Do you yourself or anyone you know play some type of video game at home, in public, or on a cell phone?
Though there might be an occasional person that does not watch television or movies, you would be hard pressed to find someone in the United States who did not either partake in playing games, watching friends play games, or who at least knew friends or relatives that were involved in gaming activities.
There is an unquestionable need for University video games courses, for proper facilities to administer the study of gaming practices and for a variety of vastly different games courses that offer students the opportunity to study various techniques with which to think critically toward this popular medium.
What is it about gaming that enthralls the senses and in many ways transcends more popular forms of popular culture in many people’s lives as they continue to have intricate experiences that appeal to the brain and senses?
Professor Guins sums the need for gaming studies up quite aptly: “It’s where our students spend a great deal of time…we need to provide a more critical framework so they can understand games in a larger context.”
The wave of popular opinion that has questioned the legitimacy in studying such “a popular medium” (as Stony Brook’s Video Game Culture Professor Guins puts it) is starting to ebb. MIT Press and many of the most academically credible institutions in the country currently represent the study of gaming, and many scholarly works are published about the subject.
One of the current offerings of games studies at Stony Brook is the “Video Game Culture” for the spring semester, and it is taught with heavy reading being the only prerequisite. Professor Guins stresses the use of critical thinking based off of, as he says: “scholarly takes, popular takes [and] biographical takes” of gaming studies. The class, like the Video and Computer Games History Course that was taught in the fall semester, has students clambering to gain entrance.
Since gaming has become a fulcrum in popular culture and a base stone of society that effects, players and non-players alike, the Video Game Culture class tackles the myriad aspects of gaming that attract so many. One of the aspects looked at closely in the course is “games as societal issues,” says Guins.
What does playing the “Grand Theft Auto” series of games say about society?
Well this game allows the player to infiltrate realistic representations of cities and decide to play along with a gangsta storyline, or to go off on their own. As Professor Guins says, “you don’t have to play the story.” One can just as easily traverse the streets, buy food and don a BMX bike, or one can violently bash hookers, mug pimps, steal cars and mess with the police. The player makes moral decisions, and in doing so they certainly take on a fictitious persona that has gone very much with or against the norms of society.
As Guins teaches, morality often has stark consequences in modern video games. Just play “Fallout 3” to witness this, or take the class to find out more about what critical thinking and society bear on games and vice versa.
The need for games studies is apparent. Not only should Stony Brook University continue to further open the door to more of these types of courses, but the school should embrace the genre head on and consider a new department be formed to address the growing demands and needs.
Currently there are not even dedicated classrooms given to Video Games Courses that require seating for dozens, large PowerPoint screens for lectures, plasma screen televisions, electrical outlets for game systems and proper display setups for projectors that are needed to enlarge on screen imagery so that the whole class can get a view to study the games in a public sphere. Stony Brook needs to incorporate video games into its teaching space redevelopment plans. And hopefully more classes will introduce video games into their curriculum.
Once there was a time when movies were not considered worthy of such treatment by academic institutions of higher learning, but the attitudes toward this have been irrevocably reversed. Now the video game industry generates more revenue per year than the television and the movie industries combined.
Professor Guins puts his spin on the importance of studying popular forms of media: “I don’t see [games] as threatening the study of film, the study of television. I think we have to do all of it.”
Raiford Guins is an Assistant Professor of Digital Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, and a member of the Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture & Technology, and a founding Principal Editor with the Journal of Visual Culture (Sage). He is currently preparing to open a Video Game Archive at Stony Brook University, where students will have access to game consoles from the 1970s – early 1990s for research and academic purposes. Please donate games and immortalize their being studied in an interactive museum type atmosphere.
By R.J. Huneke
This article brings up some very valid points. The impact video games now have on culture, and the individual is substantial. As Professor Guins says, we need to be able to apply gaming to a larger framework for students.
I think that the “Trip to Liberty City” argument–that the player can just mess around in the city instead of killing people–is really suspect, for a very simple reason: Certain kinds of violence will make the story of a Grand Theft Auto Game progress, whereas no kind of nonviolence will make the story progress. Your choice ultimately amounts to being violent on one hand, or doing nothing on the other. Of course you don’t have to play the story, but that’s a cop-out. The story is there because the designers want you to play it, so the story’s moral content matters very much.
Ethics in video games are a fascinating field of study–my field of study, as it happens–but I think that Grand Theft Auto is the wrong place to start. In fact, I’ll go rather than that: One reason people think that video games are immoral or amoral is specifically that they focus on Grand Theft Auto so much.
I’m apathetic to it. I think we need classes on video games like we need classes on television. Obviously we have the later so I should hope one would infer that I’m not opposed to the former.
That said I think (on a personal note) that both of them are pretty much waste of time classes. I think if you learn to think critically you can apply that ability to any medium. That’s why it’s called a skill. It’s like those philosophy books you see in a college bookstore that capitalize on popular trends (X-Men and Philosophy, Avatar and Philosophy, The Matrix and Philosophy, Die Hard and Philosophy, etc etc). You don’t need to have a course called Titanic and the Philosophy of the Cave Allegory. You can just have a normal philosophy course and if you’re students learn properly they can apply that knowledge to popular movies and books etc.
Also to consider is what exactly would entail these video games courses. Like it or not when most people think “Class on social impact of TV” they think this is a class where I get to watch a lot of TV.. and they’re pretty much right (as anecdotally evidenced by the experience of people I know.) Same with a class on movies. If you say there’s a class studying video games people are going to assume you play a lot of games and that is not practical. The article mentioned GTA and Fallout 3 and these games are a FAR cry from Pac-Man, Dig-Dug or even Super Mario Bros and the Prince of Persia (original), and I’m not just talking about graphics, gameplay or morality. The sheer time investment is magnitudes larger. I know every one in the game writing side of journalism likes to compare games to movies, books and music but the fact remains that you can still read an average book, listen to an average album, and watch an average movie/tv show in a fraction of the time it takes you to complete an average game and that’s a big barrier even before the tech is introduced.
To be fair you suggested courses which study the impact of gaming and in a more literal sense that does work. UC Berkeley has a course on Starcraft that focused on game theory and strategy. (David Sirlin wrote about it in his blog I think) Now in a practical sense this works. the major issue is that you can’t take a course on strategy in the gameplay of Starcraft unless you know starcraft. Compare this to the movie/TV example and even if you’ve never seen the great classic films or heard of Orson Wells you can take a class and learn. In the video game version you either have to have courses that start at lower level games and familiarize the audience with aspects of video games that we take for granted like for instance going to the right, or Attack/Magic/Run. (which defeat the purpose of the course. Unless you seriously want to have discussions on what the pill packing nature of Pac-Man means to the 1970s or discuss the moral implications of Double Dragon). The other option is to just skip gaming history and focus on the actual interesting case studies. When you do that you’ve effectively put out a chopping block on your class. It’s like having a course on football in a country where they don’t play american football. Either you start at the bottom with courses designed to teach them what football is and familiarize them with it’s history or you just chop the block and talk about football to the few who already know what it is.
In response I’d have to say to take one of Prof. Guins classes at Stony Brook. Not only is Stony Brook one of the toughest schools in the country, but these video game courses that he has constructed are the most rigorous academic classes that I have taken (and that includes Critical Thinking in Philosophy). The readings are heavy and are scholarly works. The reasons why you feel compelled to play certain games, or to play games at all are all reasons to study Games in Culture (and there are many more reasons as well). Apathy kills the country, the world and the scholar.
see it depends on what exactly these classes are, though topically I have no interest in culture studies I’ve always been more into the hard sciences. For the record my apathy extends only to the topic of ‘study of video games as a college course’.
Ehhh, I don’t know about this. While some games are deep, most aren’t.