Academics get serious about video games

Some of the new questions in a very young field: How do you judge a game? As you would a novel? Should we think up a whole new vocabulary for evaluating games? What do the social dynamics of online worlds — those massively multiplayer games — tell us about human behavior?

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the IT University has established the Center of Computer Games Research, which just graduated its first Ph.D., Jesper Juul.

Juul appears to be the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies. His dissertation “Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds” seeks to define what video games are, and how academics ought to go about studying them.

“There is an interesting naughtiness in taking something that many people consider unimportant and frivolous and then creating very detailed theory about it,” Juul said. But, he added: “I would say that video games merit much more analysis than novels or movies simply because they are less understood.” —Nick WadhamsAcademics get serious about video games (Mercury News/AP)

It’s not news that academics have been studying computer games, but it is news that the study of computer games is developing into a scholarly field of its own (rather than being situated within existing fields, such as literature, cinema, artificial intelligence, and so forth).

Besides Juul, this article also mentions Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, Henry Jenkins, and Gonzalo Frasca. It also mentions next month’s Princeton conference on Form, Culture, and Videogame Criticism.

4 thoughts on “Academics get serious about video games

  1. Bobby, since we talked a few years ago, the landscape of computer game scholarship has changed considerably. A number of ground-breaking works have come out, and video game scholarship started coming into its own (as opposed to occupying corners of scholarship devoted to digital art, cinema, hypertext literature, sociology, and so forth). So a few years ago, there were fewer resources I could point you towards. Now I’m having trouble keeping up, which is great, but nerve-wracking at the same time!

  2. Dennis,
    We talked about academic approaches to video games years ago, although I felt inadequately equipped at the time, I believe in that possibility now turned reality. I think that a theory and application approach is something to consider because it might encourage students to think deeper about what is happening on his or her television screen.

  3. You’re right, Mike — a course attempting to introduce the full range of gaming theory would be an advanced course, which is why I’m calling the course “Game Culture and Theory,” so that part of it can be a history of the developing field. I’ll have to describe the course carefully enough so that those who take it won’t go into it thinking that they will merely have to play games and maybe write reviews. We’ll have to analyze the aesthetics of gaming, and that will probably include describing it in terms of vocabularies already created for narrative, cinema, mathematics, and so forth.

    Since most of the popular arguments against the serious study of games are espoused by people who have seen one particular kind of game and therefore dismissed the whole kit and kaboodle, so they will be pretty easy to deconstruct, which does mean that the whole course will be a kind of cheerleading session, unless I can in fact find some force to work against. And so far, the forces of commercialization, which some cutting-edge designers have argued are crushing all the creativity out of games, makes a convenient target, but there is also residual intellectual tension between the groups that think of computer games as a kind of postmodern cinema or hyperart, and others that think of it as a kind of postmodern literature. And the artificial intelligence crowd seems mostly disappointed that the games that are selling are shoot-em-ups (since it’s a much simpler thing to simulate projectile motion and realistic blood spatters, as opposed to simulating complex, more subtle human interaction). Of course, there are so many kinds of games that no one pre-existing theory seems to match the whole field — will it be possible to talk about The Sims and Grand Text Auto, text adventures and massively multiplayer online role-playing games, all in the space of three weeks? Probably not. Chances are few students will have played many of the games I end up choosing for the syllabus, so part of the course will involve playing a game critically. Just as we read a novel for a course in a different manner than we read a novel for pleasure, I imagine that the difference between “real” gaming culture and playing a game because there’s a quiz on it tomorrow will generate some discussion in class.

    Whew… I’m afriad my reply wasn’t much more focused than your question, but maybe we should take that as a sign that we might soon have a fruitful discussion about it offline…

  4. It’ll be interesting to see how you build a course for undergrads out of all this, Dennis. Literature can be ‘taught’ without teaching theory in an overt way. So can film and the other established disciplines. I wonder: can gaming? It would seem to me that you would inevitably have to draw upon the same ideas you’d teach in a basic lit or film course (you know, like the formal elements of a story or the effect of ‘depth of field’ in a ‘shot’) to teach basic gaming form. Well, I guess that I think of it as a ‘multimedia’ course…do you? Part of the issue is simple literacy…it takes students awhile to become literate in theory and I know I’ve only been frustrated by trying to teach theoretical principles in lower division courses. And yet — as with lit — theory is always already present in some way, whether the instructor is conscious of it or not, so maybe it doesn’t really matter. I’m a little scattered in my comment, but my point is really a response to what I see as a problem here: that gaming scholarship is the stuff of advanced grad students, not 18-20 year olds (who just want to play, and not have their fantasies ‘ruined’ by criticism, I would assume). Also: is all game theory positive (assuming it’s always a ‘good’ object in defense of the populist view that it’s passive leisure)?

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