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Video games have also begun to gain a reputation as tools for research in more mainstream fields. Many universities have been active in posting academic resources and hosting meetings in Second Life, the online world that many compare to a video game (though others argue is not, because players do not seek to achieve some set purpose or objective). Duke's Office of Student Affairs has set up space there, as has the ISIS program.
In August, epidemiological researchers at Tufts University made national headlines with a journal article that explored the epidemic spread of a virtual virus called Corrupted Blood through the online game World of Warcraft (WoW). In the massively multiplayer game, thousands of players compete individually and in small "guilds." Their avatars fight monsters, explore new landscapes, and complete "quests" to earn currency and objects such as weapons and armor and to ascend to more challenging (and prestigious) levels. The corrupted blood, intended by the game's creators as a challenging obstacle for advanced players, was released in an area of the game accessible only to those players.
However, as the researchers wrote in The Lancet: Infectious Diseases, "Soon, the disease had spread to the densely populated capital cities of the fantasy world, causing high rates of mortality and, much more importantly, the social chaos that comes from a large-scale outbreak of deadly disease." They analyzed the spread of the virtual outbreak and concluded that such phenomena could serve as useful models for scientists studying the spread of disease through human networks.
A similar article, written by a researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, appeared in the journal Epidemic. Not long after the results of these studies were released, the journal Science published an article hailing video-game environments, especially large-scale simulations like Second Life and massively multiplayer online role-playing games like WoW, as new models for scientific research.
Peter North, a senior who is an avid WoW player, remembers the virus well. "It was really cool," he says. "That's sort of a historical event for World of Warcraft players."
But while he recognizes that there are similarities between behavior in the virtual world of WoW and in real life, he cautions against making direct comparisons. In real life, he says, "nobody would think it was funny if they ran into a biohazard and then went and hugged all of their friends." North has done some research of his own aimed at comparing avatars' behavior in WoW to human behavior in the real world.
In one experiment, he tested avatars' tendency to bend to peer pressure. Anonymous players were recruited and asked to compare a weapon in one room with three in another, then to say which of the three it matched. Ten "confederates" were placed in the second room, all instructed to give the same wrong answer. He found that avatars were much more likely to give the right answer despite peer pressure than humans in a similar experiment. But he also found that the more time and energy an avatar had taken to build, the more likely the person behind it was to go with the group.
In a second experiment, he attempted to recreate the traditional "prisoner's dilemma" from economic game theory in WoW. In the traditional form, two alleged "criminal conspirators" are caught, isolated, and then offered reduced sentences in return for ratting on each other. The best collective result occurs if neither rats on the other, but there is always an incentive to rat on the other person. This changes if the game is administered repeatedly, and trust develops between the two players.
In his online version of the experiment, which he modified slightly to fit the WoW setting, North found that players usually just raced to rat on each other, even in repeated games. Followers of WoW argue that collaboration is absolutely necessary to achieving success in the game, but North speculates that "within virtual realms, people don't feel the same sense of consequence or responsibility for their actions. There is a definite distinction between a person and their avatar." He says he's interested in further studies examining the differences between how people make decisions and behave in virtual worlds and in real life.
Despite its rapid growth—and, ironically, in some ways because of it—the field of video-game studies still faces some major obstacles, not the least of which is finding a departmental home. Henry Lowood of Stanford and Tim Lenoir both came of age as academics studying the history of science just as the field was securing a permanent seat at the table. "It was a brand new discipline in the '50s, and just finally establishing itself in the '80s," Lowood says. "What took the history of science thirty years has been compressed into maybe three years in game studies.
"Universities are big battleships," he continues. "They're not designed to turn like a car. So with something like this, it's difficult for a university to respond. Does that mean that there have to be game studies departments? At least there has to be a faculty member in a department that studies it. So, in what department? Computer science? A humanities field? An arts field?" The multidisciplinary nature of the field that is in many ways a strength can thus also be seen as an organizational weakness, he says.
In addition, the field's rapid rise, as well as its focus on what is, essentially, popular culture—or by its own account, another "new media"—is sure to rub some in academe the wrong way. Negar Mottahedeh, an assistant professor of literature at Duke, sees a parallel between video-game studies and the more established discipline of film studies, which gained a foothold in American universities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Film scholars who "read film in a cultural context or as part of an amalgamation of cultural forms" are often criticized by other academics for having "allowed for too much relativism and interpretation," says Mottahedeh, who teaches an "Introduction to Film" course. In other words, she says, they argue that "anybody can say anything about something, and it's right."
But Mottahedeh argues that context is important. A film like The Bourne Ultimatum may not be an instant classic in a traditional sense, but it's interesting to consider as a function of globalization and to "read" in the context of contemporary wars, she says. Considerations like these help to distinguish film studies from "film appreciation."
In the same way, video-game studies must continue to make a case for itself, says Victoria Szabo, program director for ISIS and another of the instructors for the Focus virtual-realities cluster. In order to make the full leap to academic legitimacy, she says, the discipline's canon of texts—both the scholarly writing and the games themselves—"must undergo lasting scrutiny."
"If you're looking for a range of exemplary texts that pass the test of time, game studies at this point may or may not fit the bill," she says. "If you say 'Pac-Man was a classic,' what does that really mean? That it was a technical milestone? That it was really popular? That people look back fondly on it?"
Those are questions that excite scholars like Juul, as well as students like Schwartz and Chou. They relish the opportunities present in this new scholarly landscape, as yet unexplored.
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