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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!
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);
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.
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.
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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
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.