Culture Clash

(October 2004)

Cerebral Studies

The PC is going through what is potentially the most significant upgrade cycle in twenty years. Consoles, too, are in flux, with new versions expected in the next few years and increasing convergence of living room entertainment duties. And so also the game industry is changing, though this particular skin-shedding will be more evolutionary than the technical transformations. Specifically, we're beginning to see game developers who aren't self-taught, developers who attended classes on making games , and who apply that knowledge to what they produce. Sooner or later, the majority of developers will be educated at institutions with accredited game development programs. This will alter the landscape of gaming in ways that will be visible even to casual players, though the players may not understand why things are different. The next generation of game developers will place great importance on the academic discipline of studying what games are, what they mean, and what they can do. Game academia will have greater influence over game content, and games will be better for it.

This has caught academics by surprise in some ways, and scholars aren't fully prepared for it. In most cases academics work independently of one another, often with little intercommunication. Avenues of publication are widely available, if not as widely read, and there is certainly some unnecessary overlap or redundancy. Part of the reason for this is actually the fault of those educational development institutions that will be supplying the large portion of industry talent over the next few years: very, very few such programs include much critical discourse, “game theory,” as it were. Scholars aren't teaching at these schools, and they should be, because an academic environment encourages intellectual cooperation by granting unfettered communication to like-minded scholars. It also gets the full spectrum of knowledge into the hands of students, combining game “education” and game “studies,” and put to use making better games.

The discipline of filmmaking is probably the closest artistic parallel to game development; certainly plenty of today's successful filmmakers started at film schools. Here's an interesting fact about film school: about 80% of what students learn is theory-based: genre study, subjectivism, structure, critical language; the psychological, emotional, and philosophical roots of film. The remaining 20% is the actual this-is-the-lens-to-use mechanics of production. Why? Two reasons. First, because film is more art than technology, and the artistry of filmmaking comes from its theoretical basis. Second, as Hollywood rebel Robert Rodriguez (who actually never went to film school, and it shows) once noted, “If the technical stuff is all you learn, then you're going to spend your entire career pulling cables on someone else's big movie.” While games certainly aren't more art than technology, the ratio should at least be even, and right now it's not. Game design has been institutionalized; similarly, we must now institutionalize its theoretical underpinnings.

So the challenge is twofold: first, it's necessary to codify the discipline of ludology in order to minimize redundancy and grant developers easy access to the work of theorists. Second, it's necessary for institutionalized game education to start taking game studies more seriously, giving them an important place alongside the equally significant technical education. Fortunately, the former issue is resolved automatically if the latter is addressed. North America is doing a lot less on this front than European educators; the Scandinavian nations, especially, are taking all aspects of game education seriously and combining their curricula in a very responsible way. It's something that many game scholars are working hard to achieve – Matteo Bittanti, for example, is outspoken in his views on this subject, and has worked tirelessly to validate the need for critical and theoretical discussion of games in an academic setting.

Getting schools to include lectures on interpretive and theoretical issues is really up to the institutions themselves; aside from saying that they should, there isn't much that people can do to encourage it. One thing that we can do is produce more texts, stuff that becomes the can't-live-without-it canon of ludology. In the past few years we've seen a number of seminal books on the subject – Rules of Play, the Ludologica series, and others are becoming to game studies what Film Theory and Criticism is to film studies. These will eventually become the textbooks of “game theory” courses.

Part of the reason that theory doesn't get much of the academic pie compared to design and technology is because design and technology are tangible necessities in the game development process. You can't make a game if you don't know how to make a game. You can make a game, however, if you don't know how to make a good game, as Singles: Flirt up Your Life so elegantly demonstrates. That's what the theory teaches – how to make good games – so it gets short-shrifted sometimes. One need only look at the products of those who do take theory seriously (ihobo, Looking Glass, etc.) to see that there is a marked difference in the depth and impact of certain games. The fact of the matter is that gamers would have eventually lost interest in games had they not begun evolving beyond mindless blasting platforms. That evolution is very much the result of a growing sense of what games can accomplish, how they can affect their audiences.

The last challenge is more insidious. Somewhat depressingly, some individuals within the industry seem inexplicably convinced that scholars somehow represent a threat to them. I've never gotten so many responses to a column as I did for this one, and the vast majority of those responses confirmed game academia's worst fears: that even now there are plenty of people in the business who will tune out or attack an educated opinion for no other reason than to jealously guard their own. This is a smallminded and ultimately self-destructive view, and it hurts both the business and its products. Whether we like it or not the future of this industry is one of curriculized education, not parents'-basement geniuses. It would be wise to accept and benefit from this future rather than blindly hope it goes away.