University of Wyoming Studies Video Games

krou writes "The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting story about how the University of Wyoming's English Department is helping fund a collective called the Learning Games Initiative to study video games. Jason Thompson, an assistant professor at UW who is part of the group, explains that 'it's a group of people [who] do research on games, do development on games, and keep an archive of games printed matter such as manuals, ... systems, all of it. We really look at games as cultural artifacts; things that reveal theology, things that reveal power. Things that should be studied in the academy.' The English Department has been very open-minded with the project, because they understand that gaming can educate people, and that 'we can expand our notion of what text and study is; the idea that it might be fun doesn't necessarily preclude its study.' Thompson believes that it's important for academia to study gaming, because games could be used in the future as a type of textbook: 'if games can teach, then as teachers shouldn't we understand what kind of teaching's going on?'"

Re:A great excuse...

[paeanblack]

An academic discipline full of fanboys, I can't wait!

I took a game analysis class last fall at MIT/GAMBIT, and went in with a similar attitude.

Yeah...there was a ton more reading and discussing heavy philosophy than I was expecting.

Deconstructing "fun" may seem like wanking, but it's serious business to the folks analyzing whether to gamble $50M on the next title.

Video game buyers are pretty fickle, and their answer to "what is fun" is generally "I know it when I see it". Development budgets have gotten large enough that investors need a little more than warm fuzzies before opening their wallets.

Maybe

[lyinhart]

This project might produce interesting results, depending on how they run things. Theology? Well, some Japanese games had references to Christian theology removed when brought to Western countries, including early Castlevania games and more recent games like Grandia 2 and Maken X. Politics? Poly Play, developed in Communist East Germany was awful (yet popular, since there wasn't much else to play there), but Tetris, developed in... wait for it... Soviet Russia became a cultural phenomenon. Then there's the supposed North Korean arcade: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2008/09/inside-north-korean-arcade.html [ukresistance.co.uk] Culturally, there's the usual topics of sex and violence in games. And increasingly, ethnicity and gender. Big whoop.

I just hope it doesn't turn out to be just like other university subdepartments dedicated to "specialty" studies, home to a bunch of self-righteous blowhards who don't really know what they're talking about.