(Not) Playing by the Rules: Proposing the Course

When it came time to write a short description of the course to appear in the schedule of classes, on bulletin boards, and on the syllabus, I dredged up my original proposal, which I submitted just about one year ago. I’ll admit I was pretty ignorant of the bureaucratic procedures involved in creating a new course. I just typed up some, printed it out, and gave it to my program director. It helped that her areas of research were equally quirky: stage magic and automatons. It also helped that my games course fit into an existing series of required courses.

Audacity, especially when coupled with ignorance, can take a person far. I wasn’t completely ignorant, of course. I had sat on committees in which we discussed the curriculum of the program and looked for innovative ways to present the material. That helped me specifically address the curriculum’s key concepts in my proposal and match topics with those concepts.

Here is an excerpt from my original proposal:

Playing by the Rules: Games In and Out of the Ordinary World
Roger Ngim, lecturer

This interdisciplinary, writing-intensive course will explore the idea of games as both a reflection of culture-based values and a method of experimenting with those values in a bounded, “safe” environment. The course will take a close look at the games we play—board games, video games, computer games, gambling, sports, school-yard games—and examine them in terms of theories of play by Huizinga, Sutton-Smith, Caillois and others. Students will discuss concepts such as “performing belief” (willingly abiding by the rules of a game-created fantasy) and the “magic circle” (the border between play and reality), as well as in-game behavior such as risk-taking, teamwork and cheating. Students will be asked to demonstrate their understanding of classic and contemporary texts by analyzing the games they play and applying their discoveries to the “real” world. What rules do we live by in our everyday lives? In what ways do we perform belief and how does it help maintain cultural cohesion? When are we inside or outside the magic circle, and what happens when we cross that border? What happens if we don’t play by the rules?

Interdisciplinarity, writing, culture, values. Trying not to use too many buzzwords, I worked hard to underscore the academic legitimacy of the course without making it sound too theoretical or inaccessible for first-year students. The proposal goes on to detail other course topics -- such as technology and games, and games as art -- as well as possible writing assignments and section activities, including games. Although I expect the course to be fun, exciting, and perhaps even entertaining for both the students and me, I avoided saying so.

The study of games has a relatively short history in academia and it’s easy to understand why. In popular culture, the defining characteristic of games is that they are fun; we use words like “ritual” for games that serve a purpose other than entertainment. On the other hand, film, which has been bestowed a greater academic legitimacy, can elicit a variety of emotional and intellectual responses. We play games because they are fun; we watch films for many reasons, only one of which is to have fun. Moreover, films exhibit their historical and cultural contexts in a more accessible and obvious manner. Games are just as much cultural artifacts as movies, but we have little experience analyzing them for their cultural meaning. (This is much less true of video and computer games than board games.)

Most of us, even dedicated hobby gamers such as myself, play games primarily because we enjoy them, and I don’t mean to devalue entertainment as a reason for playing games. I do think, however, that the game community as a whole may not be fully aware of the potential of games to go far beyond the fun factor to become a medium recognized as being as complex, nuanced and multivalent as film. We’ve seen enough strategy games over the years (or “Eurogames”) to spot trends and discern patterns, and decode the meanings behind them. I’m not saying we should all become academics, but that perhaps it’s time to make use of the huge amount of accumulated knowledge and experience in the game community and use it to further the cause of understanding how the world works.

It’s true I though teaching a college course about games would be just about the coolest thing I could imagine (apart from, say, being invited to the Gathering of Friends). But I wouldn’t have pursued teaching it if I didn’t truly believe that games have a lot of offer as objects of study, a framework for examining culture, and a method of teaching. I can't say how grateful I am to have this opportunity, and maybe that's why I feel obligated to share it with the gaming community. This is an invitation for all of us to think more deeply about what we love.

Why a Course About Games?

During a phone call with my mom last fall, I mentioned that I would be teaching a course about games at the university where I work. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey, Mom, the proposal I submitted for a new course was accepted. I’m going to be teaching it in the spring.
Mom: Oh, really? What it is about?
Me: Games.
Mom: Games? (A moment of silence most likely indicating confusion.) People don’t go to college to study games.
Me: Everything is worth studying, Mom.
Mom: What are you going to teach them? How to win? Can’t they learn that on their own?
Me: We’re going to look at what games we play, how we play them and what that says about our culture.
Mom: Well, I’m sure your students’ parents didn’t send them to college to play games. Games are just something you do in your free time.
Me: It’s a legitimate topic for scholarly research. (Getting a little impatient.) Aren’t you going to say “congratulations”?
Mom: Congratulations. (Pause.) But ... games?

At that point, it seemed best to change the subject. My mom studied business administration in college and my dad was a grocer. My brother and I often wonder how such a no-nonsense pragmatic couple could have produced such wildly impractical children. My brother is a music professor and concert pianist, and I am a former journalist who switched careers and became a conceptual artist.

It isn’t just my mom who has questioned my game class proposal. At a social event last year, a high-level administrator in charge of undergraduate education asked me what I was planning to cover in my course. He was friendly, but I thought I heard a note of skepticism in his voice. Caught off guard, I rattled off a list of some of the topics I had spent the summer researching, punctuated by a lot of uh’s and um’s. He frowned and thought a moment, then said, “I’m curious. How exactly do you define a game?” My mind went blank – not just a little foggy, but completely, utterly blank. (Usually this happens when I walk into a library without my notebook: Suddenly a curtain is drawn and my brain no longer has access to all the names and titles I want to look up. Funny how that happens.) Somehow I managed to say that there is little agreement on what a game is, and that I planned to devote at least an entire lecture to the subject. My response earned a “humpf” and the note rang just a bit louder.

Those two conversations remind me what a long road it has been convincing myself that my obsession could be more than just a hobby, that the hours I have been spending playing games, reading about games, and listening to podcasts about games have not been a waste of time. Countless times I have invoked “I’m doing research,” a convenient and flexible excuse used by many an artist and academic, to justify spending an entire evening perusing Boardgamegeek.com or flying across the country attend a board game convention. This rationalization actually began long before there were any prospects for me teaching a course about games. My parents must have transmitted some of their pragmatism to me (they would strongly argue this point) for I truly believe that if I am spending so much time focused on something, it must be for more a reason greater than enjoyment. I must be preparing for something, even if I don’t yet know what that something is.

In art school, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, I took courses in play theory and game design. I’ll talk about those experiences in a future post, but those classes convinced me that games rightfully deserved a place in my both my academic and artistic lives. Eventually, I made a series of video-based artworks built around a game-inspired structure. (Again, I’ll talk more about that in a future post.) The success of those pieces demonstrated that I could build a body of work around certain aspects of games. I’m not interested in game design itself, which I’ll leave to the pros. I am, however, drawn to the social aspects of gaming, as well as issues related to play boundaries, representation, and narrative. Games can bring to my artwork social interaction, the excitement of competition, and tropes that can be reinterpreted and otherwise played with in innumerable ways.

As games have brought a new dimension to my artwork, the study of games will be an entirely new, entirely different approach to the teaching of my program’s central concepts. Not only will they provide the subject matter, being the lens through which the students will examine culture, the games themselves will be the method of teaching. How cool is that?

Uncorking the Genie

Welcome! This blog will be focusing on a new lecture course about games I will be teaching at the University of California at San Diego this spring. I created this blog at the request of some of the readers of Boardgamegeek.com who expressed interest in learning what exactly I will be covering in the course’s 30 lectures. Facing a mountain of books, games, films, articles, and notes, and watching the days count down, I’m eager to find that out myself.

Having fantasized for years about teaching a course like this, when the genie finally popped out of the bottle and granted my wish, I found myself overwhelmed by the possibilities. In my first brainstorming session, potential topics came pouring out: the definition of a game, the history of games, cross-cultural studies of games, play theory, game theory, boundaries of play, emergent play, narrative, the structure of games, the social aspects of gaming, cheating, competition, strategy, chance, technology and games, games and education, game design, gamer culture, the semiotics of games, and on and on. Clearly, I need to narrow things down, especially if I expect to fit in the various activities I’ve been thinking about.

My class will fit into a required series of courses (yes, required) designed to give first-year students an introduction to the humanities, so it doesn't make sense to teach this subject from the perspective of one academic discipline. Instead, students will get a mix of cultural studies, performance studies, art, sociology, anthropology, and history, with a wee bit of critical theory thrown in to confuse them. The point is to demonstrate to the students how anything, even something as “frivolous” as games, can be studied as a cultural artifact and subject to rigorous critical analysis.

If it sounds like I’m puncturing a hole in gaming and letting the fun drain out, be assured that I’m determined to make this an enjoyable, thought-provoking course for the students. In lecture, we will play large-scale games and have competitions such as quiz shows -- whatever I can devise for 300 students. I’m also hoping to create a persistent mystery or puzzle-oriented game that will last throughout the quarter. In section, the teaching assistants will conduct sessions of Werewolf and other social games. There will be the usual writing assignments, but students also will get the opportunity to invent game-like structures that model some aspect of their realities (I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask them to invent a whole game). They will be asked to identify cultural meanings embedded in existing games and to change those meanings by modifying them. And they will be asked to analyze the games they play, whether they be team sports, board games, a video games, or MMORPGs.

I’m making this all public because I view this class as an extension of the real-world and online gaming communities to which I belong. I know I’m not in this alone. I’m eager to hear your feedback, suggestions and criticisms. I want to know what you would talk about if you were the lecturer, and what you would interest you if you were a student. Please feel free to comment!

Next post: How this all happened.