to go to college. The New York Times has an article (free registration required) called 'The Ivy-Covered Console', that talks about several lucky professors who play games for a living. The challenge, they say, is to develop a language of criticism to analyze video games." One particularly unfortunate quote: "Dr. [Barry] Atkins admitted that he didn't finish Half-Life before writing about it in his 2003 book, 'More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form,' (Manchester University Press), and only later realized he was two minutes from the shocking plot reversal at the end when he stopped. 'I am very nervous that I got it wrong,' he said."
As a game enthusiast I find it fascinating. As an academic, I find this is symptomatic of the walmartization of education. I'm sure this may be a nice small subsection of sociology or psychology but to me gaming doesn't seem to warrant a whole new field.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
"So far, the academic and the industry worlds, they're very far away," said Mr. Frasca, who intends to play a role of a bridge. "Developers do not read academic articles, and that's not going to happen any time soon." Academics generated animosity early on by judging games as violent. "They were also not gamers," he said, "which made it weird to listen to their analyses."
Which is why I'm taking whatever an academic currently says with a grain of salt. For the past thirty years, academics have totally discounted our industry and getting it just plain wrong. In my book, they are currently 30 years behind the curve.
There are plenty of journalists and historians like Leonard Hermann and Johnny Wilson that are getting it. Next week these "ivy-league" academics are holding a conference consisting of "a lawyer, a journalist, a composer, two professors, two lecturers and six graduate students will present papers with titles like 'Musical Byproducts of Atari 2600 Games' and 'But Our Princess Is in Another Castle: Towards a 'Close-Playing' of Super Mario Brothers.'" Too bad that they seemed to have forgotten to invite a few developers. Perhaps the academics would be better served by going to the Game Developers Conference two weeks later and learn a thing or to.
It's not always a sign of a bad game. I've never finished some of the games I LOVE, because, well, I stop for a while. That happens. Then I forget about it, play other games, and then I just don't want to finish the old game because I'm not into it anymore.
My favorite type of game is RPG -- console-style, D&D-style, any kind is good for me. The only three I've ever beaten are Fallout, Chrono Trigger and KotOR, and both because I almost just played straight through from beginning to end and had no distractions. I helped my girlfriend with the final battle in one of the Avernum games, but that doesn't count. I've never even finished a Final Fantasy, though I came very close in FF7. I stopped in the middle of Planescape: Torment and never came back. Same for both Icewind Dales, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Morrowind. That's all I can remember at the moment, but there are certainly many more. These, though, are not bad games. In fact, I think most of them are fantastic games.
Maybe it's as much a sign of a horrible gamer as of a bad game.
Two of my all time favorite games mentioned in a positive light in the "paper of record". Wow!
Also, I'm a Library and Information Sciences graduate student and I'm working on a few projects related to video games. It's really exciting and challenging to present information and analysis of gaming in an academic context. I'm hoping to attend the conference at Princeton mentioned in this NY Times article.
.
At least that's what I suspect. In fact a prof I know back at UBC has already written a paper on a collection of games. Then again English is known for studying movies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, WWE, Chatelaine Magazine, and soup can labels, so this is really nothing new.
When I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon in 1989, I decided it would be fun to make a game (actually a system for making platform games) as my senior project. I was really psyched about this, and figured that any professor would be honored to be my advisor on such an innovative project.
;)
I set out looking for an advisor. I picked one of CMU's best known professors. I called his secretary, made an appointment, and described my idea. His response? "Do you know who I am? There is *no way in hell* that I am attaching my name to a video game."
Bah, his loss. I set out to find another professor to serve as advisor. I wandered around the halls until I found a professor that I had for a class once. This guy wasn't a big shot. He didn't have a secretary, and didn't have such a big office, but that was ok. I jazzed up my presentation a bit, threw in a few buzzwords of the day: "It's an 'object oriented' system for 'rapid application development' of a class of interactive entertainment, blah blah blah.
He was intrigued! "Hmm, object oriented, rapid applica... Er, wait a minute - this is a video game? No, I'm not putting my name on that."
Ok, so no cigar just yet, but I was picking up on a trend. I wandered around some more. I went deep into the lower levels of Wean Hall. I walked down a corridor carved out of solid rock - the offices here were the size of closets, and they didn't even have windows. I found someone who appeared to have just been hired, and gave my pitch, filled with as many ridiculous buzzwords as I could think up. He mulled it over "object oriented, um, rapid stuff, um, 'Oh, you mean a video game! Yeah, cool, I'll be your advisor for that!'"
So I found my advisor. He didn't get fired for putting his name of a Senior Project video game, and it came out pretty good in the end, and nobody else got embarrassed.
BUT
Looks like I was ahead of all of them! Carnegie Mellon now touts it's Entertainment Technology Center, and proudly proclaims how they're considered the Harvard of Game Development Programs, and they've even had me back to speak on a few occasions about my latest game. They've come a long way
Wouldn't it make more sense for the Academics to grab a more plot-intensive game? (I'm thinking RPGs in particular; Xenogears, Koudelka, et. al.) After all, character and plot are something that we (academics) certainly know how to analyze academically, while gameplay is something new (and likely more interdiciplinary requiring knowledge from CPSC, Physics, Math, as well as social sciences so that you can actually analyze it using postmodernist theories after you understand it).
In fact, my understanding is that subjectivity is rather central to postmodernism. As far as I'm concerned the idea in social sciences is to be subjective, just to be subjective from as many angles of subjectivity as possible (thus completeness increases over multiple academics).
Part of the problem is that the Gamers have an intutive knowledge gained by experience which the academics have yet to even begin to quantify. A gamer can tell by a 6th sense when they are in the groove and a good designer can actually tell if the groove is being created properly by the game. Science currently has absolutly no mechanism by which to explain this phenomon. Gamers should be studied so that scientists can actually see not only that gamers can use their brain differently than ordinary people; but they can work to distinguish exactly what those differences are. Fighter pilots experience a situational awareness in an environment that only a very few individuals ever see; which is also relatively unexplored. However I feel certain that experiments will one day show that what an immersed gamer experiences is not that different from the experience of the fighter pilot. Some day when the dust settles and the sicence is there, the academics will, no doubt, have a newfound respect for the gamer and the game developer alike.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Hah.
Perhaps that would be the trick to getting more women into gaming
My girlfriend just called you a cheater. She's not hardcore [she does play The Sims, Buffy on PS2, and we play Starcraft and Warcraft together, and she tries stuff I recommend], but I pointed this post out to her, and she feels that regardless of gender, cheating's cheating. What's the point in playing the game if you're going to play 'around' the game?
Postmodernism, on the other hand, tosses consistency out the window in an attempt to be complete.
Well...it's as good a definition of postmodernism as any I guess. Certainly more tangible to me than "the curvy buildings in architecture from the 60s"; I mean how am I supposed to apply -that- to literature?