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University of Wyoming Studies Video Games
krou writes "The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting story about how the University of Wyoming's English Department is helping fund a collective called the Learning Games Initiative to study video games. Jason Thompson, an assistant professor at UW who is part of the group, explains that 'it's a group of people [who] do research on games, do development on games, and keep an archive of games printed matter such as manuals, ... systems, all of it. We really look at games as cultural artifacts; things that reveal theology, things that reveal power. Things that should be studied in the academy.' The English Department has been very open-minded with the project, because they understand that gaming can educate people, and that 'we can expand our notion of what text and study is; the idea that it might be fun doesn't necessarily preclude its study.' Thompson believes that it's important for academia to study gaming, because games could be used in the future as a type of textbook: 'if games can teach, then as teachers shouldn't we understand what kind of teaching's going on?'"
... for those who want to play games and love analyzing the shit out of games.
An academic discipline full of fanboys, I can't wait!
I wonder if having a name so similar to Jack Thompson caused any problems for this guy...probably not, but who knows?
Living With a Nerd
::Ace Ventura voice:: Obsess much?
And what's wrong with sucking cunt?
Living With a Nerd
Challenging status-quo thinking has always met with resistance. It is refreshing that the university is embracing a non-traditional approach to thinking about education, and the opportunities for education that exist in the current media children and students are actively embracing.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
"I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes."
Delillo, White Noise
they understand that gaming can educate people So... what lessons have we all learned from playing World of Warcraft, etc.?
Actually, I believe if you play as a team, you do learn valuable lessons about how to organize a team of diverse individuals over the internet to achieve a common goal, and that does help prepare you for connected knowledge work in the future. Unfortunately, I almost always play solo, in which case it is little more than mental masturbation.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And what's wrong with sucking cunt?
What's wrong is that the article doesn't appear to say anything about porn games.
This is why I have no respect for "higher education".
no job can be the 'best job ever'. remember this : once you start doing something as job, it starts to be less 'fun' every day on and on, until at one point becoming a mere job itself.
no exceptions. it goes that way because people tend to dislike things that they are doing mandatorily and regularly, instead of doing them whenever they want to do them and desire to do them.
for any job to not go down the same way, the person needs to have a passion, an obsession with that particular job/activity. however, this is the reality for only a tiny percentage of global population. and we generally end up seeing them as prominent members of their fields, if they work in a field that has any media coverage or peer recognition.
Read radical news here
I was actually a classmate of one of the two guys doing this (Aaron Perell) and I distinctly recall being incredulous when he described a project he was working on as "playing a lot of video games." It's funny to see this get thrown on to the CSM, since I got the impression that it was a minor exercise to keep bored college IT folk occupied. Hopefully this ends up producing some interesting research so we can justify further studies of this nature - to the delight of grad students everywhere.
------- "A true friend stabs you in the front." -Eliot
Perrell explains that he sees great potential for video games to be used in the same capacity as today's college textbooks.
Seldomly?
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Video gaming is already the subject of academic study elsewhere, for example see this summary of work by Daphne Bavelier, "Action Video Games Sharpen Vision 20 Percent"
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
This project might produce interesting results, depending on how they run things. Theology? Well, some Japanese games had references to Christian theology removed when brought to Western countries, including early Castlevania games and more recent games like Grandia 2 and Maken X. Politics? Poly Play, developed in Communist East Germany was awful (yet popular, since there wasn't much else to play there), but Tetris, developed in... wait for it... Soviet Russia became a cultural phenomenon. Then there's the supposed North Korean arcade: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2008/09/inside-north-korean-arcade.html Culturally, there's the usual topics of sex and violence in games. And increasingly, ethnicity and gender. Big whoop.
I just hope it doesn't turn out to be just like other university subdepartments dedicated to "specialty" studies, home to a bunch of self-righteous blowhards who don't really know what they're talking about.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
I've lived through the video game era.. (Yes, I'm that old!) No need to study what I experienced first hand.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
TFS: "... because games could be used in the future as a type of textbook..."
...
In ancient times: "Life is the best teacher"
Technological progress enables mankind to virtualize life into a perfect game.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Heh. I saw "Jason Thompson" and at first I read "Jack Thompson."
I hope he is no relation to Jack
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
This kind of systematized academic attention to games is long overdue, specifically in the soft sciences and humanities. Video games have now become the most profitable means of entertainment, and it is kind of amazing that so little attention is paid to them in terms of serious academic study. As a literature grad, I can tell you that many of the books I've devoted serious academic effort to have print runs that would make shovelware developers for the DS laugh. Although that's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison (for the purpose of building analytical skills, there's nothing wrong with examining a minor work, it actually is valuable to be unable to find any prior critical work to build off of), it could help raise the esteem and perceptions of relevance for the discipline outside the Academy.
The vast majority of games have a pretty shallow narrative structure, but there are still themes, relationships, ideologies, moralities, and philosophies encoded into the choices and actions we are presented with (or instructed to make) over the course of the game. And that's not even considering the larger context of cultural markers and meanings games are embedded in. As games grow in both popularity and narrative/cultural sophistication (were we presented with choices like 'kill innocents to maintain your cover with the terrorists' before this decade? Is that a function of a maturing playerbase demanding 'realism', more awareness of the importance of moral choices by developers, shifting cultural beliefs about terrorism/warfare/entertainment in the face of omnipresent concerns this decade?), there is a lot of fertile ground to be mined in artistic and cultural criticism, and a much wider scope for psychological, sociological, and educational research. Games are not innocent or 'harmless' and have the same capacity for meaning as any fairy tale, comic book, film, or nightly news report. Actions in a video game can be seen as 'natural' consequences, rather than as constrained choices in a constructed system, much like books and films and Fox News (or any other news network, though Fox are the true masters of narrative-building) reports; what happens is justified by the internal logic and prevailing ideology of the narrative - and if you think you can see through them easily and they have no impact on your ways of thinking, just look at how many people here quote Ayn Rand or Heinlein in their sigs*. When the generation that grew up with video games from birth reaches 40, I wouldn't be surprised to see ideological quotes from games there; though games are much more indirect and admittedly don't have nearly as many choice soundbites, I wonder if the fact that a player is performing the actions himself is more psychologically effective than simply being exposed to a narrative (although the narrative depth and sophistication of even the best games pales in comparison to even merely decent writers of fiction).
We give toddlers toys to build reflexes and train physical functions, but also to help build mental pathways for things such as seeing differences in colors and shapes, cause and effect, and rudimentary knowledge of currency and careers; we can see video games as toys as well in this sense, built to entertain, but also to develop and test critical thinking and reasoning skills (well, decent games do) and to allow players to take on various roles in the world (be it mayor or covert operative). In order to build more educational games, we need to NOT look at them as textbooks but more like a laboratory. Games are for doing, not reading; hypertextual footnotes to a textbook are okay. Like conventional textbooks, however, there are implicit and unstated assumptions built into the structure of games; in order to be successful as educational tools, you need to examine the entire superstructure to try and build what you want to teach into the very playing of the game. This must be how we see games as education, not merely computerized flash cards posing math questions or multiple-choice answers providing a smal
This means our university now has a 3rd major! what an excellent addition to meth and alcohol
... there's a game studies collective called the "Critical Gaming Project" (http://depts.washington.edu/critgame), which is ran by a few English graduate students. I've taken a class from them once, and it was interesting to see what sort of ways we can actually read into games. We've read stuff from Henry Jenkins from USC (he used to be at MIT's Media Lab for a decade I believe), Espen Aarseth, etc. Games studies is still an emerging field, and there seems to be a lot of interesting things coming out of that field of work.
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
Studies University of Wyoming in Soviet Russia!
(though not that one), but to be honest, (although this may seem like I'm blind with arrogance ;) ), I don't think I really need to.
The reason why, is simple:
I have found two extremely simple and basic fundamental problems within the English Language.
One of these problems has lasted for over 800 years, since it isn't recognised to even exist. (Until now ;) ). The other problem has ALWAYS existed, and from what I can tell, is NOT just limited to the English Language, and again, has never been recognised for what it is, (again, until now ;) ).
In fact, given the nature of the problem, if ANY common language had solved the problem by now, then why haven't we just borrowed the solution from them, (such is the nature of the English Language)?
The problem with so many books dealing with such matters as this, is that they CAN'T HAVE a proper foundation upon which to build ANY simple theory and definition of games, simply because the (English) language as it currently exists DOES NOT SUPPORT IT, (the way we need it to).
(And if you think games are the only area with such problems, think again).
Again, the paper I need to write and publish will explain all of this, and provide the solid foundation upon which almost EVERYTHING can be built/re-built, but...
'Stupidity is an often fatal disease' - R. A. Heinlein