Georgia Tech & me
As I’m plotting my dissertation proposal, I’m reviewing current approaches towards videogames. One of the more interesting ones is the one gaining momentum over at Georgia Tech (GT), which emphasizes the “expressive potential of games.” But while they are doing the field a big favor, I have my reservations.
The premise of my own research is that games are a form of communication: playing a game requires you to enter into a microcosm that has its own internal logic. By internalizing a game’s epistemology, we subsequently can reflect on the larger reality that exists outside of it. In this way games communicate ideas about reality at large.
This roughly overlaps with ideas that Murray and Bogost have put forward. Murray’s “interactive narratives” (1997) and Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” (2007) both argue that it is possible to communicate an idea through game play. Particularly in Bogost’s efforts under the nomenclature ‘serious games,’”political games that function as political speech,” do we encounter this idea of communicating a particular concept or idea through a game. (2006)
But despite this great initiative I believe that the expressive potential of video games lies not exclusively in the ability of one designer, or a group of ideologically motivated designers, to transfer a thought or idea through the creation of a game. This simply does not transcend the traditional triad of sender-channel-receiver. Given the contemporary practice of networked game play, for instance, it seems odd to approach games as communication under the assumption that this a ‘one-to-many’ relationship.
Therefore, although I agree in principle with GT’s approach, my research focuses on the way in which regular people, non-professionals, deploy game play as a discursive practice. In other words, the ways in which people explore and discuss certain topics within the context of a game. On one level this pertains to the discussion that emerges from the narrative economy of a game; on another level how people make sense of larger reality through the internal logic of a game. By participating in online discussion centered on a game and by making their ‘home-made’ productions for it freely available online, the discourse that emerges is fundamentally ‘many-to-many,’ and, I believe, much more in sync with contemporary communicative practice.
GT aims to marry the practice of game design with humanistic principles: to provide “potential developers, artists, designers, and marketers with a meaningful understanding of the human condition and the ability to express themselves through video games.” (2006) This approach has its own merits, but focuses predominantly on the privileged position of media professionals.
Obviously, the expressive potential of any medium should not be, nor rarely is, contingent on a professional degree.
The heavy focus on technology is what I believe the weak point in GT’s approach. They argue that there is a “content crisis” in the game industry because developers depend too much on so-called “hard-coded scripts, level designs, textures, models, sounds, and animations.” Their solution for this is procedural expression: “architectures, representational techniques, and design methods [that] enable creation of richly interactive, generative experiences.” In other words, game developers need to start focusing on deploying software as a space that promotes “high-agency interactive storytelling.” So that, if I understand correctly, given procedural tools, gamers will tell their own stories.
Communicating one’s experience of reality through technology is a fundamental cultural practice. However, conceptualizing expression as dependent on technological innovation seems somewhat backwards: something that McLuhan identified in terminology as “the horseless carriage.” (1962) Instead of awaking the technologists of the world to the notion of human drama, I’d argue to look into ways that humans express their drama through technology, especially in the search for expressive potential of video games.
Sources:
Ian Bogost (2007) “Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames” MIT Press
Marshall McLuhan (1962) “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man” University of Toronto Press
Janet Murray (1997) “Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace” The Free Press: New York
Janet Murray, Ian Bogost, Michael Mateas, and Michael Nitsche (2006) “Game Design Education: Integrating Computation and Culture” IEEE Computer Society, June 2006