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"Ready!" And, go. He rushes left, gobbling tiny white dots along the way. He makes a left and a quick right, maneuvering through the black labyrinth. Now he's sailing, in the clear. Seeing an orange ghost making eyes at him, he changes course and heads for an energizer, knowing that if he eats it, the ghost will be temporarily neutralized. He's keeping an eye out for drifting fruit.
In some ways, it's an epic struggle, says Benny Schwartz. But when you get right down to it, Pac-Man is just a yellow circle with a triangular mouth. Still, he says, many people have interpreted the classic arcade game "as a metaphor for life."
Schwartz and fellow first-year student Guillaume Vanderschueren have created a video "podcast" to educate the other students in their freshman seminar about Pac-Man and other early computer and arcade games. They talk about these games the way students in a literature class might discuss Moby-Dick or Beowulf.
But these two are not crazed video-game addicts hijacking a great-books discussion. They're simply completing an assignment for "How They Got Game," a course offered by the Information Science and Information Studies (ISIS) program that explores the history and cultural impact of video games. Packaging their report in digital form instead of delivering it live gives them the opportunity to lay their voices over a video track that includes appropriate sequences from the games themselves.
The theme of the course might sound odd because, to many people, video gaming represents either an entertaining escape from reality or a mind-numbing waste of time. But to a growing number of scholars, ludology, the humanities-based study of video games and game history and culture, has become a fascinating academic field. And while many mainstream news stories focus on games as unhealthy addictions, these same games are increasingly being picked apart as narratives, their characters analyzed, and their cultural influences and implications explored.
"How They Got Game," taught by Tim Lenoir, Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair of new technologies and society, is the centerpiece of Duke's freshman Focus program on "Virtual Realities: Visualizations, Imagined Worlds and Games," now in its second year. (Focus programs incorporate a cluster of courses that share a common theme.) The virtual-realities program includes four courses in addition to Lenoir's, in the fields of visual studies, information science, computer science, and classical studies.
It has a universal academic flavor, with a twist, says Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English and interim director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, where the ISIS program is based. Focusing on virtual realities, and on video games in particular, allows Lenoir and his colleagues to teach students "how to think critically about this medium that they're so involved in and use it to study other things," Davidson says.
Each course approaches the topic of gaming from the perspective of a particular discipline. For instance, the computer-science course focuses on basic programming that is applicable to games and other software. The classical-studies course examines, among other things, the history and myths that have influenced the themes of modern fantasy games such as World of Warcraft and the research that goes into creating their worlds and characters.
In Lenoir's "How They Got Game," the Focus cluster's flagship course, students begin the semester exploring what constitutes a game, reading articles by new video-game theorists, as well as academics who wrote about games long before the digital variety existed. Among other things, scholars argue about the role that fun, the sense of challenge, consequences, and a player's intent or seriousness play in defining a game. Students explore the evolution of games both in terms of technology and the ways in which the content responds to cultural themes. When they talk about the game Wolfenstein 3D, for example, they discuss both its importance as the first commercially successful "first-person shooter" (instead of manipulating an animated character, the player "becomes" part of the game, and the action is seen through his eyes) and the cultural significance of a World War II-themed game in which the object is to kill Nazis. Freshman Ben Arnstein suggests that a World War II theme was more marketable than, say, a Vietnam War theme, because World War II was "a more archetypal 'good-versus-evil' war."
In other class periods, they use critical theory to explore narrative concepts and point of view in games, and games as art. They learn about the role the military has played in pushing the limits of game development while trying to create realistic battle simulations. They study social networks using "massively multiplayer" online role-playing games, which can involve tens of thousands of players participating at once. They read articles discussing whether violent games ranging from the early first-person shooters to those from the infamous Grand Theft Auto series inspire real violence. They study the case for gaming addiction as a real disease.
Each week, pairs of students air digital videos that they've created to discuss the issues of the day. Often, the videos feature sequences lifted from games to demonstrate principal theories. Lenoir also sets aside time each week for students familiar with the various games they study to "demo" the games live for the class. Last year Lenoir was so impressed with the creative and artistic output of his students that he approached the Nasher Museum of Art about setting up a display of the videos. When he was informed that the Nasher does not display student art, he and his students sought an alternate approach. In Second Life, an online simulated world, they built a virtual Nasher and posted the videos there.
Many of the students who enroll in the gaming Focus are avid gamers, but not all. Julia Chou, a sophomore who took Lenoir's class last year, grew up with a brother who played games all the time, but stayed away from them herself. Still, she was intrigued by the concept of studying them and likes the idea of a new field that has many angles left unexamined. She's considering working with Lenoir on independent video-game research, which in an odd way, she says, is "more academic" than her current job working with mice in a science lab.
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