Studying Game Studies

Recently, I did a review of Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader for Game Studies (no, it's not published yet; this is just setting the context, not trying to trick you into reading a book review). Although this WoW-related anthology of papers doesn't claim to be doing Game Studies, nevertheless the review was for a journal of that name, and all the papers in it could have been published in that journal.

It occurred to me, though, that individually almost all of the papers could also have been published in journals that specialise in other subjects. They could have found homes in journals for Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Communications, ... That being the case, what is Game Studies about? Is it merely an interdisciplinary holding pen for people whose object of study is games but whose subject is Something Else? Or does it have something unique at its core?

Put another way, what kind of paper could only be published in a journal of Game Studies?

Comments

[jeremy hunsinger]

1.

as games studies is a field, and the other things you mention are academic disciplines, and given that almost any discipline, interdiscipline, etc. can operate in any field, that there is nothing that could only be published in a game studies journal. there is not, i'd argue, a strong enough border to define game studies as anything other than a field. You can't say, as a biologist can say to a sociologist, 'this is an amoeba, that is a human, we study this, you study that and we will publish about this, and you may, but then you would not be publishing sociology probably' The only boundary that can be defined for game studies is that it is about games... and games as we know are not that easy to define.

[greglas]

2.

Just quickly: the ludologists belong in game studies, correct? I guess I wouldn't say they belong no where else. I suppose you could fit them into English or Communications, just like you could fit film studies into English or communications. But if you're talking about folks that study games, those who are trying to produce a structural account of game experiences, the game formalists, would seem to be best placed in a game studies journal.

I think game studies is at an interesting stage now because there is not a disciplinary toolkit, so to speak, that is standardized.

My four-year old (geesh!) post on this question:
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/09/academic_instin.html

[Bart Simon]

3.

super old problem but I am reminded of some of the old answers which still apply today...

1. A group of folks needed some forums where they didn't have to take up half the paper talking about what WoW was. This has changed a bit but not that much if you take into account the average age of editorial boards and reviewers in most core disciplinary journals. This is the expediency thesis.

2. A group of folks needed some mutual support and breathing space to work on methods, concepts and theories for studying games which could then be ported to mainstream disciplinary journals. This is the holding pen thesis.

3. A group of folks see, in the study of games (whatever they are), something significant in terms of understanding and making a difference in the world with or without games. Focusing on games qua games tells us something about digital culture, human nature, domination and resistance, etc.... and importantly it tells us something different about this stuff from the usual fare in the normal disciplines. Typically concepts migrate from normal disciplines to game studies along these lines and they may or may not be ported back. I think this is the "games are good to think with" thesis.

4. Bandwagon effect -- this is very real and very important. Folks wanna be part of something other folks think is new, interesting and important especially if you are stuck or coming up in an aging discipline dominated by senior professors without a clue. I'll call this the bandwagon thesis but its a risky game for folks trying to launch an academic career (now who's really clueless).

[Cunzy1 1]

4.

It depends on how seriously the author wants them to be taken.

I think papers that want to be taken seriously (go Journal of Game Studies) rather than mickeymoused (as part of any proper disciplines).

[Richard Bartle]

5.

greglas>the ludologists belong in game studies, correct?

Yes, I think ludologists have a claim to be part of Game Studies.

>I suppose you could fit them into English or Communications, just like you could fit film studies into English or communications.

You could fit some Film Studies into English or Communications, but could you fit it all there? Likewise, you could fit some Game Studies in, but could you fit it all in? What is there that you couldn't fit in, and is there anywhere else you could fit it instead without having to dress it in different clothes?

>But if you're talking about folks that study games, those who are trying to produce a structural account of game experiences, the game formalists, would seem to be best placed in a game studies journal.

A structural account of game experiences would be an easy fit for psychology or anthropology, wouldn't it? Or do you mean in a more mathematical sense?

Richard

[Charles Cameron (hipbone)]

6.

One kind of article that would presumably belong in a Game Studies journal and nowhere else would be the kind that attempts to wrestle a sense of the core identity of Game Studies and the basic laws and/or approaches it takes -- an article, in other words, that propose the field, its purposes and its first or early set of defining insights.

It seems to me that that's the process -- in a nutshell -- of how a field becomes a discipline.

*

There's a part of me, indeed, that views play as the central discipline in much the same way that Theology was in medieval times -- the hub around which all else revolves.

Play seems to me to be the key manner in which we approach the world. For children, play is the means to learn the world, to establish the basics and nuances of life in a body with other people, animals, furniture, facts and fancies to deal with -- while for our Einsteins and Mozarts, those among us who have achieved true mastery, the freedom to explore and express that mastery is playful in its very essence.

Wittgenstein and Mozart both invented Games, and it was Carl Jung who told Sir Laurens van der Post, "One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games..."

Play is what sets our dreams awake -- work, by contrast, is the gathering of sufficient skills to make enhanced play possible, and when we fail to find a play quality in, or play opportunities opening up as a result of, our work, we say we lack "job satisfaction" and die the slow death of enthusiasm.

*

In thinking about the field, I always try to keep Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game in mind. Eric Zimmerman's 2006 Challenge at the GDC had the Nobel Peace Prize as its focus, and Jane McGonigal was quoted recently as having "a simple goal: she wants to see a video game developer win a Nobel Prize within the next two decades."

Boom! I'd love that!

And hey -- we already have a Nobel laureate who designed a game. He did it in the form of a novel, but it was that novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, aka Magister Ludi) that won him the Prize for Literature. The game itself is the central context of the novel, to such an extent that the novel is, among other things, a game design document from early in the design process -- all sheer, audacious vision, no details of implementation.

Until our sense of the field includes this grandest of all visions -- a game that collates the entire cultural history of mankind via the construction of hyperlinked, multimedia collages, a game that (as Lewis Lapham once noted in an Editorial in Harpers) "lends itself so obviously to the transcendental aspirations of the Internet" -- we're really only in the foothills of the possible.

We already have a Nobel laureate in our midst -- let's celebrate!

*

And if there's another major visionary designing games outside the game design community, in fiction, it would be Iain M Banks -- and the designs could be found in his brilliant "Culture" SF novel, The Player of Games.

If two's not enough -- heh! -- try Orson Scott Card and Ender's Game for a superb and worthy third.

[Richard Bartle]

7.

Bart Simon>I am reminded of some of the old answers which still apply today...

Ah, this is a useful (if cynical!) list.

>A group of folks needed some forums where they didn't have to take up half the paper talking about what WoW was.

So in this view Game Studies is where people who study games for whatever reason can gather without having to explain what they're studying to each other. There's no-one there who is studying games for games' own sake, just for the benefit of some other discipline (which may, because the subject matter is the same, connect with other disciplines).

>A group of folks needed some mutual support and breathing space to work on methods, concepts and theories for studying games which could then be ported to mainstream disciplinary journals.

In this view, people are developing a common vocabulary about a new object of study so they can talk about it in their various disciplines using a protocol that also works elsewhere. Again, there's no-one working on methods that have no use outside of Game Studies.

>3. A group of folks see, in the study of games (whatever they are), something significant in terms of understanding and making a difference in the world with or without games.

This view sees Game Studies as game criticism. Fair enough, but what about games is being criticised? The play? The design? The division between the author of the text (the designer) and the reader of the text (the player) isn't as straightforward as it is with, say, sculpture, where consumers don't get to change the creator's artefact. Furthermore, game designers will engage with Game Studies in ways that moviemakers don't engage with Film Studies nor authors with English Literature. Is game design the subject or object of Game Studies?

>4. Bandwagon effect

In this view, Game Studies is merely a point of attraction for academics looking for new seams to mine. They come, they take a few gems, then they go. There's no-one there who wants the stones because they study stones, there are just people who want them because they're shiny.

Of all of these, the only one where Game Studies is anything other than a temporary construction in the minds of researchers from other disciplines is the third one. However, this comes with its own issues to do with the reflexive relationship between players, designers and game studies researchers - many individuals are all three. The technical/craft skill of the designer blurs into their understanding of what experiences players will have and what they want these to mean; the game studies researcher conflates study of design with design itself, and study of play with both play and design; the player thinks about their play, and before they know it they're thinking about design, and then about how other games do it. It's a big ball of tangleness.

Does it have a centre, or is all of it the centre?

Richard

[Shava Nerad]

8.

Not an answer -- but I've been a member of an email list for a decade or so called "newfolk" (New Directions in Folklore), which is a bunch of academics and independent scholars looking at the emerging folklore of modern life (internet memes, urban myths, slang emerging from pop culture, semiotics of hip hop, what have you).

I have to say the mainstream folklorists give these people far less respect than they deserve -- some of this is the "it's not literature until it's reached the century mark" crowd, and some are simply so tenuous in their own position, they don't want to stretch any definitions.

Now, game studies (apart from the old school ludo/sim/tactics/strategic studies folks) is all new because it's dealing with a cultural overlay expressed through a new medium. The medium being the message, and the medium being a complex (transmedia, online community, cultural memetics in the old sense,...) of media that we don't understand separately yet, it's no wonder we're using the tools at hand to understand it.

So, when people started studying movies, they studies them using the tools of psychology, anthropology, static art forms, theater, and all the tangent forms of study that had applicable tools. It took decades before something which you could really call film studies emerged.

We won't find journals that talk about game studies in terms of game studies until we have enough journals that games studies has terms.

[greglas]

9.

@Richard: re "structural account", I guess I meant that with most disciplines, you've got some notion of what the primary and recurrent forms encountered are, what sorts of dynamic interactions they have, and a vocabulary for describing and explaining various sorts of phenomena.

So I could come up with a list of "core concepts" & terms & operations for math, visual art, physics, computer science, psychology, law, literature, philosophy, etc. These are the basic gears of the discipline & what you find as chapter headings in the 101 introductory textbook.

If there were that sort of thing for games, that would be an account best placed in game studies, right?

You're right that just because you could fit a lot of game studies into something else, that doesn't mean you could fit all that's called game studies now into another box.

--

Re the design/criticism divide, it makes me think of how academia handles the visual arts & literature, which is by splitting design from theory. Studio art is not history of art is not aesthetic theory, and creative writing is not comparative lit is not lit theory. Notably, none of the above is practical career training! I imagine game studies will eventually end up scattered on a spectrum of application-criticism-theory like this, don't you think?

All of Bart's accounts are true, I'd say. #4 might count for a lot. Game studies has a lot of shiny stones at the moment.

[Bart Simon]

10.

Just on my #4 - shiny stones notwithstanding I didn't mean to be cynical at all... more Kuhnian actually. Part of my reasoning is indebted to an important paper in science studies by Joan Fujimura - http://www.jstor.org/pss/800622

The abstract should make my point -

This paper analyzes the development of a scientific bandwagon in cancer research using a social worlds perspective and qualitative methods. It shows that a "standardized" package of oncogene theory and recombinant DNA technologies served as a highly transportable interface among many different laboratories and lines of research. That is, the package promoted intersections among different social worlds which, in turn, facilitated the rapid development of oncogene research and the larger molecular biological cancer research bandwagon. The paper proposes the bandwagon as one process by which conceptual shifts in science occur and shows that the process of such change is inseparable from both the local and broad scale organization of work and technical infrastructures.

[Richard A. Bartle]

11.

greglas>I could come up with a list of "core concepts" & terms & operations for math, visual art, physics, computer science, psychology, law, literature, philosophy, etc. These are the basic gears of the discipline & what you find as chapter headings in the 101 introductory textbook.

But those are at all kinds of levels. Does the introduction to Film Studies book contain the movie equivalent of these? They may talk about the affordances of various cameras and what this means for a director, but they're not going to go into the electronics; they may talk about camera angles, but they won't go into the mathematics of perspective; they'll talk about psychology in terms of suspense, and perhaps shot length, but not about why people watch movies; law barely gets a look-in except when censorship has an effect.

OK, so I was probably more strict there than I should have been, but the fact remains that your list of core concepts admits a lot more than Film Studies does. IP law, for example, is relevant to Film Studies but it isn't core Film Studies; is it core Game Studies? Why should it be?

>If there were that sort of thing for games, that would be an account best placed in game studies, right?

It would, but it could also be well placed elsewhere. Indeed, many of the most important papers for Game Studies have been published in non-Games journals. Is this just a passing phase, or will it be the same decades from now?

>how academia handles the visual arts & literature, which is by splitting design from theory.

This is fine if the designers are leery of theory. That can be the case with game design, but in my experience the better designers read the theory and absorb it. Some even write books as a result (Raph would be the exemplar here, but he's not alone). If the designers don't split design from theory, how can the academics do so?

>creative writing is not comparative lit is not lit theory.

But if creative writing were written according to lit theory informed by ideas from comparative lit, then anyone who looked at it from just one angle wouldn't see the whole picture. I don't suppose it's common in creative writing to do this, but it's not uncommon in game design.

>I imagine game studies will eventually end up scattered on a spectrum of application-criticism-theory like this, don't you think?

It probably will, yes; whether it should is another matter, of course.

>All of Bart's accounts are true, I'd say. #4 might count for a lot. Game studies has a lot of shiny stones at the moment.

Virtual worlds have been here before. There were periods in the 1990s when groups of academics descended upon them, debated them, fitted them into their theories, then left. Then they did it all over again. The only ones who have maintained interest are the lawyers, who didn't show up first time round but didn't disappear when they'd looked at the interesting parts.

Richard

[Erik Champion]

12.

"Virtual worlds have been here before. There were periods in the 1990s when groups of academics descended upon them, debated them, fitted them into their theories, then left. Then they did it all over again. The only ones who have maintained interest are the lawyers, who didn't show up first time round but didn't disappear when they'd looked at the interesting parts."
_Strangely I see some of the same names talking about virtual worlds as I saw in the nineties. And VRML pioneers (addicts?) don't seem to die, they just modulate.

"It occurred to me, though, that individually almost all of the papers could also have been published in journals that specialise in other subjects."
Back to Richard's main point or question, on the other hand I cannot think of a single academic discipline (or perhaps field?) that could be and has been confined to a single type of journal.
Q: What did Wittgenstein call the whole [of language]... "consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven"?
A: The 'language-game.'

And academics use language, or so I have been led to assume..

[Richard Bartle]

13.

Erik Champion>_Strangely I see some of the same names talking about virtual worlds as I saw in the nineties.

Yes, many of the individuals still retain an interest, but the charge they were leading has moved on. If the topic gains currency in their field again, then I don't doubt that they'll be at the head of the charge again.

I'm not suggesting that the individuals were being opportunistic (OK, well some were, but most weren't); rather, it's that the following pack wasn't as enthused as they were and went off in some other direction once virtual worlds were sorted.

>I cannot think of a single academic discipline (or perhaps field?) that could be and has been confined to a single type of journal.

No, but there are papers that you would have to squeeze really hard to get them to fit elsewhere. Sure, a philosopher or linguist could write about the nature of a mathematical proof, but the proof itself would only be publishable in the right kind of mathematics journal.

We seem to have a number of frames operating here:
1) The study of X for its own sake.
2) The study of X as an application domain for Y.
3) The study of Y as an application domain for X.
4) The study of X as a subfield of Y.
5) The study of Y as a subfield of X.
6) The study of any of 1) to 6).

Examples:
1) "Here's a cool game mechanic."
2) "We can develop AI to play games."
3) "We can develop games to help people learn."
4) "Games are a form of play."
5) "Computer games are a form of game."
6) "Headline: College Gunman is Computer Gamer."

Which of these is/are Game Studies? All of them? Just 1)? Just 1) and 5)? Just 6)? That's what I'm trying to ask here.

As you say, though, every subject has the same questions and at some level 6) is going to capture pretty well everything.

Richard

[Erik Champion]

14.

Very clear answer Richard, I follow your examples and I raise for you a dilemma in return:
1) our subject covers everything
2) only experts can understand our subject

..academic disciplines seem to try to straddle both, somehow, and so does game studies (so far). I do wonder however if game studies journals were written by game designers for game designers, if they would be so expansive in scope. Perhaps understanding how to create meaningful boundaries of play and to best experience this bounded play is closer to an essence of game studies (but also covers playground design). However game studies journals seem to be also for people understanding the effect of games on other issues or disciplines, not on designing play itself. Perhaps play design is itself the issue for academic journals.

[Richard Bartle]

15.

Erik>1) our subject covers everything

I was told recently that this is the conclusion that ITU came to when they debated the subject a while back.

>2) only experts can understand our subject

This probably explains 1)...

>I do wonder however if game studies journals were written by game designers for game designers, if they would be so expansive in scope.

They probably wouldn't be, I agree. Film Studies journals aren't packed with articles by directors, although the more erudite ones may contain articles about directors, or about some particular output. I don't know whether directors read these articles; my guess is that they do while learning their trade, but not much they've done so.

>Perhaps understanding how to create meaningful boundaries of play and to best experience this bounded play is closer to an essence of game studies (but also covers playground design).

This moves from games to play, though, which is a broader subject. Perhaps it should be play that we study, but there seems to be an implicit agreement that playing games is somehow different to playing not-games, in the same way that painting pictures is different to painting not-pictures (sheds, say).

>However game studies journals seem to be also for people understanding the effect of games on other issues or disciplines, not on designing play itself.

Do you think this is necessary, or an artefact of Games Studies' not being sufficiently nailed down as a discipline? As a game designer, I do like to know what relevance games have to other disciplines, because it gives me pointers to things in those disciplines that may interest me; I don't know if this is sufficient reason to include those disciplines in Game Studies, though (Game Studies as hyperlinks!).

>Perhaps play design is itself the issue for academic journals.

Ah, but play design for what purpose?

Richard