The Ivory Tower

May 2004

The Two Cultures, Maybe Three

The phrase "The Two Cultures" was coined by British philosopher C.P. Snow 45 years ago. In a famous lecture, he noted that Western intellectual culture was dividing into two mutually antagonistic camps, the science/engineering camp and the arts/humanities camp. Snow warned that this separation boded ill for civilization, because science and engineering confer power upon us, but the arts and humanities give us the wisdom to wield that power prudently.

Snow's warning has certainly come home to roost in the field of game design. Let's face it, the world of game design is dominated by science/engineering people; people from the arts and humanities play a secondary role. Snow could have predicted the result: a vast wasteland of cold, heartless games, technological works of genius deficient in redeeming social value.

The Two Cultures divide is reflected, to a smaller extent, in the interface between the games industry and academia. Games people remain obsessively science/engineering in their focus, while the academics who have expressed the greatest interest in games are more often based in the arts and humanities. These two sides talk right past each other, sometimes with barely hidden disdain. For example, some years ago at an annual conference that I host on interactive storytelling, one session was scheduled for a discussion of the Two Cultures problem. As soon as the discussion began, the traditional game design people walked out of the session and went off to discuss technical matters. What a graphic demonstration of the magnitude of the problem!

In the April edition of this column, Ian Bogost pointed out that science/engineering tends to be "predictably useful" where arts/humanities tend to be "unpredictably useful". I agree with Ian, and go a step further. If we think of game design as an act of ambassadorship between two disparate parties, the computer and the human, then the science/engineering people know the computer side and the arts/humanities people know the human side. The arts/humanities people are just as important in bridging the chasm between computers and humans as the science/engineering people are.

The other side of the coin is the reluctance of some academics to bother relating their work to actual game design. The impressive work of such luminaries as Espen Aarseth, Lev Manovich, or Brenda Laurel earns high praise, but after studying these works, I cannot find anything of value to a game designer. Somehow, these brilliant minds have managed to assemble a body of insightful work that avoids mentioning anything of utility to game designers.

What can be done to correct this problem? There's no quick fix, I'm sorry to say; once people have been trained with a particular mindset, they can't seem to break out of it. The problem can only be fixed in the next generation. Fortunately, we are already seeing signs of progress here. The current generation of new doctorates shows much broader facility with both science/engineering and arts/humanities.

Still, we need to go much further. We need educational programs that expose students to equal amounts of technology and art. They should learn to program even as they study Michelangelo, rhetoric and recursion, algorithms and architecture. In this regard, I think that the Europeans have the advantage over the Americans. For example, I taught several courses at the University of Bremen and was impressed with the broad-mindedness of the students there; they can argue architecture while writing code. Perhaps it's the pervasiveness of public art in Europe; I don't know. But there's no question in my mind that they have an advantage here.

Unfortunately for the Europeans, as far as entertainment software goes, there are Three Cultures, not just Two. The third culture is business, and this is where the Americans have the advantage over the Europeans.

In America, the science/engineering culture dismisses the arts/humanities culture, but both cultures have learned to get along with the business culture. In Europe, the science/engineering culture and the arts/humanities cultures get along just fine, but neither can embrace the business culture.

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Chris Crawford
Chris Crawford sold his first computer game in 1978. He was manager of games research at Atari in the early 1980s, and has designed and programmed 14 published computer games. He has written five books on computers and game design. He founded and ran the Computer Game Developers' Conference in its early years. He is now working on interactive storytelling.