Cross post from Brad’s blog Mishaps on the Journey of Life.
Trigger Warning: Referencing.
(For those of you who have gone through university – this is a bad thing to be reminded of).
I’ll also need to explain a few definitions before I get my academic wank on. ‘Academic Wank’ kind of sounds like a vacuous catchy pop song, doesn’t it?
Right, I've done my bit, over to you guys.
So here we go:
University: a centre of learning that has faculties, schools, units.
Faculties: these are the umbrella topics, so Engineering, Law, Business, Computing, Arts, and Humanities for example. The faculty is what your uni degree is in, so I got a Bachelor of Arts.
Schools: the specific subjects within those faculties – Civil Engineering, Gender Studies, Tax Law, Family Law for example. These schools are what you major in, so I have majors in History, and Journalism, Media and Communications.
Units: these are the actual subjects you go and learn, which make up your majors. I did a unit in Radio Journalism, which contributed to my major in Journalism, Media and Communications, which then contributed to my degree in Arts and Humanities.
Undergraduate: Somebody who completes the bottom level of university learning. Generally most people. An undergraduate degree is a three or four (sometimes five) year degree that ends up being called a ‘Bachelor’.
Academics: the teachers and staff of a university that research things.
Academia: the fuzzy area that incorporates all university based researchers.
Discipline: the same as a school – it’s an area of study.
Theory: in this specific case, theories are beliefs that assist in the study of the subject.
Methodology: the way in which you study a subject.
I was working on a post for this site about how flash/browser-based games are showing originality far beyond that of their more expensive, branded cousins you buy in the store for up to a hundred bucks.
I never finished that article because I got so caught up in having to teach myself a new university discipline and plan what is, essentially, a thirteen thousand word article (about the length of a novella). The flash games article fell by the wayside as I waded through a miasma of half-baked theories, methodologies and concepts surrounding Game Studies.
My little library of reference material on video games now contains over eighty entries, of which I have read all of them. Including the psychology papers.
Yeah, yeah, killing sex workers is bad. We get that already.
You see, I’m doing my honours in Journalism, Media and Communication at my local university. By studying video games. Game Studies is a new field…a very, very new field.
Let’s put that ‘new field’ statement into perspective – to the universities, and specifically to arts and humanities, media studies and journalism itself is a new field. Journalism, as we know it, has been around since the early 1700s. Media Studies looks at print, radio, television, magazine and internet journalism – areas that have existed since the early 1700s, 1920s, the 1940s, back to the 1800s and then 1990s, respectively. The discipline of Media Studies is a baby in academia. My local university just began teaching public relations, which has existed and has shaped our world for decades.
The Faculty of Arts and Humanities (to many out there reading this, the equivalent is a ‘Liberal Arts’ degree) is not a very quick-moving beast. That is to be expected when you look at what it contains – philosophy, gender studies, history, and literature. Traditionally, Arts and Humanities tend to look backwards and study and learn from what has gone before. Units – those subjects you learn that then build up to a degree – can be quite modern. There is a unit being taught in Gender Studies examining Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Arts and Humanities tends not to be as modern as the units within them. This isn’t a fault, it’s simply how they work – Engineering wants to make stuff, Law has to teach legal precedent of the here and now so those graduate are able to practive it. Arts and Humanities looks at what’s already been done. This isn’t bad. Just how it’s geared to examine stuff.
Game Studies looks at what is happening now. ‘Now’ being a relative term as in academia you will find articles published in 2009 about Ultima Online at the height of its power in the late 90s. Those Ultima Online articles? There’s a great number of them and they all look at the same game from about seven different angles.
Where Game Studies really falls over due to a critical miss roll is that it doesn’t have the agreed on set of tools that other areas of academia use to study the subject with. Those methodologies and theories that I mentioned in the definitions.
Damnit, I drop my methodology on my foot for +6 damage.
The field of game studies is fractured on these points. Yes there are theories and yes, there are methodologies. Both are coming out of the wazoo, to put it bluntly.
But Game Studies goes across so many disciplines over so many fields of study it is currently impossible to find one set of theories and methodologies to study video games. Even the most vaunted of the academics can’t figure it out. There has been a lot of academic discourse (*cough* blazing rows*cough*) at conferences about it. For a while, the entire field was split between two opposing theories, that of narratology vs. ludology (I won’t go into that argument here, instead look up Frasca’s blog on ludology http://www.ludology.org/). Since then, academics can only agree that we need a combination of both theories to study video games.
This is the problem – how to study video games. The ‘How’ hasn’t been solidified yet. And while I have to sift through papers written by academics in the field of Communications, Computing, Psychology, Sociology, Literature studies, Mathematics and Business, there is no way that we can call it its own field. To date, the industry hires people from all these disciplines to work in the field. Because every field has something to contribute to video games.
It may be that it is a case of too many chefs spoiling the broth. Or it may be a case of not enough chefs of the same discipline in the room. Or something else to do with chefs.
M(*&^%^$ing Chefs. F*%*^ng.
Until all interested parties can get under one banner in the university and can agree on how to study games, we won’t have a concentrated body of knowledge outside of fan run wiki’s on an industry that is bigger than Hollywood, exports culture from every corner of the globe to every corner of the globe and is present in almost every living room.
And that is a sad thing for those of us who love games, gaming and writing about gaming and games.
