As I was on my way to Austin I took the time to read gamespot's excellent article about the relationship between academia and games. It's a topical topic, with the new crop of students heading for the halls of learning and labour. Indeed, if you want something to inspire you back into further education, check out Dr. Edward Castronova's proposed seminar schedule for the Topical Seminar in Media and Society: Virtual Worlds at the University of Indiana. I particularly like the reading list.
Man, why didn't they offer this at my school?
In honour of the beginning of the school year, gamesblog grabbed Gonzalo Frasca, one of the leaders of the game studies community, at the recent Academic Day at London's Game Developer's Conference-Europe. He is based at the IT University of Copenhagen and also co-runs the political games development company Powerful Robot Games. He and Dr. Ian Bogost were commissioned last year to make the first political party-funded game, Dean for Iowa. Some of their titles are pretty effective; check out September 12th for a good example of how games can inspire deep thinking and moral thought. (requires Shockwave)
Frasca also runs Ludology.org, a blog of resources for the games studies community.
How much has your academic background influenced the games that you design? Totally. My thesis was on political videogames, and two years later I was making a political video game for the American election. I think I would have made quite a different game if I hadn't spent two years thinking about it and the issues involved. I'm not saying it would have been better or worse, but this project even caught me off guard. I think my academic background gave me confidence and energy to go and talk to politicians about making a game.
What is it about the current cultural and social climate that allows people to get Games Studies PhDs? Well, there's money in videogames firstly, and at the end of the day that appeals. People who grew up with games are now getting older. They know games aren't going to drive them nuts or make them kill their friends or anything. People have been moved by games, they have made friends because of games, so goodbye bias!
How do people who consider games to be "just for kids" respond to you as a grown man who studies them? In general, I don't know. I've been able to make a living making games in a very poor country so I guess I got some respect out of that. I'm not that stupid after all. Personally I haven't felt much rejection over the past couple of years. Before that I was kind of ashamed to say I studied videogames. Now I don't have a problem at all.
People who are not familiar with games have a bias. Many games are crappy. There's a lot of reasons to hate many games, but there are also many great games.
What kinds of things do people study? The breadth is enormous. They study all kinds of things: politics, social issues, psychological issues, aesthetics – what does it mean to have beautiful gameplay, or more abstract ideas – and of course that's from the non-game development side of things. On that end you have engineering, physics, 3D modelling. People also study them within the context of health issues and how games modify your body. I'm really worried that this may give a Microsoft executive who has no idea what makes a good game tools for refusing a game because it doesn't generate enough saliva. That's the kind of things they find. Thankfully, I haven't had to deal with business people like that yet.
Games studies conferences are the only interactive entertainment-related conferences where there's a queue for the ladies' loo. Would you say that proportionately more women study games, and is this representative of the research community? My supervisor was Janet Murray, and she's one of the best known people in the field. In our centre we just hired a new PhD woman yesterday. I'm not sure if we're 50/50, but if we're not we're 60/40.
There're plenty of women I know who do great research. It might be a great thing to have an academic field starting from scratch now so at least you don't have to drag in the politics from before.
Why do you think industry can learn from academia and vice versa? There's this fear from industry towards academia and this arrogance from academia towards industry, but it's technically it's changing. To the people in the industry who have strong feel against academia, I say there's nothing wrong with Homer or Shakespeare, but these people have been dead forever so wouldn't you rather, if you had to go to school again, study Zelda at school? It's the academics who are going to make this possible. If you want your kids to go to school and learn about Miyamoto and Will Wright that's how it works. It can't be bad.
On the other hand, the academics have no idea how hard and how complicated it is to make and ship a product. And as the industry grows older, designers may enjoy doing some part time teaching. In that way, it's a collaboration.
