The Ivory Tower

August 2004

The End Of The World As We Know It.?

by Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen

Two years ago the world saw the birth of a new ivory tower. However, this Ivory Tower column was more of a lighthouse than your traditional hideaway for researchers. The idea was to create a shared space between game researchers and game industry people interested in learning more about the strange beast called game studies.

The first columns were dedicated to defending the virtue of academics against what was believed to be a hostile game industry. However, this assumption turned out to be unmerited judging by the many readers and the fine feedback. The column has not quite found its form yet, but is increasingly beginning to address more pertinent issues relating to how researchers and industry can benefit from each other. This is the really interesting topic for my part, constantly wondering if years of research will find more specific use in schools, companies, training programs, or commercial products. Or will all this - what in my case boils down to ambitions for educational computer games - merely stay fantasies.

Looking back on the different columns, and from my own recent experiences of collaborating with the game industry, there are two important points to remember:

• Rise of opportunities: You need to be in places, where researchers and industry meet with a readiness to engage with people.
• Ability to see opportunities: It is not enough to experience an opportunity you also have to recognize it, and this requires understanding on both sides.

It sounds terribly simple but the point is that you constantly need to seek the opportunity - meaning both the chance for opportunities to appear and the ability to recognize them. Hopefully, the Ivory Tower column can carve out the foundations for such a place: The column is a chance for the researchers to consider the game industry as an audience, and the industry to get some feeling for the research.

My own recent experience has shown that timing and patience is essential. In my case the first initial contact was initiated one year before the first meeting concerning a concrete project, which is again half a year later not yet up and running. Still, the potential is quite great for actually benefiting more or less freely from years of research. For good reasons I can't really assess the outcome of the collaboration yet but I think there are some lessons to be learned from the project's upstart.

First of all collaboration becomes much harder without a basic understanding of how a business runs as Crawford has discussed in an earlier column. This does not dictate an in-depth understanding of business life but you should recognize that a company is ultimately in it for the money. If a company can't see the benefits from collaborating with researchers on a project work will proceed extremely slowly. The advantages from a company perspective can take very different forms, and to a high degree depends on seeing the right angle both as researcher and developer.

Second, let each side do what they do best, and don't expect game developers to become researchers overnight. I have found that an extremely effective set-up is to continue development on companies' technology (i.e. game engine). This is an area where game industry is at home, and it doesn't cost companies a lot to offer the technology for research purposes. Furthermore it can produce spin-offs in terms of development of extra features for the game engine or open new potential markets. In my case we've used of a commercial game engine for educational computer games.

Third, it helps if you as researcher are commercially hungry, meaning that you want your research to make a difference in the market. Approaching game industry with a desire for them to fund your research, and thinking they might make some commercial spin-off is somewhat naïve. This doesn't mean that the business agenda should become dominant but unless you are interested in the commercial perspective becoming a factor, then external funding may become quite cumbersome.

Fourth, working with a concrete prototype where you implement your research and try it out, is highly recommendable. This provides a shared space between researcher and developer, and forces the researcher to concretise theoretical thinking. This is also an excellent milestone and result for a research project to build future collaborations on. It is much easier to show a prototype of a game than a 200 page report to later potential collaborators.

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Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen
Resigning editor of the Ivory Tower column, Simon is currently finishing a PhD thesis on the educational potential of computer games taking commercial titles as the starting point.
He has written, researched, and worked with computer games, children, education, and learning since 1997. He is the author of two Danish books on computer games, and regularly gives talk on the subject both nationally and internationally.
He is a board member of Digital Game Research Association, co-founder of Game-Research.com, and a founding member of the Center for Computer Games Research Copenhagen. He can be eamiled via sen at game-research.com.