Academic Insights: What Researchers Can and Can't Tell You About Your Games IGDA Panel at the GDC 2005 - Dmitri Williams (Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) - James Paul Gee (Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading University of Wisconsin) - Jesse Schell (Prof. Entertainment Technology Carnegie Mellon University) - Edward Castronova (Associate Professor of Telecommunications Indiana University) - Constance Steinkuehler (MMOG Cognitive Researcher, University of Wisconsin) Summary/Notes ============= Jesse Schell (Moderator) ------------------------ - There is a difference between game research and game education. - Researchers would love to make use of industry data, and have the time and training to get useful data out of it. - Game studios that take the time to make university contacts get a lot of benefits at little or no cost. Edward Castronova ----------------- - As the industry shifts from toy production to community service, it will need as much help from behavioral scientists as it currently needs from computer scientists. - There are rich opportunities for university-based applied research, sponsored by game companies. Bring us your problems and give us the tools - such as a functioning MMORPG - and we will give you high-impact, deep-think answers. Dmitri Williams --------------- - Games matter culturally, and having academics do work on them both legitimizes their value and offers some protection from external forces, e.g. you'll want us around when you get called before Congress - We have expertise in forming and answering hypotheses through a wide range of methods including interviews, surveys and experiments. You may have questions about your game, retention rates, HCI functions, fun, etc. Give us access to data (or better yet work with us) and we'll give you answers. On a simple level we can be low-cost consulting work. Do you know how cheap grad students are? They're the best cost/quality tradeoff you'll find and we have loads of 'em. - Our goals are not to make you happy. They are to discover truths. But there are plenty of areas in which you should want to know truths. Constance Steinkuehler ---------------------- - Research on games can help designers better understand what people actually _do_ within them. This can only help design. I've personally had conversations with industry folk about specific mechanics within their game worlds and how they might be able to design structures that enable the activities they want to see while constraining the one's they don't. In the case of MMOG's, people do wildly unpredictable things with the game rules (and legal regulations) sometimes. I can offer insight into that. - Research on games can also help the industry design games that appeal to a wider audience than they currently do. My concern: women! - At GDC last year, there was a panel on the relationships (if any) between academics and industry and the conversation devolved into a discussion of the differences and tensions among them, and the academic side of games was inadvertently reduced down to the question 'how can universities better train folks for jobs in the industry.' Well, I don't train people for industry. Rather, I study games. And by the very nature of what I do (care about games, try to understand them in a deep way, think about the relationships among games and other aspects of folk's everyday lives), I have lots in common with game designers. We care about the same things. -We ought to look at the relationships industry and academic folk have fostered on the grassroots level and ask ourselves what works / what doesn't rather than take up grand generalizations that are more divisive than anything else. At UW, our games group includes designers and theorists alike. We game together, argue, write, talk, and frag. It's proven productive in both directions. I'd like to start there and build on that. James Gee --------- Universities do not have to be seen as only sites for game design programs that will train people for the industry. They can*and, I believe, will*also become sites where games, gaming, and game design are studied as a "liberal art", much as we do literature and film. Students can use games as a lens with which to think about social interactions, economics, social and cultural issues, complex problem solving, communication, and content of a wide variety of different types bearing on many different issues. Students can use game design as a lens to think about the role of the design of complex rule systems and "world making" as creative acts that can be art, social commentary, problem spaces, and exploration, as well as an escape into a realm of role-playing, fantasy, and imagination. We have done this with literature*all sorts of literature, not just "great books"*for years. We view literature as "equipment for living" and games can also be "equipment for living", but of a different sort, one that stresses the player's activity, interactivity, decisions, and control. This will have the effect of making video games a mainstream force in society, taken for granted as a communicational and expressive media. It will be part of a process that eventually helps spread games, to new niches*for work, school, training, communities, the elderly, and many more*it will be part of a process that creates new ways to use commercial games and creates new slots for new types of games altogether. But the centerpiece of this effort will be the best of today's commercial games and game designers. From the audience ================= Q Why don't you publish in Gamasutra? A Because we have to publish in academic journals to get tenure as a first priority. Nevertheless, point taken. We ought to reach out more. Q Have you tried to contact devs to do joint projects? A Yes, with very mixed success. Many think we want charity or port us off to PR departments. The consensus answer is that it isn't going to be a "game shop" that reaches out to a professor. It will be one passionate voice within a shop that makes it happen.