The Ivory Tower

May 2003

Into the Labyrinth: Defining Games Research

by Celia Pearce

Anyone in our field can attest that the bane of our existence is the proverbial cocktail party question: “What do you do?” The answer “I’m a digital games researcher” is met with a spectrum of responses. The most common of these comes almost as an accusation “Are games making our children violent?” It is a simple question that implies a simple, if not simplistic, answer, for which, as we all know, none exists. In fact, people in this category rarely want to hear the real answer, in spite of your perceived expertise. Then there is the game fan, age 13-to-30, who thinks you have the coolest job in the world and is amazed that such a thing exists. In between these extremes is a range of responses: the baffled expression, the glazed-over look and quick change of subject, and the occasional case of healthy curiosity.

Among members of the game industry, the popular misconception is that game academics are merely teachers of game design producing worker bees trained in more or less standard industry practices. This is more the role of vocational schools, which are quite happy to accommodate the status quo. However, the University is distinguished by the fact that it is both a teaching and a research institution. There is a reason why the newly formed association of these peculiar fish-out-of-water have chosen to call ourselves Digital Games Research Association, and not the Digital Games Teaching Association. While all of us teach, we are also engaged in games research. But what precisely is games research?

Games research, like game design, is something of a game in and of itself, a game that is being designed as it is played. As suggested by Jesper Juul’s DiGRA column last month, (Just what is it that makes computer games so different, so appealing?, The Ivory Tower, April 2003) computer games provide us with infinite directions for exploration. Digital games research is a labyrinth of discovery that integrates an array of disciplines hitherto unconjoined. Currently, much of game research falls under the rubric of “digital cultures.” A wonderful example is a recent paper in the Game Studies Journal on Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-Strike (Wright, Boria and Breidenbach), a subject that should be as interesting to game designers as it is to academics. Other game research topics include: narrative structure in games; history, evolution and sociology of online role playing games; “computer semiotics” (a fancy “academese” way of describing how meaning is constructed), and “ludology” (a fancy academese way of saying “the study of play.”)

In the industry, “game convention” usually conjures up E3 or the Game Developer’s Conference. But academics use the term to refer to the conventions of communication, to genre, to the formal (e.g., of or relating to form) aspects of games, to the “rules of the rules,” so to speak. For the most part, game conventions—such as real time 3D, cut-scenes, interface controls, levels, the uses of time and space, character and story, etc.—have evolved unselfconsciously from a confluence of idiosyncratic creativity, technical constraints and an iterative process that is highly responsive to player likes, dislikes and demands. While game designers are in the business of creating and establishing those conventions, games researchers are in the business of identifying and articulating them, elaborating on their unique properties, and understanding their expressive qualities. Currently in development is a game canon of the important and genre-making works that distinguish game-making as an “art form.” Like early cinema, the status of the game as an art form is still in question, but one thing can be said for sure—no popular medium has ever been able to establish itself as an art form without the aid and support of academia. Our role is, in part, to shine a flashlight into the corners of the labyrinth to help better understand and describe what games are and why they are so compelling.

At “Entertainment in the Interactive Age”, a conference I organized at University of Southern California in 2001, MIT comparative media scholar Henry Jenkins pointed out that the development of an academic practice of film study and critique was instrumental in producing a generation of artists who revolutionized the film industry and brought it to what could be considered “maturity.” The critical study of genre-inventing filmmakers like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock produced such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Federico Fellinni and later Steven Spielberg, as well as helping to create a more savvy film audience. As games researchers begin to explore this sector of the labyrinth, they bring with them a generation of students for whom game-playing is already native. This sense of indigenous habitation of games, combined with a critical sense of history, artistry and cultural impact, will help to elevate games to their next level of creativity, innovation, and maturity.

Even technical researchers in academia are beginning to recognize the value of games. We know that bandwidth is growing at a rate that exceeds Moore’s law, and we anticipate an increase of several orders of magnitude in processing and graphics power in the coming decade. It is only a matter of time before the inevitable absorption of digital cable tuners into game machines. Most game industry research is constrained by market forces to anticipate a future that extends only as far out as next Christmas. But academic researchers have the luxury of both studying the past and imagining the future five, ten, twenty years out. We also have the luxury of making mistakes, provided we document them appropriately, a service that can be viewed as “outsourcing risk.” Why not join forces, integrating industry’s market-savvy and skill as popular culture mavens with the long-term time range of academic research? This interspecies cross-fertilization could serve as a power-up for coming levels of evolution.

The view from inside the academic labyrinth is fraught with its own obstacles. For starters, most academics regard games as “the medium that dare not speak its name.” The fact that game-playing is the favored recreational activity of college students only casts it under further suspicion. In addition, academia’s greatest weakness is its disciplinary ghettoization, a sort of institutionalized intellectual lobotomy. Unlike the game industry, which has long integrated creative and technical pursuits, rarely do the expertise of cultural mavens, artists and techno-wizards in academia merge. Games are an ideal rallying point around which to integrate various disciplines, creating an excellent test-bed for historically and sociologically informed cultural and technological production. In this arena, games could quite potentially revolutionize academia from the inside by demonstrating the necessity for synergy between technological development and digital cultures.

Regardless of the potential for academic inertia, the zeitgeist will most certainly win out in the end. In the past two years, the inclusion of games in an array of academic disciplines has gone from non grata to de rigeur. Often, it is the students who drive the demand, as more and more of them clamor for inclusion of games in the curriculum. As younger researchers join a handful of veterans who have long embraced gaming, a critical mass is beginning to form, possibly at the same clip as Moore’s law. In any case, we have clearly reached the point where games can no longer be ignored as both a vital cultural influence and a viable economic force. One hopes that we will find ways to integrate across both disciplines and domains, so that we can accelerate our collective process in our adventures through the labyrinth.

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Celia Pearce is a game designer, writer, teacher and the Associate Director of the Game Culture & Technology Lab at University of California Irvine’s Cal-(IT)2.