The Ivory Tower

November 2004

What Mastery of Which Arts?

by Barry Atkins

Things had been going well. The students were attentive, relaxed and showed as much evidence as you ever get that they were learning something. The Art Manager of the local arm of an international developer had spoken about the realities of the industry in a frank and humorous way, and he was taking questions. I had been sitting at the back of the room throughout, and had been cheered by the ways in which what had been said matched what we had taught so far on the Masters programme.

And then one of the students, who had read his Salen and Zimmerman, his Caillois and Huizinga, and who was currently wrestling with Brian Sutton-Smith piped up.

‘So what use do you think there is to all this academic theory on games?' he said.

There was a slight ripple of laughter around the room and a few glances in my direction. I shifted a little uncomfortably in my seat and decided to go and do some paperwork. Somehow, I felt that if I had stayed, there might have been less frank exchange of views than the question, and the speaker, deserved.

I was curious as to what answer would come, but not anxious. After all, this was the third year that the speaker had contributed his time and expertise to a course that had never hidden its commitment to a meeting of theory and practice. We had already talked about his return to see the same cohort a little later in the year. Other local developers had been generous with similar offers, usually saying that they would want to meet the students more than once. I know that other courses in the UK and internationally have similar links with industry.

Now I am quite prepared to accept that everyone in the industry is an altruistic believer in education for its own sake, and one of the nice things about working in the area of games is the presence of so many committed enthusiasts among both developers and academics who will talk about games and share their experience given the slightest opportunity.

I am also aware, however, that there are some pragmatic considerations at work here, if only because the industry professionals have so many other demands on their time. Listening to a professional developer wax positively lyrical about how fortunate the students were that courses such as this now exist only a few minutes earlier, I was fairly secure that we, and other academics like us, were doing something right, and something right that went beyond teaching the students to work quickly in 3DSMax or Maya to low poly budgets, get a walk cycle right or produce assets that function effectively inside a game engine.

The technical skills our students were picking up were essential to their eventual employability, as it is for students on other courses focusing on programming or dealing with other aspects of design. But of more interest to industry, my conversations with the professionals seemed to indicate, was the way in which the university provided a place in which students could screw up and experiment, push at the limits and stretch themselves and their understanding of what games are and might be.

As an academic I am probably more inclined than an industry professional to believe that such a process of exploration necessitates knowledge of the critical and cultural conversation surrounding games that expresses itself in the theoretical research into games. And to believe that in the process of mixing up theory and practice the students learned how to learn (from successes as well as mistakes), as much as they learned about the technicalities of asset production, or project management, or working in teams, or even about the various theoretical models that are in circulation and the subject of ongoing debate.

But an interest in the process of learning was clearly shared with my industry collaborators.

This is the reason that the developers would want to see the students more than once – not to see the specifics of what they had learned in the intervening period, but to see how quickly they were capable of learning. If we are to graduate students as ‘masters' of anything, then it is mastery of the practice of learning in an environment where theory and practice meet, where the university provides a space in which students can develop as thoughtful practitioners before the realities of actual commercial production bite.

This might not be a particularly blinding insight, but it does appear to have some application beyond the teaching we do to the research and development work that underpins that teaching.

As I and my colleagues have reviewed our own projects making games and teaching games, thinking about games and (yes, we will admit it) playing games, it is that we have learned much, and that we will continue to learn much. As games researchers and theorists, games makers and games designers, as programmers and artists, we too all remain students of games. Any absolute distinction between ‘us' (the academic experts) and ‘them' (the students) would be futile, and not a little arrogant.

The word student, of course, conjures up images of the incomplete and the unfinished, a product that the industry might be suspicious of if what it wants is happy worker bees who can perform production-line tasks on their first day of employment. The industry is not particularly suited to such a model of staffing, however. We do not have to have memorised Moore's Law to recognise that games production is a space of rapid change and innovation, where the focus is always on a future that will be different from today. Even the most pessimistic doom-sayer who looks at the current crop of licences and sequels and sees the end of creativity and invention should recognise that the future producers of all games will be grappling with new software, new hardware, new engines, and new ideas. For the more optimistic amongst us we can look forward to new interfaces, new audiences, and new as yet unthought of genres.

We all – professional or academic – need to keep on learning, and recognising that we are all still students.

That, I suppose, is the key lesson I have learned so far about games in academia – and it may well have been a lesson I should already have known – that universities are effective places of learning, and that the industry has a need for those who are able and ready to keep on learning. If nothing else, universities have a long record of providing space to foster learning. Not only for the students who come to us for degrees and training, but for the academics and the professionals who do the teaching. If we remember that we are all learning, and that theoretical enquiry and research is a practice that constantly draws our attention to that process of our own learning, we might really have something to offer the industry: people already equipped to take part in an area of cultural production that is constantly developing, changing and evolving.

Did I ask the students what the response to the question had been? Yes. Did the professional dismiss the academic? No. If there is a divide between industry and academia, at least with regard to education, then I have yet to find it.

--
Barry Atkins
Barry Atkins is the author of "More Than a Game: The Computer Game As Fictional Form" and Programme Leader, MA Digital Games at Liverpool John Moores University.