The Problems Facing Video Game Academia

[07.14.11]

By David McClure

[In this article, David McLure points out the major flaws in essays and books written about games, and offers solutions to make video game academia more interesting, accurate, and meaningful.]



"Two games were selected for the study, Project Gotham Racing 3 and the game with the most violent and gory content available at the time, Gears of War 2. ... As with previous research (Goodson & Pearson, 2009) the EEG data showed that the participants who, regardless of experience, played the driving game had a significant increase in activity in brain regions associated with the expression of aggression." (Goodson, Pearson & Gavin, 2010)



"Responses were collected from testers aged 18 and older. The testers were 64.62% male and 35.38% female... I discovered several things about my characters from the survey results. There was a very positive reaction to both of the characters, overall. The majority of testers felt that both the Medic and the Heavy fit the style of the game, maintained a good distinctiveness of their body types and silhouette, and would be interested in playing video games with female characters similar to these." (Hamm, 2009)



"By comparing the average game ratings with the performance of the players, we can see an indication that winning isn't everything: the most positive players were the ones that failed some, and then completed the game. Completing the game without failing was followed by a lower rating of the game (the statistical significance was the slightly weak p<0.06 for all three categories of player performance combined)." (Juul, 2009)



Notice the common thread? All three pieces present evidence derived from primary research in favour of a position, while challenging, what is, in some parts, accepted wisdom. However, while much of it is compelling, as exemplified by the work of Juul, Hamm and Goodson, Pearson & Gavin, a good deal of the academic literature about video games seems to fall prey to the same, small number of problems:



Academics writing about games without playing them for an appropriate length of time

An over reliance on subjective work and inferences, with an absence of evidence

A lack of understanding of the technology underlying video games

A tendency to write papers that are, effectively, platitudes

As common as these points are, they could all be avoided and prevented by following the solutions given below. It is important to avoid these problems for two reasons. First, inaccurate work should not be left unrecognised. It may lead to more inaccurate work being produced, as those who draw upon it make erroneous conclusions and propagate myths. Second, when inaccurate work is recognised, it is likely that readers will dismiss the rest of the work out of hand, and thus miss useful information and conclusions.



As we will see, even extremely good scholars do, at times, make mistakes. Adopting the solutions given might catch some of these mistakes before they reach the printing press.



Problem: Academics writing about games without playing them for an appropriate length of time



"In Counter-Strike, players enjoy fanciful tweaks like tunable gravity, unlimited ammunition and extraordinary environments. Strategy in Counter-Strike is grounded in free-for-all: players often use "bunny hopping," or continuous jumping, to avoid fire; they respawn immediately when killed; they can fire effectively while running or jumping... Whereas Counter-Strike encourages the player to log as many kills as possible, America's Army players collaborate in short missions, such as rescuing a prisoner of war, capturing an enemy building or assaulting an enemy installation (Bogost, 2007:75-76)"



There are a number of errors with the statement above, which is unusual in a book as fascinating and well written as Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games. To clarify, a normal match of Counter-Strike does not involve unlimited ammunition or unusual levels of gravity. Play consists of one team attempting to accomplish an objective, while another tries to prevent them from doing so. The majority of the environments in which play takes place are representations of fairly quotidian surroundings. Immediate respawns are not a default feature in Counter-Strike, an easy way to find this out being to test just how effectively it is possible to fire while running and jumping.



Although it may be possible to set a Counter-Strike server up to involve a number of the features mentioned, they are not what are commonly thought of as the characteristic elements of the game. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that anyone who would describe Counter-Strike in such a fashion has not played it sufficiently to be capable of commenting on it accurately.



Solution



This is perhaps the easiest problem of all to solve. Academics should not write about games they have not played for a long enough period of time to understand them at a basic level. In the interests of accuracy and accountability, it would be a good idea to go further than this. Where possible, academics should play games via services like Steam, PSN and Xbox Live, which will allow them to make their trophies, statistics and achievements public.



If this information was made publicly available then it would allow audiences to assess sources much more accurately. Academics do not have to be good at games in order to study them, but the way in which skill alters play sessions will inevitably make its way into any subjective work. Again, audiences will be able to better judge the value of an academics work about a specific game or genre if they know how competently they play it.







Problem: An abundance of subjective work and an absence of evidence



"[Tetris] is a perfect enactment of the over-tasked lives of Americans in the 1990s - of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desk in order to make room for the next onslaught. (Murray, 1998:144)"



In this excerpt from her seminal work, Hamlet On The Holodeck, Murray is of course correct, and has brought to the fore an important point. It is possible to consider that games tell stories and enact events through ludic rules. However, given that Tetris was invented in the 1985 in the USSR, it seems unlikely that its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, was either influenced by, or intending to make a comment about, life in the USA in the nineties.



It is often claimed that all interpretations of a work are equally valid and that the originator has no claim to know a "correct reading." The problem here is that it is possible to interpret a game as abstract as Tetris as having almost any possible meaning. Unfortunately, a lot of academic work about games is based in anecdotes and subjective analysis. It is therefore not particularly useful or enlightening.



Solution



Academics should concentrate on objective, evidence based work. Without evidence, any discussion will be based in subjective opinion, and therefore any conclusions drawn from it will not be particularly convincing. In the academic study of games, there is a dearth of hard data, evidence, results and facts. Even when starting from an observation reached via interpretive work, academics should see if any objective work can be carried out, in order to confirm or deny their hypotheses. There is a huge amount of knowledge to be gained by carrying out objective study of games, and it is a shame to see this overlooked in favour of opinion and sophistry.







Problem: Academics writing about games without understanding the underlying technology



"This point can be summarized in an initial claim: gamic vision requires fully rendered, actionable space. Traditional filmmaking almost never requires the construction of full spaces. Set designers and carpenters build only the portion of the set that will appear within the frame. Because a director has complete control over what does appear within the frame, this task is easy to accomplish. The camera positions are known in advance..."



"In a shooter, because the game designer cannot restrict the movement of the gamer, the complete play space must be rendered three-dimensionally in advance. The camera position in many games is not restricted. The player is the one who controls the camera position, by looking, by moving, by scrolling, and so on (Galloway, 2006:63-64)"



Although it is true that the player controls the position of the camera in many games, they only do so within a limited subset of all the possible camera positions within an environment. In other words, there are usually some places within the level that a player cannot see without cheating, so therefore the camera position is usually restricted to some extent. Because of this, environment artists are able to optimise static models by removing polygons that will never be seen.



Similarly, level designers do not fill in the full details of areas that cannot be seen or reached. The play space may be constructed in advance, but what might appear in the frame can always be known and therefore extraneous detail is not constructed. To claim otherwise is simply untrue.



Solution



Academics should only write about games when they possess an understanding of how they actually work and are created. This may mean that they need to spend time learning about how games are actually created, but this is entirely necessary when we consider the alternative, which is to continuously make mistakes.



Work that contains errors in one part becomes difficult for readers to believe in others. Academics should also learn about the history of games and game machines. When coupled with an over reliance on subjective interpretation, analysis devoid of technical-historical perspective could potentially lead to ridiculous errors.



Midwinter takes place in a cubist-like, near-monochrome low-polygon landscape, where players are attacked by planes loyal to an evil general. It is likely that the aesthetic elements are due to technical constraints related to the hardware that Midwinter was designed to run on. However, if we ignore technical aspects of games production, we might well decide that the game is a reference to the Spanish Civil War, via Picasso's Guernica. Clearly, this would be absurd.







Problem: Truisms are drawn out to become full-length papers



The essay, Play And Punishment: The Sad And Curious Case Of Twixt (Myers, 2008) concerns a player character, Twixt, in the MMORPG City Of Heroes/City Of Villains. The player who created Twixt ignored social customs of the game and engaged in behaviours that were generally frowned upon, but that were within the rules of the game. The behaviours prevented other players from enjoying the game in what was the generally accepted method of playing it. Unsurprisingly, Twixt received censure from the other players.



Solution



Given that the playing of games is a subset of human behaviour, it seems reasonable to assume that common human behaviours will be present when playing games. In this light, it is not a surprise that breaking social norms can result in stigmatisation, or that social norms are not codified laws, and in fact exist alongside them.



Although it may be interesting to confirm the presence of common, existing behaviours within game worlds, ultimately, it seems to be frivolous to write long papers about them. Instead of cataloguing all the ways in which behaviour is the same within games and every day life, it would be more useful to investigate what differences, if any, there are.



Taken on their own, each of the solutions above is likely to improve academic work for very little cost. Implementing all four will, again, require very little expenditure of time, effort or money, but will reap considerable dividends. The academic study of games is often ignored by the games industry. In part, this is because games companies find much of the work produced to be either irrelevant or unreliable (Hopson, 2006).



As we have seen, even some of the greatest scholars within the field have fallen prey to these errors. Nobody is perfect, and in all likelihood, if people of such stature can, at times, make errors like these, then the rest of us are at least equally likely to make them. If all academic study of games was to follow these guidelines then the result would be a field in which the general standard of work was more accurate and more objective, and therefore more useful, as well as being more interesting.



References



Bogost, I. 2007. Persuasive Games. Cambridge: MIT Press.



Galloway, A.R. 2006. Gaming. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.



Goodson, S., Pearson. S. and Gavin, H. 2010. Violent video games: The media scapegoat for an aggressive society [Online]. Available from: https://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/goodsonpaper.pdf



Hamm, S. 2010. The Aesthetics Of Unique Video Game Characters [Online]. New York: United Business Media LLC. Available from: https://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/854/the_aesthetics_of_unique_video_.php



Hopson, J. 2006. Gamasutra - Features - We're Not Listening: An Open Letter to Academic Game Researchers [Online]. New York: United Business Media LLC. Available from: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1783/were_not_listening_an_open_.php



Juul, J. 2009. Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games. The Video Game Theory Reader 2. ed. Wolf, M.J.P. & Perron, B. New York, Routledge, pp. 237-252. Available from: https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/fearoffailing/



Murray, J.H. 1998. Hamlet On The Holodeck. Cambridge: MIT Press.



Myers, D. 2008. Play And Punishment: The Sad And Curious Case Of Twixt [Online]. Available from: https://www.masscomm.loyno.edu/~dmyers/F99%20classes/Myers_PlayPunishment_031508.doc



van der Graaf, S. and Nieborg, D.B. "Together We Brand: America's Army" (paper presented at the Digital Games Research Conference, Utrecht, Netherlands, November 2003), 6., quoted in Bogost, I. 2007. Persuasive Games.



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