Christian McCrea

The game studies instinct to magically and imperially overrule game design needs and realities is facing more and more resistance. One thing that’s emerged in the last few years is a focus on how systems of all kinds produce meaning. It remains a positive development because game studies has travelled a long way without paying systems much respect. It might seem staid sometimes because it undercuts the orthodoxy where games are merely zones of interaction for players. I want to return to this idea of orthodoxies (ontological orthodoxies, design orthodoxies, linguistic orthodoxies) throughout the year, so these are some early forages.

It was hard for me at first to read work that concentrated on game systems, be they design or technical systems. I’m certainly critical of work written in bad faith where a particular type of system is discussed (or more usually, invented) without much criticism or care. Endless articles about “7 Types of Play Interaction” have their place, but not everybody needs to think and work with game design studies. But I don’t think thats particularly special or unique.

I’m also critical of work (including two of my old articles, so I’m speaking from experience) where imperial statements are made about game design in favour of some vast and ecumenical playful-society-to-be. I used to rant at students and tell them they shouldn’t be making more Castlevanias, but thinking about new and exciting new games that are about real play. 

But that play asserts itself over systems is the big revelation is not controversial. I don’t know a single games designer, artist, programmer, theorist, thinker, blogger who has ever effectively argued that meaning is to be found in game systems alone. I consider the opposite perspective very provably part of the game studies orthodoxy. Which is something I’m finding interesting to think about.  Consider the next paragraph a thought experiment.

“Games can potentially do anything. We should encourage our students to step outside the genres they’re familiar with and understand games more as playgrounds. Game design needs to be an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that takes influence from other media. Of course programming is vital to games but we should be careful that the game is led by ideas first.”

If any of this sounds familiar, its because these are other elements of our orthodoxy. Is it easier to have a discussion with academics about serious games than it is about oh, lets say, console game design. We are in the habit of thinking that the latter constitutes both a commercial and intellectual mainstay; it does not.  The intellectual journey of game studies - including big chunks of game design research - is interested in and is invested in, serious games.  

We can say that It is utterly unremarkable for a University, or for a University funded academic to have an interest in the design of serious games. Serious games, in turn, protect and produce the orthodoxy, the reputation and the discussion of games in the academy. It might well still be the site of important work, of great work. It is, however, our total and defining orthodoxy. It is more remarkable to hear or see or read a games academic that is interested, purely, in console games. One of the byproducts of this orthodoxy is arrogance. Designers and artists who make games for a buying public are treated as empty vessels for the superior (and more playful, naturally) wisdom of academics. More insulting than that, we treat serious games as some kind of outsider avant-garde against those commercial (and indie) games - as if the millions of military dollars, the placement of ex-Armed Forces on the boards of major serious games companies and the resolute, single-minded focus of the entire academic game apparatus was no hint at all. This agenda, maybe what we can more accurately call ‘the games and innovation agenda’ - is the rotting elephant in the room. 

In the games and innovation agenda, games act as a service model for the delivery of higher ideals. Chiefly amongst those higher ideals is pure play, the old ghost which has haunted the study of games since the beginning. These debates are well-trod and I’d need to build a reference list a mile deep to do it justice; and that’s partially my point. There’s more written work on academy-funded serious games with a couple of hundred player hours than Pokemon, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy and so on. 

The games and innovation agenda can be seen in a global apparatus that links Universities and their myriad game labs, small serious game companies, public speaking festivals like TED, education technologists all of which have links in the social games space. With all this plainly in view, we can call building and talking about serious games the core of the orthodoxy within game studies. 

One of the symptoms of the orthodoxy is a vision of academics-as-designers. It has been noted by many game studies academics that many serious games and other games produced in the University context are single-player games, usually with simple non-dynamic interactions. It is no mystery. The reasons are plain. Cost is one. Complexity is another. Universities often go about such projects with a fraction of the labour and expertise of the model which they arrogantly mimic, and then wonder why there’s no audience, commercial traction or even academic interest. 

Game studies is, at its worst, in the business of building a taste fortress that positions a very slight and anemic commercial game canon alongside slight and anemic best practice from the military-industrial-games complex. The conservatism of this positioning should be obvious, and we know where it leads. We stood silent while our contemporaries lay praise at the feet of Second Life as some kind of open-ended playful nirvana, for example. We aped the logic of odious venture capital boosters because we were desperate to resist the so-called orthodoxy of ‘traditional’ games. Second Life is as much a prison as it is an open space of expression. 

On the pedagogical front, games are still beset by the old academic orthodoxies of film and media studies - areas which are desperate to find footholds in digital technologies. Some universities have games firmly planted in the Computer Science department, where different old orthodoxies hold on. Games are highly devalued in these contexts because of the same games and innovation agenda, which forever proposes dilution of practice in favour of offering up game designers and programmers as service providers and cheap labour for other areas. Games service ideas. Games service higher ideals. 

That games have a unique set of intellectual, art, design and programming needs that have benefited every single University that have respected their uniqueness, and blighted every single University that has not, should have long ago been a sign. But in establishing that uniqueness (itself an orthodoxy of course), what has happened is that we’ve confused the compromises with what we compromise. To tell the tale of how games could exist in a modern, changing University, we’ve nodded our heads with every wistful discussion of how games are for everything; health, education, change. They are for these things and much more. 

However, this is our orthodoxy. We accept few other positions.

The anarchic violent joy of action games, the sexist and puerile concept art, the majestic and fantastical concept art, the secluded and isolated design cultures, the open and global design cultures, the changing shape of independent game design, the morphology of character design, weird histories in game music, the absurd microhistories of arcade machines, deranged pedophilic dating sims, bone-snapping murder simulators, the involvement of drug cartels in the history of Street Fighter game design, game development labour itself, the delirious mania of early 90s SEGA, everything to do with Pokemon, everything to do with Call of Duty, everything to do with Final Fantasy - all of these are peripheral to what we talk about when we say we do game studies. 

Which is okay for some of us, some of the time. 

NOTE: There’s more to say here, but I didn’t want to go into things like the horrendous presence of ‘social innovation’ madness or Australia / Europe / US difference.