Polymath

Game Studies – [musings]

This afternoon my attention was caught by an exchange between Julian Raul Kücklich [particle stream] and Markku Eskelinen. The verbal sniping is amusing, though it pales in comparison to a netnews-era flamewar. What I find interesting about this discussion -- and I have made oblique comments about this on grandtextauto -- is that most of the posturing has an implicit assumption: that game studies has a coherent object and is worth pursuit.

Now certainly there are games, and there are people who study games, and so there is something called game studies. The more polemical of the game studies crew have even coined a Latin-esqe term for the field: Ludology. In the sortie above, Eskelinen argues for a game studies/ludology concerned with rules, goals, and more-than-passive player effort, a hard science positioning which may [or may not] be opposed to the soft science approach of narrative and social science. And this is where the debate perpetually lingers: should we discuss games the soft way (story) or the hard way (rules)?

And I am perpetually wondering why we should talk about games at all.

Why game studies? The easy answer is: money. Academic programs are always looking for funding, and, now that the game industry has (allegedly) surpassed the film industry in terms of gross receipts (at least in the US), there is a good chance that the industry will start investing some of its profits in education. While this approach seems to be working -- game labs are popping up at public universities everywhere -- the prospects are dubious when you consider last year's obsession with New Media, the internet, and the dot-com revolution. Now that the dot-com titans (Dell, Intel) are sleeping, that money has dried up.

Aside from the facile money angle, games studies is a fitting heir to new media. The significant change with game studies is its focus on a specific activity; new media was (and still is) preoccupied with computation in space, in the air, over the phone, onto walls, &c. New media is too nebulous, and always too fragile to be taken out of the lab (or out of the SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies pavilion). Unlike the media of new media, the games of game studies are actually being played in homes and cars and shopping malls all over the world.

And although game studies does target a particular activity, it never weighs the significance of game playing activity against other computational activity. At least new media recognized the value of computational activity, even while it tried to relocate that activity in space, in the air, over the phone, and onto walls.

When you finally weigh games against everything else we do with computers, the significance of games is miniscule. Computer technology allows for so much activity: the word processor, the spreadsheet (the original "killer app"), tools for revisualization, and that fundamental activity: building new computational machines, a.k.a. programming. The American office worker spends 40 hours a week sitting at a computer, and an insignificant amount of that time is spend playing games. (Please, no anecdotal evidence to the contrary.)

Now it may not be fair to pit game studies against all other computational activity; we consider music, and drama, and art as worthy of study, even though few people spend all their time engaged with them. But the value of these other arts lies, to some degree, in the role they play in our daily lives. If we say that the arts entertain us, then we can discuss the role of entertainment; if they educate us, we can discuss education. Likewise, if a game entertains us, we can discuss the role of that entertainment -- unless you are a ludologist only concerned with rules, goals, and more-than-passive player effort.

Game studies chooses for its object a very small activity, and while this could be fruitful territory there is strong resistance towards any humanistic treatment. If ludology is truly interested in rules, goals, and more-than-passive player effort, then the scope of that research should embrace far more than just games. Hopefully this reveals the contradiction of game studies: games are a small object, and game studies isn't really about them anyway.

And so I shall remain a faithful spreadsheetologist.

Posted by B Rickman at September 20, 2004 05:09 PM | TrackBack