Gaming and Academic Research

Sorenson

In place of a student portfolio, this semester I'm taking a class on world literature that is really just a cover class for a big research paper about the Infernal Contract, and one of the resources I'm using is Animamundi: Dark Alchemist. Despite the bullshit spewed by one big-wig or another about how games can't be art of the likes of, say, Goethe's Faust, given both the ever-increasing presence of games in society and the emergence of more and more games with high levels of artistic and literary quality it's only a matter of time until gaming becomes on a level par to literature, music, film, and other media outlets.

Thing is, how do we approach games in an academic manner?

This is not to say that gaming cannot be "researched" in the traditional sense of the aforementioned mediums, far from it - but rather that given the extrordinary-to-limitless variabability of forms and structuring within games, it's difficult to integrate them into the standard academic models of citation and archiving. For all the different variations present in film and literature and music, they're all still bound by an eternal and basic format of one sorts or another that dictates what happens at what point of time: works of literature and other types of print have pages, chapters, acts, sections, and lines to distinguish each seperate instance of action, whereas the more mobile mediums can be stamped through time, episode, installment. What lies within a game, though, to unify it? We cannot use levels since many games make seamless transitions from one point to another or are completily open in form; we cannot use timestamps because the variables of playing styles plus the influencable nature of games means one cannot count on the right situation being at the right place at the right time; we cannot use areas or descriptions because those alone do not provide the nessecary information required for fact-checking (which is itself another problem of the use of games as academic material: how do we certify that the information presented by someone regarding a game's material is true?).

Or is it possible that it is simply impossible to use games in an academic fashion as compared to other traditional mediums? Could it be that gaming is a medium that is incapable of being boiled down to the bits of information festooned about papers in parenthesees and sitting in neat little rows in the bibliogrophy?

EDIT: OK, literature wasn't the best way to look at it, but I was biased on that given the focus of the aforementioned paper.

Gyral

I think that artistically, gaming is further along in terms of quality then the literary aspect. Literary-wise, the whole genre is still pretty infantile. Your biggest problem is going to be perception by those who "determine" what is acceptable in the academic realms. In colleges, you have far fewer academics who game and can see them as more than base entertainment. In years to come, this may change as people who grew up on gaming become more prominent in the established academia.

Xagarath

Don't look at the literature. Look at the form of the narrative- the gaming equivalent of cinematography. Focus on ways of interpolating gameplay with story to make both of them more effective, that kind of thing.
See: Portal.

kaliyama

What? No, games may be (somewhat) less linear than a linear movie or text, but they don't defy citation.
If you had full access to the game material, you could cite the line of compiled code and the content directory for the text, and the graphic art. Or if the 'event' is user-generated in a relatively freeform 3D world, you can take video capture or screenshots.

You know, different editions of texts, especially older, translated ones have different page referents to different events; often, then, events in books are described wholistically rather than with a page citation.

You check someone's citation about a game the same way you do with a book or movie; you examine the contents. Not particularly impossible. It may be clunkier to reference, cite and verify discussions of games, but it certainly isn't some structural impossibility. Without cheat codes and patience, it is an improbability at best that academics would do so, and who would play a game that isn't fun to cite-check? But it's certainly possible.


I think the biggest problem you'll have in making your argument is that writing for games, especially when the original text was in a foreign language, is terrible. Even games with an engrossing plot, like Planescape: Torment, the writing is almost exclusively descriptive. The writing is used as a tool to convey information and events. Those events may have emotional heft, but the writing itself doesn't trigger an emotional response the way a beautifully written sonnet might.

Some games may excel in telling a story or evoking a mood, like Portal does, it is hard to see a game without dialogue or a 'plot' is going to get the same sort of acclaim that Goethe, Shakespare or Martin Scorcese gets. Portal is likelier to end up lumped with abstract art and experimental performance pieces in a category of things that may be aesthetically pleasing but don't engage most viewers the same way as a traditional narrative work does.

RainbowDespair

Apparently there's a convention next year in Quebec that will discuss horror games in an academic manner: http://conference2009.ludicine.ca/

I so want to go.

Saddler

People have had some success writing about games as a way of interaction between people. I would look to the field of cultural studies, and psychological and sociological writing on sports. I don't know that anyone has done the latter, but they should, especially if they are interested in going beyond aesthetic judgments.