The Ivory Tower

July 2003

Do we need a common language?

by Espen Aarseth

Two industries, two cultures?

In this column and elsewhere, there has been much discussion of how academia and industry can cooperate for mutual benefit. Many good suggestions have been put forward, and even when some of them fall short, they help us by understanding each other's needs and wants better. One common pitfall, I think, is to regard the two sides as monolithic; "the industry" on the one hand as a cash-loaded, anti-intellectual juggernaut with short attention span, and "academe" on the other as a "self- indulgent masturbatory navel-gazing" bunch of … well, navel-gazers, I suppose.

The Academy is really just another industry, with short term production goals (student credits), competition for market share, product launches (new courses) every six months, and if we are very lucky, a bit of creative research at the end of the day, or (more likely) in our spare time. But while the commercial game industry has been around for few decades, the academic game industry doesn't really exist yet. We are still inventing ourselves. The best game theory out there still comes from people like Richard Bartle and Harvey Smith. But give us a couple of hundred years, and we will give you Einstein. Trust me, it will happen.

The above quote about masturbatory practices is lifted from Ernest Adams's closing remarks at this year's Academic Summit at GDC, where Mr. Adams, in his usual sharp, witty, and yet endearing top-hat fashion warned us (us game academics, that is) not to become like the literary academics:
"To those of you who come out of dramatic and literary criticism: if you do to this medium what you have done to literature and drama, then communication between us is at an end."

While it is easy to understand and even share the sentiment behind his stern warning (who, after all, likes navel-gazing academics? – probably not even their own mothers), this time it seems to me that my favorite game dev pundit, while attempting to rocket jump, has fragged himself in the foot.

A closer look at literary history, from Greek drama to Stephen King, reveals a close, mutually beneficial relationship, where theorizing, writing, teaching, mentoring and editing go hand in hand in hand. Sure, there is love and hate, as in any long-lasting, productive marriage. But in the long run (the next two thousand years of game development and criticism) we could do a lot worse than duplicate the symbiotic relationship between literary criticism and creative writing. Adams’ warning against self-indulgent, non-communicative jargon should be heeded, but journals such as Game Studies have been dealing with this from the start. That GS has received flak from other academics for this policy, such as in a recent discussion on the DIGRA list, is surely a sign of good health. It also shows that just as the game industry comes in many different shapes, sizes and agendas, so do the gamademics.

The Quest for a Universal Language

Speaking of jargon, it has been suggested, by Ernest Adams and others, that a way to make ourselves useful would be for academics to develop a common language, a shared vocabulary that the industry could use to standardize their design documents and daily communication. This sounds like a good, academic project, but is it really? As Janet Murray pointed out in last month's column, academic research is not about reaching consensus above all, it is about producing knowledge, and this means disagreement as often as agreement. Even after two thousand years of research, there is no industrial-strength common terminology of storytelling.

There are many dictionaries and shared vocabularies in narratology, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that one standard language will emerge anytime soon, despite narratologists' best efforts. Vocabulary-building, like community-building, is a slow, collective and infinite process, and not always compatible with critical analytic research. People see things differently, and words are far from neutral carriers of common, already-agreed meaning. What to do, for instance, with 'addictive'?

Of course, a standard technical terminology would be of great value to a large game production company, but in that case, let them pay for it! That is what other industries with similar needs do, such as the oil industry in Norway. Compiling and maintaining industrial terminologies is a standard applied-research task for trained terminologists (terminology is a branch of applied linguistics). It is probably not a task best left to game theorists, who would probably never agree on any other terms than those of their own invention.

And it could actually be a bad idea to have a common language, this early in the infant tradition of digital game-making. Immature standards are tomorrow’s straitjackets, and if I dare risk Mr. Adams' wrath for a moment by invoking a very useful tenet of post-structuralism, words tend to direct and shape our ideas much more than we like to think. Their meaning control us more than vice versa.

In the fast-moving world of creative game development, probably the last thing we need is a perfect common language. Game production is already becoming so standardized that innovation and art would probably benefit from more, rather than less, chaos and pluralism.

Don't get me wrong. I am not at all against attempts to standardize terminology. In fact, as a theorist I do it all the time. We all do. It is just that I don't think that the end result of a conscious, collective effort to produce a dictionary, should it be organized (and funded) will be all that useful, if we by hard work or divine intervention managed to reach consensus. Its chief value will probably come from the process rather than the product, through the awareness raised by the difficult decisions. As with gaming itself, the path is the goal.

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Espen Aarseth is an associate professor at the Center for Computer Games Research and a professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. He is also the founder and an editor of the academic game journal, Game Studies.