Game Studies: A Student’s Perspective
Posted on June 18th, 2008 in Games |
Good friend of the Virtual Fools J (aka the letter J) forwared to me a link to a Rolling Stones article online that asks if Grand Theft Auto IV is the Best Popcorn Movie of the Summer?. I’m sure 5/8s of the population cried out “no, wait, that’s a game!!” before reading the article but the rest of us looked to see how author Peter Travers was going to draw parallels between the game and a movie. It’s a nice review of some of the narrative and plot and he purposely says that’s he’s not going to talk about gameplay. Fair enough. Good article. Moving on, right? Of course not.
What struck me was a comment left on the article:
Ben Raybuck | June 18, 2008 10:16 AM
Absolutely wonderful. It really is about time that someone with credibility helped to usher video games into the realm of high art from a critical standpoint, and I am certainly glad Mr. Travers is the one to do it.
Now, as somebody paying $20K a year to earn the right to call myself a Game Studies scholar with a little piece of paper declaring that I am indeed a Master of Science, this comment is a bit disheartening. After all, I’ve made it my goal to be one of the people that carries on the charge. As a matter of semantics, “carries on” implies that there are other people that have come before me and other people doing this right now. I’ve learned that there’s a surprisingly large contigent of people that are interested in game studies (which itself is a term that hasn’t been decided on). There is no single voice for the field, though Dr. Henry Jenkins of MIT and Dr. Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech are at least prominent figures for the media. People keep expecting some sort of figure that will become the face critical game studies that launches the medium into the “mainstream” and “high art”. They clamor for the “Lester Bangs of Video Games” without realizing that such a person isn’t all that important.
There are a lot of smart people thinking about video games. They’re in academia, design, criticism, marketing, and tons of other fields. Hell, there are even a lot of intelligent fans with good ideas about the medium. They all bring something good to the table. If we keep waiting for the person with the turkey, we’ll miss the people with the mashed potatoes, the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the greenbean caserole, and the peas in a butter suace with those yummy little vidalia onions. Eventually the turkey will just arrive and we won’t even notice because we’re pigging out on so many delicious things. So just do your best with your side dish and remind other people that Peter Travers has the rolls.
2 Responses
Wow, that was the most horrible game related articles I’ve ever read. This has to be a satire, I mean he spent the whole article just describing what you can do (heavily focused on the brutality of the game which is always the first thing attributed to the game and the concept made fun of most) and then comparing that to what is found in movies. Using that logic I can say since I drive a real car not only is my life like Speed Racer but it is also like GTA4. Plus the way he describes the game I could swear he was talking about GTA3, so if that is all GTA4 has to offer then why are people buying it? Oh and comparing games to movies, how old is that concept? I mean that was one of the things that sparked the Ludology/Narratology debates, should games have to worry about telling stories that match cinema or are they something completely different and we delude the medium if we compare it to other mediums.
I really hope this quote was a joke, “It really is about time that someone with credibility helped to usher video games into the realm of high art from a critical standpoint.” I don’t think a 1000 word article that says gems like “GTA IV doesn’t shoot its wad in the first scene” really boosts the game into that high art status. Personally I have no idea who Peter Travers is and I’m pretty sure this article is a joke … pretty sure. Games don’t need to be movies and they don’t need movies. They are something else (better in my opinion) with their own pros and cons.
But per your comments Bobby yes I think we do spend too much time trying to find that one Game Studies Guru. In fact I’m getting sick of going to conferences and seeing the same keynote speakers time after time, we need some fresh faces. I like the food metaphor, made me hungry.
@Ben
I see the article as a joke or satire about the state of the film industry more than the game industry. Like Travers was saying, “look, if games can do cinematic story telling this well, how come our movies can’t?” So I must say that I didn’t mind the article from that perspective. However, you’re right to say that if something were to be labeled a seminal text in game studies, this certainly wouldn’t be it.