Archive for August, 2011
|Game Studies, Year Ten
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
Game Studies, in an organised scholarly sense, celebrated its tenth birthday in 2011. As with most fields of academic endeavour, there are several claims to parentage and disputes about chronologies such as I have advanced. My attempt at genealogy sees the study of computer and video games taking recognisable disciplinary shape in 2001 with the launch of the online peer-reviewed journal Game Studies under the editorial control of Espen Aarseth (available at http://gamestudies.org/1102). In the first issue Aarseth called for the emergence of a distinctive field of Game Studies, drawing upon existing academic traditions, such as Sociology, Film and Media Studies, but not colonised by their approaches and assumptions. Aarseth’s opening editorial made a strong claim for Games Studies as a specific discipline, rather than a subset of existing fields of study.
Today we have the possibility to build a new field. We have a billion dollar industry with almost no basic research, we have the most fascinating cultural material to appear in a very long time, and we have the chance of uniting aesthetic, cultural and technical design aspects in a single discipline (Aarseth, 2001, para. 12)
Aarseth’s opening editorial makes the case for the study of games as games, arguing that they are not a monolithic cultural form designed simply for viewing, but rather a multiplicity of interactive forms for playing, either alone or socially. The diversity of games available and types of interaction possible challenged researchers to find a foundational commonality for the study of games. A number of researchers, who chose to call themselves ludologists, claimed that what was unique and distinctive about games, whatever their type, was the existence of rules. Ludologists suggested Game Studies should examine the rules of the game and how the player interacts with them. Issues such as representation and storytelling, although interesting, might best be thought of as subservient to these rules.
In the early issues of Game Studies the ludologists met stiff resistance from narratologists, keen to study games as they would other forms of narrative. Most emerging disciplines are subject to the sort of intellectual land grabbing of the ludology vs. narratology debates, but in time, most disciplines see the virtue of studying complex phenomena with a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. Game Studies has recently embraced cross and inter-disciplinary approaches. The broadening of the discipline is apparent in contributions to the journal Games and Culture, which was established by Sage in 2006. Articles have appeared focusing on race and representation, the study of community in the online game World of Warcraft, gender identity in games and of gamers, older gamers, casual game and ethnographies of game-playing.
The diversity of approaches that constitute contemporary Game Studies makes it a lively and increasingly inclusive discipline. There are many possible objects of study and a similar number of theoretical and methodological means with which to study them. My own recent article in Games and Culture perhaps illustrates the openness of the discipline. I was interested in the ambience of fear in horror video games – both how it is rhetorically expressed and experienced by the gamer. I chose to use Kristeva’s work on the abject and Freud’s notion of the uncanny as my theoretical touchstones. My article was interested both in the rules of the games and the way that narratives of fear are employed as shared resources by game designers and gamers. Despite the apparent flexibility of my approach I felt compelled to include a short passage entitled ‘the limits of analysis’ in which I positioned my research as a necessarily partial and circumscribed attempt to study a game text and its highly variable interactive relationship with several million potential players. My motivation for including the section was not simply a humble recognition of the limited scope and validity of my research but a wish for the new discipline to leave theoretical and disciplinary approaches as open as possible. Hopefully the coming generation of Game Studies researchers will continue to avoid simplistic and reductive accounts of their objects of study and remember the limits of their own analyses.
References
Aarseth, E. (2001). Computer Game Studies, Year One. Game Studies, 1(1), retrieved 15th August 2011 from http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html
Spittle, S. (2011) “Did This Game Scare You? Because it Sure as Hell Scared Me!” F.E.A.R., the Abject and the Uncanny, Games and Culture, 6(4), 312-326
Dr. Steve Spittle, Media and Cultural Studies, Liverpool John Moores University
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