The University of Arizona Alumnus / Summer 2008
Got Game?
The intellectual pursuit of gaming cultureby Tim Vanderpool
Art and photos by Sarah Beaudry
We're sitting inside a darkened room, on the upper floor of a staid building right in the heart of campus. And we're knee-deep in the eccentric world of computer games, thousands of them — from Odyssey and vintage Pong to a primitive version of electronic football.
Just moments ago, I was handed the controls for a crazy Japanese romp called Katamari Damacy, in which the "King of All Cosmos" has accidentally destroyed the very galaxy he lords over. So now it's up to the young prince — that would be me, by proxy — to put the universe back together again. No small chore, that. And so I start maneuvering a sticky ball, the clumping "katamari," across the screen, picking up everything from paper clips and small farm animals to trees and houses.
Had I been gifted with a gamer's itch, I'd nimbly resurrect that ruptured cosmos and greatly please my erstwhile dad, the "King." At that point, however, the work of Judd Ruggill and Ken McAllister would have just begun. For these University of Arizona game theorists, the real goal is getting under the skin of digital creations such as Katamari Damacy, to understand how they interact with people, not to mention what they say about society.
Like me, you might not have considered electronic games to be anthropological talismans, cultural markers, or even cleverly disguised teaching tools. But peek into this humble headquarters of a group called the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), and you'll likely think differently. "We're an international, transdisciplinary research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games, often in an educational context," says Ken
McAllister, LGI's codirector.
That might sound like a lofty mouthful, especially coming from a guy perched among a cortège of joysticks and enough digital firepower to overwhelm a glazed-eyed army. But to McAllister and Ruggill, these games are remarkably underappreciated windows into culture.
"The reason LGI was started," says McAllister, "is because we knew lots of people who were trying to make inroads into a field that eventually would be called game studies. But there was nothing really connecting them."
The demand for those ties was obvious, Ruggill adds. "There is a groundswell of recognition that these games are culturally important artifacts."
Nor was there a repository for storing the objects of so much curiosity. "In game scholarship, it has become difficult to study these artifacts," McAllister says. "The shelf life of a game — even a game released yesterday — is less than a year."
That does not bode well for vintage games. So LGI keeps a sort of digital salvage yard, to resuscitate the more decrepit machines and software received through donations or obtained online. The organization is now home to more than 100 game systems and some 50,000 games, along with a gaming archive and various paraphernalia. Because of funding and space shortages, much of that inventory is stored in homes and garages around Tucson.
And it's all made available to researchers. "That's why we started the collection," says McAllister, who teaches rhetoric and technology in the English department, and recently authored Game Work: Language, Power and Computer Game Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2004). "Say you were in literature and writing a piece of scholarship about a play or a poem or a story without actually having read them. Well, that just wouldn't happen. But with game studies, it happens a lot.
"I mean, where are you going to find a rare game like Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em? Or Custer's Revenge, an incredibly controversial and X-rated game released for Atari 2600? Everybody writes about those games, but nobody has played them. We wanted to encourage people, and say, "Hey, if you're going to write about this stuff, well here it is.'"
Thorough research demands nothing less, says Ruggill, a lecturer in the School of Media Arts who will be an assistant professor of communication studies at ASU this fall. "A lot of game studies focus upon interface with the game. It's not just an audio-visual game, but also a kinesthetic experience. You have to be able to touch these things, to see the way you interact with them. That's part of the purpose."
Still, who would have thought that such games, long dismissed as mere entertainment, might be considered worthy of academic toil? That notion likely didn't cross the mind of Willy Higginbotham back in 1958, when the physicist constructed the first electronic game at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. Called Tennis for Two, Higginbotham's creation was played on an archaic screen, with the net denoted by a tiny vertical line. Its purpose was entertaining guests at a laboratory open house.
Within four years, the first true computer game was developed, this time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Spacewar! offered galactic battles between two ships self-descriptively called "Needle" and "Wedge." Then in 1966, a television engineer named Ralph Baer came up with a game that could be channeled through a TV antenna. Baer's creation was an early version of electronic ping-pong. By 1972, Magnavox released the seminal game Odyssey. Complete with 10 games, the console was attached directly to a television set.
Since then, electronic gaming has evolved from a rather eccentric niche market into a commercial leviathan; by the turn of this century, electronic games had become a $30-billion worldwide industry.
But academia was not keeping up. A gap between the proliferation of games and the insights they proffered - not to mention their potential as teaching tools — was really the spark behind LGI's start in 1999. That academic hunger was great; the organization quickly grew to include scholars from a slew of UA departments, along with researchers from a dozen universities around the globe.
Major conference workshops have since been spearheaded by LGI members, and countless articles, books, and presentations have come from within the group. They've created an online game-studies bibliography, and were primary drivers behind the first Academic Gaming Symposium.
It's an extraordinarily broad-based collective, drawing upon any number of academic domains. According to McAllister, that largely reflects the complexity of game culture, and the sweeping task of creating games themselves. "Collaboration is a necessity," he says, "because games are incredibly multidisciplinary — you have to have creative writers, illustrators, animators, engineers, musicians, programmers, physicists, marketing people, lawyers."
Meanwhile, game culture is gaining attention from the outside. In 2006, for example, Special Collections at the UA Libraries hosted an exhibit called Documenting
Digital Play: Computer Games and Their Communities. Although more accustomed to handling first editions and rare manuscripts, Special Collections Associate Librarian Bonnie Travers saw the importance lurking in games, says McAllister.
"She had the vision to realize that games, too, are incredibly ephemeral. They go out of date and can no longer be played.
"So we had a seven-or eight-month exhibition, with rare things from our collection. It was really fun." It also revealed, in sharp focus, the almost primal technological linkage between eras. "One of the most fun things was that we had the very first home game console," he says. "It's an Atari Pong system. But we had it hooked up to a modern, huge-screen plasma TV." And throughout the exhibit, teenagers lined up to play.
The work of McAllister and Ruggill also spills over to social causes, such as their involvement with Looters!, a game created to teach visitors to Cambodia — and Cambodians themselves — not to disturb antiquities or participate in the black-market trade in such precious heritage.
"We developed Looters! with Monash University in Australia," says Ruggill, "and with Heritage Watch, which has an obvious interest in anti-looting and cultural preservation."
In Looters!, a young boy is offered money by black marketers, if he'll pilfer through areas such as burial sites. So the boy has to make a decision: If he chooses to loot, he's followed by ghosts and shunned by his community. The message is obvious.
Like all game productions, developing Looters! was quite complicated, involving everyone from a mortuary archaeologist and 3-D animators, to Cambodian musicians and comic-book artists. The result is an impressive teaching tool. "It falls into the category of a serious or persuasive game," says Ruggill, "an example of a game built around a serious concept."
Besides building ties between academic institutions and disciplines, LGI goes out into the community, sponsoring game nights, "where we pick a theme — it might be music or children's games or militarism," McAllister says. "We invite people from the community we think would be interested, and who also can help us think about the game from an insider's perspective. For example, if it's a driving game, we might try to get professional car builders and race-car drivers."
Other games pluck their models from more-or-less everyday life. "Such as Health and Fitness Tycoon," says Ruggill, "where it would be great to have somebody (on a game night) with that kind of experience. It can help you think about ways to interpret the game.
"One of the things we're particularly interested in," he says, "is why these games teach, and how they do so. But the learning isn't transparent. You don't know you're learning until it's over — and then you've been tricked, of course."
Of course. Hey, wait a minute! Am I being tricked into learning, even as I white-knuckle the controls of Katamari Damacy?
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