University of Wyoming Studies Video Games 81
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?'"
So, class, what have you learned? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I believe if you play as a team, you do learn valuable lessons about how to organize a team of diverse individuals over the internet to achieve a common goal, and that does help prepare you for connected knowledge work in the future. Unfortunately, I almost always play solo, in which case it is little more than mental masturbation.
Not the best job ever. (Score:4, Interesting)
no job can be the 'best job ever'. remember this : once you start doing something as job, it starts to be less 'fun' every day on and on, until at one point becoming a mere job itself.
no exceptions. it goes that way because people tend to dislike things that they are doing mandatorily and regularly, instead of doing them whenever they want to do them and desire to do them.
for any job to not go down the same way, the person needs to have a passion, an obsession with that particular job/activity. however, this is the reality for only a tiny percentage of global population. and we generally end up seeing them as prominent members of their fields, if they work in a field that has any media coverage or peer recognition.
This is hilarious (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A great excuse... (Score:3, Interesting)
""Video game buyers are pretty fickle, and their answer to "what is fun" is generally "I know it when I see it"."
You do know that Mass effect 2 director said "listen to fans"? He said the MOST important thing you can do as a developer is listen to your fans critiques, they took a list of all the major complaints of Mass effect 1 and used it to design Mass effect 2. There are whole articles on it @ Gamasutra.
Academically analyzing games is fine, no doubt about it. But you have to remember games are huge projects and gluing those engineered pieces of work together by large teams is the hard part. Anyone with a degree of intelligence can analyze what is wrong with a game. You go to a major review site, pick the "criticism cream" of the crop (i.e. reviewers who know what is wrong with the game).
Games are developed via dialogue with one's customers. If a gamer orders steak, and you give him onions he's going to know "that's not steak".
Not all gamers are equally skilled at understanding what's broken with a game but intelligent gamers are, many gamers are better then many academics at knowing what makes a good game.
I've predicted which games will fail or be successful with a greater then 90% accuracy rate.