Culture Clash

(September 2003)

First Comes Love, then Comes Marriage

Developers must embrace their academia

Some weeks ago I had a brief discussion over e-mail with a developer who implied, in an oblique sort of way, that he doesn’t like my column. “I don’t like your column,” he wrote, “and your opinions are not valid.” When asked why, his response was simple: “You’re not a developer.”

True, I am not, though how this invalidates my theories on the subject of electronic gaming escapes me. It is not necessary to build a car to know how to drive; nor does one need drawing aptitude beyond stick figure level to appreciate a painter’s masterpiece. There are plenty of careers in the industry peripheral to the act of development, but this periphery in no way reduces the ability of those filling such roles to be part of a medium’s scholarship.

It is important for developers to realize that scholars are not the enemy but the ally, and that only by working together can gaming evolve. This means that developers must accept the presence of nondeveloper scholars in their midst. Some game developers, like some filmmakers or composers, seem threatened by the presence of media experts who are not also media creators. “If you haven’t written an opera, you’re not qualified to comment on mine,” a librettist might say.

The devaluing of pure scholarship by certain creators is often followed up by the outlandish postulation that scholars only do what they do because they couldn’t cut it as creators; a notion as ludicrous as if Buzz Aldrin were to claim that an astronomer’s theories cannot be valid unless he has flown in space. It’s a variation on the old saying “those who can’t, teach.”

Plenty of teachers can and choose not to, and developers would be well advised to believe that. The vast majority of film professors and critics are not embittered Hollywood failures. They chose scholarship, just as some game industry experts choose not to be developers. It would be ill-advised for developers to assume that an industry expert would only write articles about games because he failed to make them.

It’s important to note that not all developers are offended by the idea of a scholarship composed partly of nondevelopers. Many (maybe most) cheer it wholeheartedly, and the industry should be frankly grateful to such developers, not only for their open-mindedness, but for their eager anticipation of the scholarship’s product, based on the plausible ground that it will help them make better games. Other developers still need to be convinced that they’re not the only ones qualified to generate theory.

The existence of an external scholarly establishment for a medium can be tremendously beneficial: nondeveloper academics are not bound by publisher deadlines, not required to produce thoughts that capitalize on recent industry fads, not limited to R&D results that can fit into a box. Meanwhile, a sampling of what they can do:

• Educate the nongaming public about the awesome creative power of the medium, as nondeveloper Steven Poole does in Trigger Happy
• Defend the industry against unfair attacks on gaming, as nondeveloper Gerard Jones does in Killing Monsters
• Provide an artistic retrospective of the industry’s evolution, as nondeveloper Lucien King does with the GameOn Exhibition
• Generate theories on the validity of games-based interactive education , as nondeveloper James Paul Gee does in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
• Examine the application of the game experience to cultural and social problems, as nondeveloper Gonzalo Frasca does in Videogames of the Oppressed – Videogames as A Means for Critical Thinking and Debate
• Apply virtual worlds to studies of market economy, as nondeveloper Edward Castronova does in Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier
• Formulate early theories in the critical area of genre study, as nondeveloper Diane Carr does in Playing Dead: Genre and Affect in Silent Hill and Planescape Torment

Ideally, there should be a symbiosis between development and academia, a point further discussed by (nondeveloper) Espen Aarseth. The fact that academics aren’t necessarily developers doesn’t preclude actual developers from participating if they choose to. Game developers who wish to contribute to the scholarship are welcome. Developers who choose to ignore academic and critical advances are equally free to do so, though history tells us that a director with a solid background in film theory is more likely to produce a superlative film than one who merely knows how to use the equipment. It’s inane to think that a person must make films in order to understand or add to film theory, yet that’s what some game developers seem to think of the nondeveloper academia.

Film was used only to capture motion and examine kinetics until visionary directors, spurred on by the theories of non-filmmaker scholars, used it to create emotional impact through narration. Game developers and industry academics could collaborate similarly to produce the games and the critical language necessary to drive the evolution of interactive media to the silicon horizon. We don’t yet possess sufficient insight into games’ unique capabilities of narrative, genre, and interactivity to differentiate them from passive entertainment like movies. Scholarship will produce theories leading to eventual understanding, and based on these theories, developers will produce the games that act as the gateway to our medium’s future.

There is a long history of antagonism and animosity between the “doers” and the “ponderers” in the early stages of any medium’s development. The sooner this rancor gives way to cooperative amity, the sooner we can all look forward to making our art form into what it deserves to be – both by making the games and by examining them. Gaming’s penultimate future is one of machined reality, of handmade perception, and without significant analysis of the norms and potentialities of this concept, forty years from now the games we play may look and sound better, but the experience, the impact, will languish unevolved.