The Ivory Tower

December 2004

Will Master Chief Ever Frag Moby Dick?

by Nathan Garrelts

Whenever I tell my colleagues about my research interests I feel as if I am admitting some perverse addiction at a support group meeting. Although much has be written about the relationship between digital game scholars and digital game developers, an often uncommented upon relationship is the relationship between digital game scholars and their non-gamer colleagues. While game developers understand and value digital games, this is not always the case in the Ivory Tower where many academics are unaware of recent game developments and the cultural centrality of the medium. The widespread academic ignorance of digital games, combined with the fact that digital game studies are often conducted at the margins of other more established disciplines, creates a situation where game scholars are often compelled to explain and justify their research.

As an American Studies doctoral student at Michigan State University, I did not have much difficulty mitigating my research on digital games. Because my classmates studied everything from circus culture to the politics of fatness, my interest in digital games was novel but not notable. It wasn't until I began interviewing for jobs in English departments that I realized digital game studies raised both eyebrows and questions. Inevitably, members of search committees and high level administrators would ask, How will your research interests in digital games fit within the framework of our English department?

Three years and two tenure track positions later, I have found that it is not difficult to justify the digital game as a form of contemporary literature worthy to be studied from the vantage point of the English department. Though the term literature is often used to refer exclusively to creative or otherwise artistic compositions preserved in print, the domain of the term is much more extensive. Regardless of popular perception, and the protests of some academics, literature need not be confined to conventional print media -- nor has this ever been the case. Indeed, the only prerequisite for some item to qualify as literature is that a symbol system be used intentionally in a creative or artistic way to communicate experience.

Not only do digital games fit this definition, but also beyond this they have uniquely remediated several of the formal structures of literature to include: scripted dialogue, developed narratives, complex characters, and detailed settings. Moreover, digital games have replicated and extended the complex audience relationships pioneered in poetry and drama. As with poetry, digital games highlight the interdeterminate play of meaning between gamer and game, and as with drama, the experience presented in digital games is not only mentally engaging but immersive in that it often requires the creative involvement of the audience as player/performer -- even more so than the Barthesian writerly text.

In fact, because digital games so effectively press forward literary conventions, they might also be quintessential examples of postmodern literature. Among the many things that can be said about postmodern literature is that it often has fragmented or playful narratives, takes popular culture as a serious subject matter, presents the forgotten perspective of the marginal subject, encourages ontological questioning, and prizes ambiguity (Waugh). The end result of any combination of these postmodern tendencies is that audiences have to work hard to unravel the precariously contingent meanings within postmodern texts. Anyone who has ever played Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid II or Final Fantasy VII can attest that this is indeed the case in a number of digital games.

Of course, many academics become stuck on the point that digital games are not conventional print texts. On this issue, I contend that the means of preservation/ presentation, while important for analysis, is not important when defining some thing as literature. For example, if one considers the three most traditional genres of literature to include poetry, drama, and prose fiction, the first two examples quickly distinguish themselves as transgressing the boundaries of conventional print; poetry and drama are unequivocally considered literature, yet their existence in print is as incidental as it is functional.

Historically poetry has its roots in the oral tradition and, arguably, the poem in print originated as a preservation of -- or technological mediation of -- the voiced original. Although most poetry today is inscribed simultaneous with its composition, the continued attention given to the sound conventions of poetry lends credence to the argument that poetry remains closely tied the spoken word. In fact, lyric poetry, the most popular form of poetry today, is as likely to be digitally recorded as it is to be transcribed. In fact, Bob Dylan has been nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature several times. Indeed, this confounds some literature purists and often results in contradictory, elitist rhetoric on the subject of modern lyric as literature.

As with printed poetry, printed drama was initially inscribed so that dramatic material could be preserved, transmitted, and performed; the text of a drama is akin to sheet music. In reality, to treat drama as pure text is an academic perversion that seldom happens in English departments. Instead, textual, visual, and aural relationships are considered as essential for audiences to understand meaning, while the text/performer relationship is often ignored or dismissed to the theater department.

Unfortunately, within the Ivory Tower all things are political and this includes the right to study digital games. Even though academics have been able to successfully extend the domain of literature to include other voiced or performance based works such as hip-hop lyrics and Hollywood films, these alternate forms of literature are bastardized or marginalized while more traditional literature is made the subject of general studies and other required courses. Of course, this practice is defended with tenuous claims that students will somehow be enriched by having had the experience of reading canonical texts - -texts that they would likely not read otherwise. Yet, while there is no evidence that students inordinately benefit from this practice, it is apparent that scholars who specialize in studying such texts profit through their continued employment in the academy. It is also obvious that the inherent opportunity cost for students is that they do not receive guided instruction in thinking about the literature with which they interact daily. While I hope that digital games studies will find a niche in academia, it is highly unlikely that within the English department digital games will fare any better than their already bastardized cousins.

Work Cited: Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

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Nathan Garrelts
Nathan Garrelts is an Assistant Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. He is the founder and chair of the Video Game Studies area at the Popular Culture Association National Conference, and recently edited a collection of essays for McFarland Press on the intersection between digital games and gamers (final title TBA).