The Ivory Tower

June 2003

The more we talk, the smarter we get: the conversation between game designers and researchers

by Janet H. Murray

In previous columns my colleagues in games studies have talked about the broad questions that academic research can help to answer (Jesper Juul, Just what is it that makes computer games so different, so appealing?, The Ivory Tower, April 2003), and how it can help the games industry to understand the future of gaming (Celia Pearce, Into the Labyrinth: Defining Games Research, The Ivory Tower, May 2003). Their columns laid out the big picture for industry/academia cooperation, and should be enough to persuade corporations of the value of working with academic research programs. I’d like to focus in on the smaller picture: on why individual designers and researchers need to seriously engage one another, and why we should nurture organizations like IGDA and DiGRA that are helping to provide the framework for focused dialogues.
We are at a crucial time in the development of Game as an academic discipline. At this early stage, practice and theory are pretty close together, with many of those who are doing academic research about games also very active in making them. This model is not just true for the faculty (like myself and many other DiGRA members), but also for many of the graduate students. For example, two recent Georgia Tech masters degree graduates, Gonzalo Frasca and Chaim Gingold, are working in the games industry and also theorizing about games as an expressive form.

This close connection between making and studying is healthy for both enterprises. A tradition of self-reflection helps to professionalize design practice, taking it away from the limited horizon of the next profitable game, and focusing on the career-sized goals of expanding the power of the medium itself. On the other hand, a tradition of practice provides a testing ground for cultural theory, which otherwise could get lost in its own formulations. Film criticism provided a healthy context for the 1970s generation of film school graduates who went on to become innovative directors, but when the two professions diverged in the 1980s, film criticism became self-referential and its arguments grew weaker, distanced from the specificity of actual films. Game Studies can learn from the experience of Cinema Studies. Right now there is a healthy mixture of communities. Designers and researchers should do all that they can to keep building on this openness.

Game makers and researchers are currently involved in parallel processes that are becoming a common process—the effort to create a descriptive and critical language for games. Right now, we have a fan magazine vocabulary on one hand (“head boss”) and academic jargon on the other (“simulacra”). In between is a great deal of unarticulated territory. If you cannot describe how one game is similar to and different from another game, then you cannot describe what makes for a good one, or what constitutes innovation. Other creative traditions, from folk singing to filmmaking, rely on chains of apprenticeship to accumulate and pass down knowledge, creating many-stranded traditions of practice. This is the current state of discourse among designers within the game industry: it is an oral tradition, an informal tradition, and often a proprietary tradition with different kinds of critical shorthand used in different game companies.

Many designers have been actively working to articulate their own design process and to generalize principles of design. Eric Zimmerman is following in the tradition of Chris Crawford and Brenda Laurel with his forthcoming book on game design. Others – like Hal Barwood, Noah Falstein, Doug Church, Warren Spector, Will Wright – have worked to establish a focused design discussion through conference presentations, articles, and interviews. But the games industry does not provide much incentive for this activity.

Analytical discourse is more at home in academia. And, indeed, the academy is moving to include games as a subject of cultural research, similar to films and literary forms. As one whose career path was changed from Victorian scholar to interactive designer by a game (specifically Zork which I saw in 1981), I can sense a growing excitement as those who had dismissed or distrusted electronic gaming are increasingly coming to understand the expressive potential of Super Mario Brothers, Tetris, Grand Theft Auto and The Sims.

But an academic discourse does not replace the apprenticeship culture of game designers, any more than film school replaced it the apprenticeship culture of filmmakers. It merely augments it, accelerating the transmission process, and providing a more precise discourse. Academic discourse expands the circle of influence and offers new practitioners a more extensive palette. It also provides a context for new work.

For example, game research can trace the traditions of gaming, starting with pre-electronic games. Board games are among the earliest human artifacts we have. Indeed, animals show many behaviors that can be classified as play (focused behavior with high arousal but without immediate survival value) and may be seen as the precursors of human games. It is not surprising that games should have a long evolutionary history. Traditional human games may have helped to shape cognitive and social behaviors, reinforcing counting skills and patterns of reciprocation like turn-taking.

Game research can help us to see the forest as well as the branches and leaves of each individual tree. At Georgia Tech we are surveying game designers and game researchers trying to establish an expanding “canon” of important games, and analyzing these games in an attempt at elaborating a “morphology” of games: a set of patterns and components at differing levels of granularity. As we go about this we find that it is harder than we thought. Even a simpler category such as the “shooter” can be hard to define (does it have to be a gun? is it always first person? must you be shot at as well as shooting?). Every pattern we find leads us to several more that need defining. The same thing happens when we work out from a single game. Indeed, one could spend an entire year analyzing the simplest arcade game.

One of the morphemes or patterns that I expect to be productive is the notion of an arena, a magical space in which a game takes place. An arena can be a game board, a pinball machine, or a computer screen. In my own childhood on the streets of New York, girls played a game called Potsy. The arena was a chalked area into which we would throw game tokens (usually our keychains) and then hop and jump around to retrieve. The boys had a more exciting game called Ringolevio. There the arena was the whole block, which included areas designated as home base for the opposing teams that chased, hid from, and captured one another. Verbal games like 20 Questions do not have a spatial arena, but they have a circle of players whose presence makes up the game arena. These examples can help us to think about new forms like multiplayer online games, where you need the virtual space, the real-time processing of the responsive environment, and the presence of other players to make a complete arena.

Or maybe arena is not the right way to think about it. Academic discourse differs from informal traditions in that you have a duty to try to prove one another wrong, and though you can’t just flame at your fellow researchers; you must offer supporting or opposing arguments in terms of common assumptions and commonly available evidence. This disciplined way of reasoning helps everyone’s understanding to progress. I like it when people tell me that my work has been helpful to them as critics or designers, and when they use the analytical structures I have built as a foundation for their own. But I also like it when they quarrel with my assumptions or point out the limitations of my approach. Game theorists, game designers, and avid gamers all have knowledge and judgments that bear on the many open questions of game research. The more we can talk together, the better we can make our common language. And the more precise our language the more we can pool our knowledge, and the smarter we get.

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Professor Janet H. Murray is an internationally recognized interactive designer and the director of Georgia Tech's graduate program in Information Design and Technology. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.