(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.