Wednesday, January 30, 2008

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?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your conversation with your mother is similar to one I have been forced to go through at least once a week for the last four years....

"So what are you researching exactly?"

"Um, games"

"Games?"

"Um, yeah.."

"Oh, like Videogames?"

"Well, not really, more board games, card games, that sort of thing..."

"What, like Monopoly?

"Um, yeah, let me grab you a beer..."

Roger Ngim said...

Hi Stewart,

Thanks for you comments. Maybe my mom and your mom should have a beer together and talk about their wayward sons.

By the way, thanks for mentioning Suits. He's on my list but I not yet read his book.

Scott Nicholson said...

I'm teaching a course on "Gaming in Libraries" in the summer, and am struggling with many of these issues. That's also my area of research (http://gamelab.syr.edu for more info there.)

I recently went in front of the American Library Association to get a new group started on games and gaming, and this exact question came up. Thankfully, the night before, we had been debating it, and then I did some searching online.

My current working definition is the one from Kevin Maroney at http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/MyEntireWakingLife.shtml
which is
"A game is a form of play with goals and structure."


I looked at a number of different definitions, and this one is simple and hits on the important points - play, goals, and structure. Without all three of those, you have an activity but not a game.

Roger Ngim said...

Hi Scott,

Kevin Maroney's definition is succinct and workable. But I'm wondering if it excludes all forms of play that most of us would not call a game. I'll have to ponder this.

At any rate, I think it will be more useful to have the students weigh the various definitions available. Jesper Juul offers a handy summary of thought on the issue in his book "Half-Real."

craniac said...

You are my hero. I teach technical writing and have my students rewrite bad rules and playtest them in class.

Roger Ngim said...

Mark, what a great idea for teaching technical writing. Maybe you could put your students to work fixing some of the famously bad game rules and uploading them to the Geek.

We will be studying and writing rules in my class. I am even thinking about writing the syllabus in the form of game rules.

If I have students write rules, it will probably be an exercise in which they take a real-life situation (such as driving or having dinner in a fancy restaurant) and write rules for it.

Anonymous said...

A: Very Cool.

I have to give a shout out for games people play in central america... a long time ago. Certainly a valid topic of study among archaeologists.

Went to Chichén Itzá this summer.