February 26, 2004, The New York Times, G1, G6
By MICHAEL
ERARD
SOME day Dexter Palmer might be a professor of 20th-century
American video games, editing The Annals of Computer Game
Research with his good friend and colleague Roger Bellin,
who by then might hold the Grand Theft Auto Endowed Chair
at a prestigious university.
Right now, Dr. Palmer and Mr. Bellin analyze video games
only on the side. Dr. Palmer, a 29-year-old with a Ph.D. in
English, writes test questions by day for the Educational
Testing Service (and by night reworks his dissertation on
James Joyce, William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon into a
book).
Mr. Bellin, 26, who once designed educational video games,
is a Princeton graduate student studying a more traditional
American storytelling medium: books.
Video-game studies is still a nascent field, too young to
have a standard list of must-play games, let alone endowed
professorships. The day Mr. Bellin and Dr. Palmer can meet
at the faculty club to discuss Mr. Bellin's seminar on
first-person shooters of the 1990's, or reminisce about Dr.
Palmer's mastery of Akira's Stun Palm of Doom in time to
complete his exegesis of Virtua Fighter 4, is still far
off.
Nonetheless, the first 30 years of video-game history have
provided ample material for game critics, Mr. Bellin says.
"Even discounting all but the very best examples, there
are
already enough games around to keep critics busy for a long
time," he said. But critics are uncertain about what to
do
with these riches. "There just isn't yet much agreement
about what critical vocabulary, what concepts, we would
need in order to make claims about games and evaluate them
confidently," Mr. Bellin said.
To that end, Mr. Bellin and Dr. Palmer have organized a
conference on March 6 at Princeton called "Form,
Culture
and Video Game Criticism," the first of its kind at an
Ivy
League university.
A lawyer, a journalist, a composer, two professors, two
lecturers and six graduate students will present papers
with titles like "Musical Byproducts of Atari 2600
Games"
and "But Our Princess Is in Another Castle: Towards a
'Close-Playing' of Super Mario Brothers."
Mr. Bellin and Dr. Palmer's premise is shared by others who
study computer games: games are credible objects of
intellectual inquiry because they are central to American
popular entertainment and a major global industry.
According to the Entertainment Software Association,
entertainment software sales reached $6.9 billion in the
United States in 2002; the British Department of Trade and
Industry reported that the worldwide market reached more
than $21 billion in 2001.
In fact, video games have long been a focus of academic
study. In 1985 Mary Ann Buckles wrote what is considered to
be the first dissertation about a computer game. During the
1980's and 1990's, psychologists and sociologists studied
the links between games and violence, and which features of
games attracted more boys than girls. Researchers came to
games from disparate fields: computer science, literary
studies and film studies.
But since 2000, game studies has begun carving out its own
territory. Universities in both the United States and
Europe offer graduate programs in game studies, and
conferences devoted to games, like the one at Princeton,
are becoming more common. A professional organization, the
Digital Game Researchers Association (www .digra.org),
links developers with academic researchers. Scholars can
publish in three peer-reviewed journals and contribute to
game studies Web logs (ludology.org, ludonauts.com,
terranova.blogs.com and buzzcut.com). The field's snappy
new name is ludology, from ludus, Latin for game.
Now game critics are rephrasing the fundamental questions
that Aristotle gave to literary studies about 2,300 years
ago: What is the purpose of a game? How do we describe the
experience of playing a game, or game play?
Others say that games need a Shakespeare, someone who can
catapult the digital medium forward. "But Aristotle was
one
of the things that helped create Shakespeare," said
Janet
Murray, who teaches game design and interactive media at
Georgia Institute of Technology, the first American
university to offer a Ph.D. in humanities-based digital
media. "Putting those things together, the analysis of
games with a tradition of storytelling, trying to have a
critical vocabulary of games that will help raise the
standards of practice."
Aristotle might begin by asking, "What is a game?"
To
answer, critics point to a spectrum of games from abstract
to narrative, with Tetris at one end and Grand Theft Auto
on the other. Yet The Sims or Sim City, which a player
neither wins nor loses, leaves critics divided, as does
EverQuest, if one requires that a game have a definite
endpoint. (As its title suggests, EverQuest can be played
perpetually.) To further complicate the definition, the
linear quest game Half-Life has only one course of action,
giving a player no influence over the final outcome. Does
that make it a game, or merely a story disguised as a game?
Such confusion is not unique to game studies, says Gonzalo
Frasca, a game developer from Uruguay who now studies games
at the Center for Computer Game Research at the IT
University in Copenhagen, which has emerged as a hub of
game studies. "Defining games is as hard as defining
other
categories, such as literature or film," Mr. Frasca
said.
"We all agree that novels are literature, but what
about
toilet graffiti? Are Webcams examples of film?"
Game studies can comfortably live with disagreement on the
issue of what constitutes a game, according to Espen
Aarseth, who is the principal researcher at the Center for
Computer Games Research and a co-founder with Susana Tosca
of the field's first journal, Game Studies. What the
emerging field lacks are senior researchers who can guide
young scholars and enforce standards for research. (The
field is so young that at 38, Dr. Aarseth already
qualifies.) "If game studies is to advance as a field
and
be of use to society, it must develop a research program
that can unite artistic, social and technical
perspectives," he said.
That means developing ways to study games that are specific
to the medium. Borrowing methodologies from other fields
like film studies works to a point. Dr. Palmer,
co-organizer of the Princeton conference, said that he and
Mr. Bellin turned down papers that misapplied theories of
film to gaming. "Many of them tended to view games
simply
as films with an element of interactivity shoehorned into
them, which is, I think, the wrong way to go," he said.
Games are also different because there are so many ways
into them. One unique methodology is called close gameplay,
in which a researcher plays critical scenes of a game
repeatedly, analyzing the details, perhaps searching for an
anomaly the programmers have buried in the code or simply
arriving at some resolution.
But close game play may require researchers to use cheat
codes or other game-play hacks. This is a new issue in game
studies circles, said Mia Consalvo, an assistant professor
at Ohio University who studies the place cheating has in
the game industry. "To get a really good idea of how
the
game plays, you shouldn't cheat," she said. The length
of
the game, she said, is crucial to the experience that a
player has.
On the other hand, academics may not have the time to
become power players, racking up a huge max chain on
Ikagura or playing Diablo three times through without
dying. "Games are big, big objects," said Barry
Atkins, who
teaches in the English department at Manchester
Metropolitan University in England. "The days when you
could play a couple of hours of Myst and write about it are
over."
Dr. Atkins admitted that he didn't finish Half-Life before
writing about it in his 2003 book, "More Than a Game:
The
Computer Game as Fictional Form," (Manchester
University
Press), and only later realized he was two minutes from the
shocking plot reversal at the end when he stopped. "I
am
very nervous that I got it wrong," he said.
And from the perspective of game developers, academics and
their concerns seem distant. "So far, the academic and
the
industry worlds, they're very far away," said Mr.
Frasca,
who intends to play a role of a bridge. "Developers do
not
read academic articles, and that's not going to happen any
time soon." Academics generated animosity early on by
judging games as violent. "They were also not
gamers," he
said, "which made it weird to listen to their
analyses."
If a game-studies Aristotle is going to emerge, he or she
will most likely come from the generation for whom playing
games well is not far-fetched. "To be able to write the
seminal text on video games, you have to have grown up
playing them," said Dr. Atkins, who persuaded his
university to pay for him to attend the Princeton
conference. A tenured professor, he reports that his field
of interest is stigmatized. "It's fairly standard, the
frowns I get from colleagues," he said.
Likewise, a Shakespeare might come from the generation of
young scholars with an intellectual understanding of games
and a familiarity with their underlying code. Nick
Montfort, 31, a writer of interactive fiction and
co-founder of another game studies Web log,
grandtextauto.gatech.edu, defends his return to graduate
school in computer science last year at the University of
Pennsylvania. "How are we going to understand how
complex
virtual worlds are put together if we don't understand how
a computer program works?" he asked.
An expert on literary modernism, Dr. Palmer wonders if game
critics might also play a role in explaining difficult
games, much as literary critics explained difficult texts
like those written by Joyce, Pynchon and Gaddis.
To put it another way, just because easy games like The
Sims, Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider are best sellers,
should critics focus only on them? Dr. Palmer said that no
one submitted a paper to the conference on an obscure
Japanese role-playing game called Arc the Lad II, which was
adapted for the American market in 2002 by Working Designs,
a licensed third-party publisher for Sony.
Maybe, he said, game critics can someday explicate Arc the
Lad, bringing it to a larger market in the same way that
the literary entrepreneur Sylvia Beach supported Joyce and
published "Ulysses."
"But I don't want to draw the comparison between Arc
the
Lad and 'Ulysses,' " Dr. Palmer said, "because
that would
be very, very wrong."