|
Lenoir is, by training, a historian of science. His initial interest in video games stemmed from research he conducted on the military's battle simulations and the idea of the "military-entertainment complex," or the ties between simulations developed by the military and commercially available war games. Before coming to Duke in 2004, Lenoir was a professor of history and chair of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford University. In the late 1990s, he collaborated with Henry Lowood, an archivist at Stanford who shared his interest in military games, to establish a new research project that they called "How They Got Game." Part of the project was an undergraduate course that focused on the history of computer-game design, exploring themes of business, culture, and technology. When Lenoir came to Duke, he brought the class with him. He initially taught the course as an upper-level seminar, but last year, folded it into the Focus program.
The themes visited by Lenoir's class are the grist of the rapidly turning modern-game-studies mill. Video games have been around, in one form or another, almost as long as computers, and articles analyzing games have been published in scholarly journals since at least the early 1980s. But until 2000, scholarly production in the field was sparse, says Jesper Juul, a noted game theorist, game designer, and co-editor of the online journal Game Studies. The beginning of the decade was a turning point for the field. In 2000 and 2001, several academic conferences and journals, including Game Studies, appeared for the first time. Juul, who has a background in the humanities and earned his Ph.D. in video-game studies from the IT University of Copenhagen, says that the field rose out of a sort of "distributed critical mass" that had been slowly gathering.
It's probably not a coincidence that 2000 was also the first year that Lenoir and Lowood taught "How They Got Game" at Stanford. In writing the syllabus, they had planned for a small seminar of fifteen to twenty students, Lowood says. But they were overwhelmed when more than 100 showed up. "They were climbing in through the windows. The fire marshal came," he recalls. "That just shows the kind of pent-up interest there was" in game studies. He remembers a particularly telling moment during one class discussion that first semester. A student was discussing ways in which the idea of character is different in the classic Nintendo games The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros., Lowood recalls. "He stopped right in the middle of what he was saying and looked around. Everyone was listening to him intently. He said, 'God, I love this class.' "
Since that time the critical mass has continued to grow and expand, bringing with it a sense of legitimacy. In the early days, Juul says, "every paper we wrote started out with the question, 'Why should you study video games?' Now we don't have to do that anymore."
The resulting rise in critical scholarship has been reflected in the publishing world. Doug Sery, senior acquisitions editor for computer science, new media, and game studies at the MIT Press, published his first game-studies book in 2001. Now he estimates that he receives five to seven book proposals a month on the topic of video games. This year, he'll publish four. He has contracts with writers for five more and is considering another five to seven projects.
This past summer, the Library of Congress announced an initiative aimed at preserving games and real-time clips of online game environments for future study. Earlier in the year, the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin announced the creation of a new archive of video games and systems; marketing materials, magazines, and websites; and documents relating to the game-design business. (Although these are groundbreaking events, they came seven years after Lenoir and Lowood oversaw the creation of a massive video-game archive at Stanford that started with a donation of some 25,000 titles—representing nearly every game published commercially from the 1970s through 1993—from the family of an avid collector.)
The Digital Games Research Association, which describes itself as an "association for academics and professionals who research digital games and associated phenomena," drew 355 delegates from twenty-nine countries to its most recent biennial conference, held in Tokyo in September. The organization's website, which notifies members of other relevant video-game conferences around the world, listed seven for that month alone in addition to its own.
On the flip side, the video-gaming industry has also become more accepting of scholars, Juul says. In fact, in recent years, it has undertaken collaborations with many West Coast universities, along with the movie industry. "In the early days, they were skeptical of academics. They saw them as back-seat drivers." Now, Juul says, the industry values those educated in game studies not only for their skill at game design, but also for helping to develop a common industry language, analyze the industry's audience, and give the industry itself an additional layer of legitimacy.
A sampling of articles from a recent issue of Game Studies hints at the range of topics covered by the field—and the types of scholars covering them: A lecturer in new media and media theory at Victoria University in New Zealand writes on "the gamer addiction myth"; a Ph.D. candidate in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania analyzes an early game called Combat; an avid gamer with a background in psychology compares personalities of people who play The Sims 2 with those of their avatars, or virtual counterparts; and a professor of Japanese studies writes on Japanese games and the global marketplace.
Other academics in the field have made names for themselves developing "serious" games—games created not for entertainment or commercial success but as vehicles for social critique or education. Some deal with war or famine. One game created by Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner of the game-design studio Persuasive Games, essentially lets the player see how boring it is to work at FedEx Kinko's.
• continues on page
three. |
