Academic Game Studies and the Gaming Industry

Submitted by Laurie on Fri, 11/10/2006 - 18:58

John Hopson has an article on the need to bridge academic game studies and the game industry. In particular, he's interested in making academic work more immediately relevant to the gaming industry. The article is useful because it acknowledges it shows how academic research needs to be repurposed to relate directly to the industry. Hopson also doesn't dismiss the usefulness of academic research (normally arguments on bridging academia + X end up making a binary argument on one or the other being "better" when they're just different). As an added bonus, Hopson even includes a concrete method for making academic presentations relevant with recommendations like:

Quote:

Look forward, not backwards. Lose the lit review. Don’t quote references. Don’t worry about background material. This is about specific, concrete recommendations and the impact on their game. Shape the presentation from the recommendations outwards, providing only the background absolutely necessary to justify the recommendations.

The recommendations are valid and useful. Many academics are trained to present in one hyper-academic format and other formats are needed when addressing undergraduates, high school students, the general public, or folks in a particular industry. In non-academic parts of the world, the background research stays in the background and that's an important point to know and remember.

What's most impressive about this already excellent article is that it acknowledges that academia and industry may be able to help each other and work together on some concerns, but not completely. Academia needs to share the knowledge they create, whereas corporations often have an interest in not sharing information. The differences in goals as well as the differences in approaches are important points to remember. Hopson's article does a great job of explaining these differences as well as possible ways to bridge these differences. This would be a great first reading for any game studies class so that students can learn some of the underlying parameters for academic game studies and the industry. Plus, the presentation tips are useful for academic and non-academic presentations.

I haven't read the entire

Submitted by zach on Fri, 11/10/2006 - 20:04.

I haven't read the entire article yet, but he alludes to something that I think we need to address: Does what we're doing here ("here" being Game Studies within a Humanities model) really need to help the industry make better games?

I don't have time to look back at it at the moment, but doesn't Hopson make some kind of distinction for game studies that is "pure" research as opposed to practical (I guess)? I think most of us on this site we would fall somewhere near the "pure" end, and least in our scholarly writing. (What we do on this blog or what our existence as academic gamers might mean in itself is a different question).

I really don't know. It was just my impression that most of what Hopson was talking about was the empirical kind of research into (for example) whether games make us smarter or better at certain tasks. Again, I haven't read the whole article, but it may be important to distinguish different kinds of game studies because, whatever impact my scholarship may have on the industry, I certainly don't think it would better if it had more of an impact, which I take it is the assumption behind the presentation advice.

Or maybe that's just me?

Hopson does mention the

Submitted by Laurie on Sat, 11/11/2006 - 23:06.

Hopson does mention the difference and that only some types of academic research will apply/be of interest to the gaming industry.

Much of academic research won't be directly applicable to the game industry, but the article has a good explanation of how to bridge the gap for better communication.

This is a subject close to

Submitted by Tanner on Mon, 11/13/2006 - 14:04.

This is a subject close to my heart right now as I am sort of finding my own voice as a scholar within game studies.

I just submitted my first article to an academic journal. It is focused primarily on issues of blackness in MMORPGs. Due to my focus in cultural studies and politics, my writing is interested in communicating both with academics and people in the design community who can make changes. One of the things that I find exciting about game studies as a new discipline is its potential to be different from traditional academic criticism of other popular media in that it may actually have an impact on praxis. I have tried to write with this goal in mind. I also look to people like David Leonard, who publishes both in academic journals and in magazines, as a model.

To this end, my article on Blackness in MMORPGs followed, unknowingly, some of Hopson's rules, in particular, his law of "Be Prescriptive, Not Descriptive."

However, taking this strategy has caused some conflict with professors who reviewed the paper and I anticipate not being accepted to the journal I submitted it to because of this writing style.

For Hopson's model to truly work you not only need people who are writing work in this style but places of academic publication that are amenable to it. Without those opportunities scholars have no incentive, unless they want to sacrifice their job possibilities.

Tanner
http://tannerhiggin.the-means.com

Tanner http://tannerhiggin.the-means.com

Game Studies and the Industry

Submitted by mattbarton.exe on Sat, 11/18/2006 - 14:44.

This is also a topic close to my heart, Tanner. I must admit to being a bit disappointed with some of the scholarship I've seen emerging under the banner of "game studies," and am beginning to have grave doubts about whether the field that is emerging is really one that I care to join. On the other hand, I still feel that it hasn't quite solidified yet, and if enough of us could step in to guide it (or, more cynically, as other "camps" emerge to divert it), maybe things won't be so bleak.

My biggest caveat with the field as it seems to exist now is the way so many theorists are trying to construct their identities. There's a tendency, for instance, to bog a text down with so many "post-modern marshmallows," as it were, that's it becomes difficult to discern the author's point (if, indeed, there is one). I've actually discussed this issue with "game theorists" who admit that what they're really interested in is "theory," or should I say "Theory," that is, discourse that is ultimately detached from anything at all, much less games. I suppose the most optimistic view of this tendency might be to call it "cross-fertilization" and assume that good things will come from the merging of critical theory and post-humanism and videogames.

Unfortunately, this is the same tendency that managed to reduce composition studies from something that mattered to universities to something that didn't. We were brought on to learn about writing and how to teach it better, but now we "do Theory," and thus "legitimize" our discipline according to standards set by our comrades in literary studies. Why worry about something as insignificant as writing when there are such bigger questions at stake, such as the very definition of "human?" Meanwhile, we can gauge just how puny our "impact" has been on writing instruction by how many university programs require their writing directors to hold degrees in Composition, or indeed how many classes are being taught by compositionists.

To put it simply, the field of composition studies has failed, having been diverted into realms that, while certainly interesting and maybe even "more important" than writing instruction, aren't writing instruction.

I see the same thing happening in game studies. Instead of taking Aarseth's lead in working from the bottom-up regarding game studies, we've preferred to indulge ourselves in the warm blankets of postmodern theorists, hoping, somehow, I suppose, that the scholarly "panache" we gain by dropping names and jargon from Lacan and Deleuze and Guittari will somehow make up for the fact that we're not studying games. I think it's pretty clear why the "industry" doesn't find what we're doing relevant: They don't understand it. Furthermore, there is no clear reason why they should try.

What I'd like to see is a "camp," if you will, of game scholars who are willing to buck this trend and come back down to earth--or at least back down to the screen. What I mean is the courage to write naively, arrogantly, and even flat out wrongly, as long as it's about games rather than Derrida. What I'd like to see are fewer works of critical theory whose only contribution to game studies is that they use a few token games as examples to illustrate (or perhaps obscure) their points (assuming they exist and haven't been discounted as mere boorishness). Not to put too fine a point on it, give me less Guittari, and more Atari.

On the other hand, I can definitely understand the resistance we might have towards becoming "Santa's Little Helper" for the game industry. That's not what I'm advocating. However, I think that genuine, honest, and a bit more of the "I don't know but I'm going to try to figure it out" mentality might lead indirectly to much better games. After all, hasn't literary criticism led to better novels? ;-)

Matt,

Submitted by zach on Sat, 11/18/2006 - 18:13.

Matt,

I understand what you're saying, and I agree that we still need to find ourselves in the practice of game studies, but I think it's a bit short sighted to write off all theory as superfluous to game studies. That would have to include, for example, much of my own and Laurie's writing since we both refer to Lacan or Derrida as needed. The point is to make it useful and productive to our arguments, and it can still be entirely game-based.

I think the problem you're alluding to in game studies has as much to do with disciplinary caginess as it does with any particular approach or another. In other words, some of what might be called marshmallowy in game studies isn't theoretical at all; it's just tentative or hesitant and sometimes simply territorial.

Basically, there's no reason scholarly conversations about gaming can't be both theoretical and appreciative, but there's also no reason they have to be. Furthermore, games are indeed a big part of what it means to be human, so if that's what we're studying, we darn well better have a way of including video games among that understanding.

I agree that Theory can be used as a smokescreen (and to be honest, I may have been guilty of doing that myself), but the best writing makes prior critical thought an important component in developing new critical thinking, which is really what we're doing since whatever our approach, we're writing about games, not gaming about games.

I can't speak much to the theorization of composition, but perhaps that's not the best comparison since the majority of us approach games as players, not creators. Unlike the close relationship of literature and composition (where reading makes you better at writing and vice versa), one of the early and perennial criticisms of video games is that playing them doesn't teach you anything about programming them. In other words, the acts of creation and reception are somewhat farther apart.*

Anyway, I definitely agree that we need to privilege a games-first approach, but we might as well use all the tools at our disposal, whether they're the ideas of French theorists or the skills of l33t h4x0rr5. I think Bogost's Unit Operations and to some extent Galloway's Gaming are great examples of this, and they both quote Derrida, Deleuze, and others at some length.

And in my comment above, I didn't mean to suggest that appreciative approaches (e.g. writing along the lines of "games are better if ...") that do offer something useful to the industry are in any way less valuable than approaches that don't. Just that if helpfulness to the industry is our only metric, we do become "Santa's Little Helpers."

That said, "Less Guattari, more Atari" definitely needs to be on a t-shirt ;)

* Just to be clear, games do teach all kinds of things, and many do introduce or actually consist of programming. I'm just trying to frame the opposing points here.

Theory is Good; Easy Bake is Bad

Submitted by Laurie on Sun, 11/19/2006 - 14:09.

Based on the scholarship produced by all of us, I think we all agree that game studies needs theory and practical application. Some scholarship will be more theory-oriented and some will be more practically-oriented, but both should be able to speak to each other at some level. And, by practically oriented, understanding games in a better sense (meaning more nuanced, historical, granular, etc) does constitute a practical goal because it creates a building block that can be used for other work.

I do, however, agree that there's a problematic trend in all scholarship to do the easy bake article method of: "theory + text = article." That method does a diservice to theory, the text(s), and to scholarship as a whole. Unfortunately, that method remains popular enough in all fields of criticism (art, print literature, television, film, game). That method is simple and in some ways it's encouraged by the academic "publish or perish" model which should want quality articles, but which often just wants CV lines.

I think game studies has a lot to give back to academia, in part because it can be both very theoretical and very practical and that creates a tension that allows for more possibilities. Plus, how could we address player-avatar identification as effectively without theory; how could we address horror games without the unheimlich, again which aids the practical goals of game comprehension and construction; how could we understand city games without theories of urban development and movement like Kevin Lynch and the inverse with Deleuzian smooth space. Theory is a tool that, when applied well, aids various goals. Creating theory creates more tools. The easy-bake method bogs everything down in goo and gives everyone a disinterested and disgusted sort of tummy-ache.

Great respones

Submitted by mattbarton.exe on Sun, 11/19/2006 - 14:45.

Wow, I really enjoyed and profited from both of these great responses. I think Laurie hit the nail on the head with her "easy bake article" formulation, which really gets at what I was thinking about.

I know that I was thinking games-games-games in my continental philosophy seminar, particularly while reading Merle-Ponty and Husserl. It seems so obvious that "phenomenology" and the theoretical structures erected by workers in this area have potential applications in understanding how games work. I had the same experience with a great many other thinkers we read, such as Zizek, and recently I've been fascinated by some of Baudrillard's thinking about simulation. On the other hand, I also found plenty of relevant thought while reading old literacy criticism, and even made ties between thinkers as separate as Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Hume, and Kant. How can anyone reading about Plato's allegory of the cave not think about virtuality?

On the other hand, at some point, you have to wonder to what extent working all of these sources into a paper is really a boon or a bane to the intended reader. I see three possible outcomes.

1. The reader is introduced to a new body of theory and a familiar text and led to see helpful and insightful connections between the theory and the text. The reader comes away knowing more about the theory and the text.

2. The reader is introduced to an unfamiliar text and shown how it can be analyzed or studied with theory the reader is already familiar with. In this case, the reader comes away knowing more about the text (and possibly a new application for the theory). I don't like #2 very much, simply because it might allow the reader to get too comfortable filtering the text from a single theoretical perspective.

3. The reader is presented with a new text and a new theory (neither of which is familiar), and is left to more or less drown in an ocean of strange jargon, concepts, and content. About the best we can say of this outcome is that it "defamiliarizes" the reader and perhaps untidies his or her intellectual domain.

In any case, I can't help but think it's foolish for anyone to assume that existing bodies of theory are inadequate or irrelevant to understanding games. What I do think is foolish, however, is for writers to assume too much understanding on the reader's part. For instance, it's pretty easy to drop the name "Lacan" into a text, and possibly also a few key concepts from his body of work, such as "petit object a" or the like. However, a writer doing so should (a) have a very clear reason for doing so, and (b) be prepared to unpack an extremely complicated and sophisticated theoretical framework. I think it's wrong to assume that a reader interested in game studies should be familiar with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Indeed, I'm honestly skeptical of anyone who claims to be really comfortable working with that very difficult and often baffling theory. What I sense is a need to drop a name, sound really intelligent, and then move on, all without really establishing clearly why the reference was warranted or useful to the reader.

I had this problem when I was writing an article for Computers & Composition about online discourse. I had just finished reading one of Habermas' books and felt that what that book was saying had great relevance to understanding online discourse. So, I tried to summarize and elaborate on a few of Habermas' key points (about half the article!), then showed how they could help us understand online discourse. Afterwards, I still wasn't sure if what I had done was merely write a "study guide for Habermas with example applications." Nevertheless, I felt better doing that than just assuming the reader was already familiar with Habermas and could "sense" the connections or should work them out for him or herself.

Although I understand we should have a "canon" of works or the like that we can assume all game scholars have read, I always find great value in writers who nevertheless feel compelled to offer an abundance of context for the theories and theorists they introduce into their criticism. Even if I'm intimately familiar with Habermas, which I'm definitely not, I'd like to see a game scholar working with him to offer an explanation and try to "set me up" as well as possible to share in the discovery.

In short, there's a difference between applying theories to help elucidate (or, as the case may be, obfuscate!) a text, and then again merely dropping names and terminology into an article just to appear well-read. Furthermore, no Theory, not even works explicitly labeled "Game Studies," are relevant to game studies in-and-of-themselves. It's up to the discourse community to establish their relevance and hopefully, yes, very hopefully, to be very patient when introducing, re-introducing, and re-re-introducing these works to those folks hoping to enter this discourse on something like equal footing.

Great points, Matt and

Submitted by zach on Sun, 11/19/2006 - 18:20.

Great points, Matt and Laurie. I agree the writer has to do their part to outline the theory and contextualize the argument in a way that a reader not familiar with a given theorist can still follow. It's quite a skill, though, to be able to do that in a way that doesn't insult your reader's intelligence or become a "study guide", as you say. I had a similar experience recently with an essay on C.S.I. in which I deployed a range of Lacanian ideas like the subject-supposed-to-know and the version of Lacan Zizek coopts for film analysis. In my first take, I wrote it naively assuming that my readers would be familiar the jargon and the editors would not question my using it. Fortunately, they did question my use of it by essentially demanding that I justify it within the text, and my resulting revision ended up being about twice as long and really became more of an introduction to Lacan by way of C.S.I.

The essay was definitely better for that revision, but I still worry that I went too far the other way by over-explaining. In either case, I think I had a pretty good core argument so it was more of a rhetorical problem for me in determining how to present it.

For that case and Game Studies, I think that what we're all saying is that the first step is to have a good argument or a good piece of research, and perhaps because our field is so unyoung and untested in the eyes of the academy, it makes sense to me that we should always try to start with the games.

I don't want to give too much away, but that's the approach I'm taking to my dissertation. I'm looking at typography in videogames and first developing a historical/technical understanding of how and why it works the way it does before embarking too far into theory of why it's important. I have some ideas, of course, but I'm going to wait for the material to tell me what to do before I get too far ahead of myself.

What about the teaching side?

Submitted by Amanda Phillips on Mon, 11/27/2006 - 15:59.

The discussion about critical writing has been interesting, but I have been wondering to what extent should we be trying to teach people how to play games? The industry will always be driven by a market, so wouldn't another effective way of affecting creative production be to train kids to be smarter consumers of cultural products?

I know that sounds really naive, but I'm still young and starry-eyed. I also know that I never learned how to look at movies or (certainly not!) games as the same valuable springboard of insight as books - and the books we always had to read were too boring for most people to want to develop the analytical skills for the proper digestion of texts. I can somewhat accept that we need to keep up certain standards of aesthetics and tradition to remain viable as a field, but would it hurt to throw in something that people are actually interested in to try and develop some sort of discerning taste?