The Ivory Tower

September 2003

The Arrival of Computer Game Studies

by Dr. Graeme Kirkpatrick

The time has come for humanities scholars to stop apologising for being interested in computer games. The new MA in Computer Game Studies at Northumbria University is unashamedly a humanities course, concerned only with the social and cultural aspects of the computer game. The degree is both a flagship for the new discipline and a tribute to the powerful body of work that explores the meaning(s) of computer games as a cultural presence. Although Masters level games scholarship has existed for a few years now, mostly in Scandinavian universities, this is the first to offer structured taught courses organised around a canonical literature, a fact which reflects the different status of Masters level programmes in the respective academic cultures but also testifies to the emergence of the new discipline.

In the terminology of the philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard, game studies has established its own, distinctive problematic – a question or set of questions that can only be addressed from within a discrete framework. Once this is established the new discipline can evolve hypotheses and methods that define work within the new field and mark it off from its neighbours. This stage has definitely been reached with computer game studies as a branch of humanities scholarship. We no longer need to rely on the unique conjunction of design, animation, scripting and coding that constitute the technical basis of games production to give the study of games legitimacy. There is a unique cluster of meaning-oriented questions that are worth asking in themselves and which cannot be addressed within other disciplines. Moreover, these questions are of sufficient depth and scope that serious attempts to answer them merit recognition as scholarly work.

Until recently, addressing the questions that define computer game studies required that we draw upon the resources of several established humanities subjects as discussed by Janet Murray in an earlier Ivory Tower column. To understand ‘interactivity’, for instance, was a problem within psychology or human computer interaction. Now there is awareness that interaction with a game is not adequately grasped within these frameworks. We also need ideas about play and narrative; ideas that were formerly explored within development psychology and literary studies respectively. Only with these in mind can we understand interactivity as it works in games. Similarly, they do not of themselves furnish the resources for understanding play or storyline in games – to grasp these we need ideas about interactivity. A new synthesis is necessary. When we ask the question: ‘What is play with a computer game?’ we are asking a new question with answers that define a new field of enquiry and research. This work is being done, by scholars with first class minds, all over the world. We are privileged, then, to be present at the birth of a new, humanities discipline.

These developments at the level of knowledge are driven by the differentiation of the game form itself. Increasingly, scholars are arguing that it is not possible to generalise about games – with Tetris being the most-often cited illustration of a game that simply defies comparison to most others. The coherence of game studies is not threatened by this, any more than chemistry has been menaced by the discovery of new elements. The diversity of games requires more detailed analysis conducted by people with the requisite skills. Game criticism becomes more important than ever and reviewing games an increasingly sophisticated skill. The role of criticism is easy to miss. It is not only a question of telling people that it is OK to like games, or of engaging in gratuitous over-complexification of the simple act of play. Criticism challenges people to understand better their own engagement with an art form or medium. In this way, it is instrumental in the creation of audiences who are able to rise to the challenge of better, more difficult, perhaps even troubling games.

A new cultural space is gradually opening up around the game form, evidenced by the use of games-based ideas in contemporary art and literary fiction. The critical public who respond to these works will need to be able to draw upon the resources of our discipline to understand what is going on. The differentiation of the cultural space defined by the game has only just begun and those who come to terms with it now will be equipped to make sense of it for others. For example, it is now well established that games can be used for mainstream educational purposes. As games become more diverse and the possibilities multiply, educationalists will need input from people who understand how they work – not technically, but upon human beings under definite sets of psychological and social circumstances. This expertise will be essential to the task of integrating games properly into the curriculum.

As anyone who was present at the ‘Power Up’ symposium in Bristol last month will be aware, games can be and usually are political interventions; they are replete with ideological possibilities. As the leading critical theorist of technology, Andrew Feenberg, points out one of the negative features of contemporary capitalism is the way that it stymies the development of technology, preventing us from experiencing it as a vocation. The game player’s fascination with the behaviour of the computer, their use of it to establish new communities ‘on-line’ and, increasingly, their willingness to modify games and share the results with their peers are, in this context, intensely political acts. Cyber-society may be pre-structured by social power but it also has its cultures of resistance and the gaming community may be a cultural launching off point for people to participate in these.

The political, ideological and cultural importance of games can only be understood by those who understand game culture in its specificity. In other words, the questions games raise can only be adequately answered within the framework of computer game studies.

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Dr Graeme Kirkpatrick is senior lecturer in sociology and course leader for the MA degree in Computer Game Studies at the University of Northumbria in the UK. He has published articles on technology, society and culture in a number of journals, including Thesis Eleven, Max Weber Studies, Imprints and Science & Society. His co-edited volume, Historical Materialism and Social Evolution, was published by Palgrave in 2002. His book on the sociology and politics of personal computing will be published by Ashgate Press in 2004.