Game Studies at GDC, Part 2

After the ranting, moaning and blogging about the first session I participated in at GDC this year, I have to say I was a bit nervous about presenting at The Game Studies Download. However, given that it was the last session, on the last day, Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal and I figured there wouldn't be too many people around to see it, much less heckle. We made 50 handouts and figured that was being optimistic. And then the people started arriving, and then more came in, and the room was filled. Seriously.

They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from it. I hope the audience did as well.

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown). And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies. Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Comments

[Greg]

1.

Hmm... Actually, from my perspective, the 'game studies' approaches I find most useful and relevant are from a humanities perspective. Not that I don't appreciate the contributions of social scientists, as hard data about, say, player behavior is always useful. However, a theoretical approach to game design is going to come out of some analog to literary criticism or film studies, not out of economics or sociology. While I have the highest regard for Ian and Jane, I would suggest that, say, Jesper Juul and Espen Arseth and Henry Jenkins say things I've found at least as useful. Of course, given the nature of the presentation, it's hard to extract that--e.g., what single "research finding" has Jesper Juul contributed that is "of use"? But is "utility" the real criterion, or should it be "enlightenment"?

[greglas]

2.

Greg's comments ftw.

I'm definitely in favor of enlightenment over utility. I'm not a game developer (well, arguably I was one a little bit, but never a professional one that anyone would take seriously) But I have dabbled more seriously in creative writing and art. And when I was doing that, I paid attention to what people who studied art and writing said about those things. Who wouldn't do that?

If the thing that happens when a game developer creates an engaging game is something more like an art than just a business of selling widgets (and it certainly is) then of course people who make games should be at least interested in hearing what smart people who study games say--be it criticism, empirical studies, random theorizing, whatever.

[Raph]

3.

Alice's battery ran out, but I took notes that are now superfluous -- except for the eleventh and final item the panel covered, which I therefore just blogged:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/25/gdc-day-5-top-ten-lessons-from-game-studies-number-zero/

[Michael Chui]

4.

I don't actually make a distinction between utility and enlightenment. What's utility for? But that's a philosophical bone to pick.

That said, I've always thought the best way to do it was to cater to the audience and provide links to the Other Cool Stuff so the further interested could be further enlightened.

I've actually decided that webpages make better presentation tools than powerpoint slides. Why? Well, first we assume that the audience has access to the internet. Then, you make sure that the webpage is very well navigable. And then you add in all the stuff that's interesting.

It's not like they're paying a whole lot of attention as it is; this way, they pay attention to what they want to, get out of it what they want, and enjoy themselves.

Just a thought. =)

[Ian Bogost]

5.

In response to Greg C.'s first comment, and in expansion of Mia's original point, I certainly agree that utility itself is not a more noble goal than enlightenment. But I also don't believe the reverse. That is to say, useful insights are not necessarily also unenlightened ones.

In fact, this panel really challenged me. We proposed it for the conference and Jane worked extensively with the GDC advisory board to make them comfortable lending us the time and space to do it. The GDC is a huge business event and this was a reasonable (albeit debatable) concern, but I'll admit that I became increasingly uncomfortable about the panel as these constraints increased. After all, even though I'm an active designer, most of my games research is humanistic (to wit, my new book on game criticism, which made its first appearance at the show). I was concerned about representing all of game studies as useful game studies.

But then I realized that the increased constraints needn't necessarily do violence to the field. Really what we were doing was reading research and performing very rapid analysis of that research in front of a crowd of game developers to help them draw insights from the works in their domain. This could even be done with humanistic work, but it would take more time to contextualize, and we had but a few minutes per study. Furthermore, we took a more conservative approach this year in the hopes of being invited back next year (which now seems very likely), at which point we could branch out a bit.

So, I actually felt quite comfortable with the result. If anything, I hope it showed that game studies has latent insights for game designers whether or not the researchers intended to speak to designers.

[greglas]

6.

I guess it isn't surprising, but I feel like Raph's and Mia's suggestion that this one was pereived as more "successful" basically confirms Thomas's point about a divergence of approaches (which you could call utility v enlightenment) and his appreciative summary of this panel as "Lots of of qualitative, micro-level studies that address very specific questions" supports his original point too. Obviously, that's what Ian thought the goal here was, and it turned out to be the right goal to shoot for based on reaction.

I wasn't there, but this panel reads, based on Alice's description, as a presentation of useful and objective data. It is great that the audience at GDC seems to give that a thumbs up, and it shows that there is something that game studies folks can do that will interface well with designers. It would be unfortunate, of course, if that was all that game studies did -- and comments like Greg's suggest that some game makers agree. In the prior thread, monkeysan said at one point that what is happening is "a mirror the longstanding tension between the 'sciences' and the 'humanities." That seems right, and I think there is room for both.

Btw, perhaps this is a bit disingenuous as a meeting of game makers and academics? I kind of think of Ian and Jane M as being primarily game makers who happen to carry the stigma of being serious academics. ;-)

[Thomas Malaby]

7.

Agreed, Greg -- you always put things so well, and thanks, Mia, for this enlightening post. Great to have something more to follow up on, rather than spinning our wheels in the other thread.

Regarding monkeysan's apt quote, I also agree, although part of the problem we're dealing with in these threads is the tendency to take this characterization too far and thereby perpetuate the habit of seeing these are utterly different approaches, as either/or. One way to avoid that (and it jibes with Michael's comment above, as well) is to see "science" approaches as always involving root assumptions (about the nature of humankind, society, culture) that humanities approaches regularly re-tackle (though they get trapped in paradigms as well). I guess we should all be aware of the value and limitations of "normal science", as it were.

[Ian Bogost]

8.

We really weren't just presenting obvious and useful objective data! I presented four of the 11 (we counted from 10 to 0), and two were cultural meditations, one was a CS/HCI influenced typological study, and one was a technical study. The latter two didn't even characterize themselves as "game studies," but sat more confortably in other fields. We were performing readings of these studies paradigmatically, in a way that might show how game developers can read primary research. It may not be clear from the blog summaries, but we weren't just parroting numerical results. We were actually trying to synthesize the studies and to present those synthetic readings as findings for game developers in particular.

We shouldn't confuse the idea of us drawing useful conclusions for this particular audience of game developers with the foreclosure of all research in this direction. Moreover, the very studies we used could read differently in a variety of other domains, academic or professional.

I'm not sure if Thomas was at our final session or not, but I don't think I understand your (greglas) assertion that Thomas's assessment of the sesssion ("qualitative, micro-level studies that address very specific questions") supports the notion of divergent approaches. It seems to me that a lot of humanistic ("enlightenment"-style) research focuses on qualitative, micro-level studies... close reading for example, of which game studies could use a lot more. Maybe we're having a methodological break, and I'm just not understanding your use of the terms. But can't close analysis lead to both thoughtful insight and fungible design practice? I think this is why Raph pointed to this kind of approach as a way to bridge the gap...

This reminds me of something I've said many times but not written down in the context of this discussion. I love the GDC as an academic as much as I do as a game designer. In fact, I think I regularly get more humanistic, non-fungible research insights and inspirations at GDC than I do at most academic conferences.

[Thomas Malaby]

9.

Ian, please don't mis-understand--I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that the papers on Friday (and I wasn't there--I'm relying on Alice's report, which is great, but not the same as being there) were somehow simply numerical (not sure what that means) or otherwise simple, or not involving researcher analysis and interpretation.

We definitely have a gap in terminology here, and this might not be the right place to sort it out, but it bears mentioning that I would have to turn in my cultural anthropology secret decoder ring if I thought that micro-level studies can't, by their nature, yield deep insights.

As I read the studies, however (and please correct me if I'm wrong), they are charting out focused claims (music has x effect on gameplay, success/failure have x effect on enjoyment) that are great and valuable in their own right, but which are not seeking (and shouldn't seek, necessarily) to critically examine the root assumptions about games, humankind, and society that lie behind them. This difference is of course really a continuum, depending upon the degree to which any study is built upon standard assumptions.

A good example of this might be the difference between a study that proceeds to treat what a game player brings to a game as "human capital" (one sees this from time to time), implicitly associating that gamer's ability to play the game as what all humans bring to the equation, missing thereby the culturally-located nature of that ability (and the gamer's available time, access, etc.). Similarly, even if a study proceeds under the assumption that a given gamer's "culture" ("Japanese", perhaps, or "German") determines how they approach the game, this too can founder on an undynamic understanding of what culture is (because it is a falsely constructed picture of "Japanese" or what have you). Of course, not every study can critically examine these kinds of assumptions (Aaron's post on the other thread is very good at charting this out), so what we're saying is that the work which reaches more toward answering "why" questions in the big sense is recognizably different (and has a different [or no! ;-)] appeal to developers as compared to work that generates confident, focused conclusions within a given paradigm.

[Thomas Malaby]

10.

Another thought: Some of the best work that is critical in this way is the work that crosses and combines disciplinary approaches, like Ted's on virtual economies, and the work of many others here, or yours Ian, for the Command Lines volume. This is, as we all know, hard to do, and it's not simply methodologically so, or terminologically so. It's just as hard (if not more so) to reconcile the different pictures of how the world works that different disciplines (and schools within them) hold dear.

[Raph]

11.

I have to agree with Ian that perhaps 1/3 of the talk was not data-centered at all, but instead just provocative, drawing from research to provide not answers but instead questions. Ian's choices in particular were like that. The one on player-controlled cameras, in particular, was a challenging notion and one that challenged current practices. Interestingly, it was also the one where Alice's summary says "I didn't understand this one" or words to that effect.

I point at this session as a way to bridge the gap because the first step in dialogue is offering something the other side needs. First comes trading food, then comes cultural exchange. Saying "they are Other, and they Think Differently" (even in a romanticized sense) seems to almost always be a symptom of not laying groundwork in the exchange.

In particular, much of the more complex work that you cite would require a substantial amount of common ground to develop before it can be fruitfully discussed. One hour is a tricky constraint for that, much less four minutes per topic.

That said, stuff like Ted's work, I think, and for that matter work like Eric and Katie's in the other direction, demonstrate that a heck of a lot of the problem is in styles of communication, not in fundamental modes of thought.

Part of my reaction, I must confess, is driven by the awareness that I have (and that for all I know, many academics do not) of exactly how academics are perceived by the industry, and for that matter how those of us who bridge the gap are perceived. People like Eric, myself, Jane, and others are widely regarded as more than a little weird for even talking to you guys, and as overly academic ourselves -- often accompanied with a complete or blanket dismissal of our work.

And let me tell you, if you think that you have problems in that regard talking to industry people, wait until you talk to players. That's the frontier on the other side of the industry. ;)

[Thomas Malaby]

12.

I agree in general, Raph, but this troubles me...

Raph wrote:

Saying "they are Other, and they Think Differently" (even in a romanticized sense) seems to almost always be a symptom of not laying groundwork in the exchange.

This seeems to be a rhetorical, strategic claim only. To suggest that acknowledging culturally-shaped dispositions as an important factor in these kinds of cross-profession exchanges (for all those involved) is really just a sign of some deeper failure of communicative effort (from one side, it usually seems!) is to deny everything we know about culture, marginalizing it yet again. This is something that we should all be humble enough to recognize, even if it means knocking our confidence in our transcendant briliance down a peg. Moving past our preconceptions takes a lot of work, and much of it is not just about laying a groundwork in the moment of exchange, it is about being ready to question even what one takes for granted.

[greglas]

13.

Since we're picking on Raph, let me pick on the concluding bit:

And let me tell you, if you think that you have problems in that regard talking to industry people, wait until you talk to players. That's the frontier on the other side of the industry. ;)

"Wait until"? Not sure what you're alluding to with that one. Restricting myself to the TN author list, when I think about TL's book on EQ, Nick's D Project, Constance's work in Lineage... so I admit that *I* don't talk to the players that much, but it seems to me that many, if not most, people in game studies spend a heck of a lot of time talking to players.
I do appreciate what you're saying about your place in the industry. But honestly, I think most game studies people are in the same boat. From your vantage, it might seem like cultural studies is pretty mainstream in the ivory tower, but I think many of us raise eyebrows as well for talking with you all. ;-)

[Jane McG]

14.

Raph wrote: People like Eric, myself, Jane, and others are widely regarded as more than a little weird for even talking to you guys, and as overly academic ourselves -- often accompanied with a complete or blanket dismissal of our work.

Ack! What! Really! Raph, say it ain't so. :) Actually, to whatever extent someone considers me academic could never be an overstatment... I consider my research to be as important (to me personally if not, like, to the world of games in general) as anything I've ever designed. And a lot of what I design I think up because I've hit a research block and need to see stuff in action to figure out some of the theoretical/critical stuff I'm trying to work out. And because I started my Ph.D. program in the fall of 2001 and started designing in the digital/pervasive game space in the fall of 2001, I've never seen any real gap between the two practices.

But I'm very glad to see all this discussion come out of the download and optimistic that there will be a 2007 download that keeps pushing the conversation forward...

[Dmitri Williams]

15.

I was also blown away and very, very encouraged with the attendance.

Kudos to Mia, Ian and Jane for a great session. I hope it becomes a regular thing.

Critical studies, empirical studies, hard or soft data, whatever. Your chocolate landed in my peanut butter, and it was good.

[Mark Deuze]

16.

Could not make it to the session, alas... but still my 2 cents as an academic attending the GDC for the very first time - just to get a sense of the people and the 'culture' of game developers. Because indeed, academics spend most if not all of their time scrutinizing game content and surveying/interviewing/profiling gamers, but as far as I can tell, few if any talk with game developers as a research 'object'.

I had a great time at the conference, and met a lot of fascinating people. Yet I am not a hardcore gamer, so I guess there goes my legitimacy ;-)

However, let me weigh in on something Thomas said here and elsewhere at TN: "...acknowledging culturally-shaped dispositions as an important factor in these kinds of cross-profession exchanges...is really just a sign of some deeper failure of communicative effort...is to deny everything we know about culture..."

To suggest a 'split' between code-based 'mechaniks' (the game developers) and esoteric holists (academics) is rather silly. A strictly academic approach to this means to argue that we always take up multiple positions in our ways of looking at the world along the continuum between the 2 extremes - whether we are academics or developers. And frankly, considering the bewildering variety and creativity apparent in both scholarly and game developers' output available on the market today, I'm pretty sure the process we all go through to give meaning to what we do is a bit more complex than either code (practice) or enlightenment (theory).

As for a preliminary conclusion, I found it fascinating to listen to developers trying to find a balance in their work between creative autonomy and commercial viability, as well as between designing/programming/producing amazing content and providing open-ended designs so that gamers can tweak/mod do their own thing with the game (which centers more heavily on connectivity). Those two dilemmas seem daunting (and fun) at the very least, I'd say.

On a final note: game developers are not the only media professionals dealing with these issues (creativity vs. commerce, content vs. connectivity): that is exactly what journalists, advertisers, and TV producers are trying to grapple with, too. And yes, those professionals are also sometimes at odds with 'their' academics.

Silly, isn't it.

(ps: to the devs on the site, thx for a great conference!)

[Thomas Malaby]

17.

Mark wrote:

few if any talk with game developers as a research 'object'

Few indeed, and you have no idea how hard it was to install a duck-blind at Linden Lab. ;-)

[Raph]

18.

Moving past our preconceptions takes a lot of work, and much of it is not just about laying a groundwork in the moment of exchange, it is about being ready to question even what one takes for granted.

I doubt any developers would have been there at all were they not ready to move past their preconceptions, or at least giving it a shot. After all, there were other, less challenging sessions to be at.

My point here was that it's going to take incremental advances and meeting halfway. You state in your reply here,

To suggest that acknowledging culturally-shaped dispositions as an important factor in these kinds of cross-profession exchanges (for all those involved) is really just a sign of some deeper failure of communicative effort (from one side, it usually seems!) is to deny everything we know about culture, marginalizing it yet again.

but you were the one using terms like "elitist," "arrogance," and "incapable of thinking outside the box" in your earlier post. "From one side," you say?

Of course there are culturally shaped dispositions. You cited the bias towards mechanistic, code-based thinking among developers; I actually think this is a bias that exists equally strongly in certain other academic disciplines.

I'd assert that a far bigger bias that academics must understand if they wish to communicate fruitfully, is the overwhelming importance of time and money in the typical developer's working life. To put it very bluntly, you need to understand that "interesting" and "useful" are not the same thing to a game developer. To an academic's professional life, they very frequently are.

This is what I typically see as the big gap when academics try to communicate with developers. It leads to massive misunderstandings, as when you asserted in the backchannel but repeated in your last post, that "Other kinds of (creative) human activity vanish from its radar screen."

To state that the game development community is uninterested in non-mechanistic forms of creativity, or somehow incapable of thinking about them, seems absurd to me. Say, rather, that the game development community is looking for ways to provide that creativity whilst working on a mechanistic canvas, and working against the bottom-line impulses of an industry that values profit over art.

In a similar vein, I'd point out that among the things most prized in Eric's game design challenge results isn't just the creativity of the results, it's also the feasibility of many of the proposals.

I say this, again, as someone who routinely gets bashed for being too academic, and too pie in the sky. :)

(If I had to pick the thing that developers need to understand about academia, it's that the building of theoretical frameworks, arguing over terminology, creating hypotheticals, and asking questions with no direct practical application purely because they are interesting, is useful in the long run and shouldn't be dismissed just because it cannot provide short-term results).

Not sure what you're alluding to with that one. Restricting myself to the TN author list, when I think about TL's book on EQ, Nick's D Project, Constance's work in Lineage... so I admit that *I* don't talk to the players that much, but it seems to me that many, if not most, people in game studies spend a heck of a lot of time talking to players.

I suggest to you that they spend a lot of time talking to players to gather data, but not a lot talking with the players about their research. In particular, not a lot of time justifying it. This is perfectly reasonable -- after all, they are not the intended eventual audience. But I can't think of very much work that has come out whose results were aimed at players reading it; Nick's stuff is probably the most obvious exception.

The typical reaction of the players to many aspects of game studies is "uh, so what?" Most particularly when developers try to apply the research. Players are even more results-oriented than developers are, you see. :)

Ack! What! Really! Raph, say it ain't so. :)

No offense intended, Jane -- you know I am an admirer of your work, and for that matter, of Eric's too, and yes, even of aspects of my own. ;) But I think all three of us are probably very aware of the lack of interest there would be for any of it from many, many quarters of the game industry.

[Thomas Malaby]

19.

Thanks for the great, considered reply, Raph. As far as I'm concerned, we've hammered out a lot of common ground.

Raph wrote:

You cited the bias towards mechanistic, code-based thinking among developers; I actually think this is a bias that exists equally strongly in certain other academic disciplines.

Yes, and for other academic fields if it's not that particular bias, then it's another, as I've taken pains to point out when I can. Close reading, narrative, statistical survey work, etc. can each prompt for their practitioners a narrowness of vision about how to understand the world. Perhaps the useful feature of ethnographic research on this issue (nitpick about the Friday panel: interviews & journals are qualitative research methods, but they're not ethnography) is that it pushes you a bit harder to confront the worldview of those with whom you do research, and thereby question your own.

Raph wrote:

If I had to pick the thing that developers need to understand about academia...[good stuff cut for space]

Great to hear -- Monday's panel had shaken my faith in your stance on this issue. ;-)

[F. Randall Farmer]

20.

Why do some academics continue to beat up the world/game designers that *want* to learn from (and participate in) their research?

This has been going on for more than fifteen years.

Can we stop arguing about who's not listening to whom? It just leads to less hearing.

Randy

[Cory Ondrejka]

21.

I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with Randy staking out the "why can't we all get along" position.

[Oliver Smith]

22.

Growth of the industry has lead to growth of the academe associated with it. To say that developers don't listen to academics is undue.

The number of people claiming academic MMO credentials is blossoming and a lot of what they have to say or discuss is abstract or theoretical.

I guess from a devs perspective its a bit like someone coming along and pointing at an empty field and saying "There might be ruins under here". If that field is the compost heap in your backyard, you're probably going to want to skip over them nosing around in the first few feet of the dig...

[John Greis]

23.

I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with Randy staking out the "why can't we all get along" position.

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