Academic Journal on Computer Games

Espen Aarseth writes: "The world's first academic journal on computer games, Game Studies, is now online. With several international conferences and a peer-review journal, 2001 is the year that the academic world finally takes computer and video games seriously."

i suppose it had to happen

I mean, everything gets analyzed these days, games just never made money in studies before.

what other journals exist?

I like game dev for one... very good mag.

anyone have other favorites?

subatomic
http://www.mp3.com/subatomicglue [mp3.com]

Gaming U

So we have the philosophical aspect of gaming. Does it make you a bloodthirsty killer or whatnot.
We have the engineering standpoint. Obviously tons of game specific coding skills.
Not to mention hardware engineering specifically for games
We have games as works of art. Character design, texturing, model building...
Throw in a "phys.ed." class and I think we've got the beginnings of a gaming university.. Can you imagine the kind of revenue and the amount of people to try and attend such a place... Coming soon to an ivy league near you! "Gaming U"
A really cool place to go to school ...except that it's light on girls.

Academic Attitudes to Game Development

In my experience, most academics in the field of computer science consider game development to be an waste of computing resources and expertise.

I had to fight hard to get my university to allow me to develop a PSX game for my final year undergrad project and I was lucky that my supervisor was not an old-school stick-in-the-mud, and was very supportive.

I ended up with a great mark (80percent) and a lot of decent experience which got me a job in the games industry. A lot of my contemporaries ended up doing 'suggested' projects - i.e. donkey work for lecturers who wanted some kind of utility to make their lives easier.

I'm pretty anti-academia and I think my main reason for being like that is that I saw these guys (university fellows, doctors, lecturers, or whatever they want to be known as), who really should have known better, acting like they were supreme masters of computing when really the stuff they were doing was stuck in the 70s. Game development is, by necessity, cutting-edge stuff.

I'm not arguing that there is not room for more 'traditional' computing, but the way these guys dismissed game development, you got the impression they considered it something that was only for people without the intellectual capacity to do something more 'academic'. In reality, the average big-budget game these days requires more combined knowlege and skill, across a multitude of disciplines, than almost any other type of software development.

Some great developments have come about through videogames. I'm sure you've all heard about how interested the military was in Atari's tank war game, or DID's combat flight sims. I'm sure there are lots of other examples of gaming technology going mainstream a few years down the line

The bottom-line is that "fun" is very difficult to quantify and it can't be expressed in mathematical notation. Therefore, the thinking goes, it ain't science. Therefore, it ain't academic enough.

-Sy/\/apZ-

Some thoughts...

Game Institute [gameinstitute.com] offers courses (non-trivial ones at that) for the aspiring game maker. They look pretty good, and I've heard good things about them, but I haven't done one myself.

The thing about game development is that is rapidly turning into its own kind of engineering. Large projects neccesitate good engineering practice. However, there is reputedly still remarkable reluctance on the part of developers to adopt coding practices that have been the norm in other development fields for some time (the adoption of C++ for one, but I realise that can start a flame war, so don't).

I don't think it's reasonable to say that game development is an academic discipline - a reasonable acid test is whether there is active research in game development. There's loads in graphics and visualisation, probably a bundle in audio techniques, and a lot of AI... but these are all ends in themselves, rather than explicitly contributory research to the field. Most implementations of research techniques are very heavily tailored due to the contraints placed upon the games developers by technology.

That's not to say that game-development doesn't take skill - clearly there are some incredibly bright people working in the field. It certainly warrants its own journal. Maybe we'll see some standardisation bodies :)

Henry

Missing something...

As someone who actually does some amount of game studies in my actual academic studies, I feel that some of the posts here so far are missing an important feature...

People have stated that games are "science"...and that they are "feats of engineering"...but, what's missed is that to a large degree they are also works of "art" and as a whole comprise an artistic medium. There are journals analyzing film-work, television, music and such from a cultural, social, and/or humanistic academic standpoint. It was important for this distinction (in both ways) to happen with respect to gaming as well...

Slightly unfair

2001 is the year that the academic world finally takes computer and video games seriously.

Hmm, that's a bit harsh. Although games have never had a scientific conference or a peer-reviewed journal of their own, they have had their place in many journals and conferences for quite a while now. A few among the many: SIGGRAPH [siggraph.org], which sponsors many conferences including of course SIGGRAPH 2001 [siggraph.org], GI [graphicsinterface.org] the Canadian conference which often focuses on interactive rendering and animation, Eurographics [eg.org], which sponsors many publications, journals, and conferences on rendering and animation, etc, etc. Gaming is one of the stronger motivations of all this research, and they do talk about other aspects of gaming. For instance SIGGRAPH had a course on game AI for at least the past 2 years, and often presents articles on 3D sound.

Just seems slightly sensationalistic to claim that the field has been ignored by the academia while it has been a driving force of so much research for at least 5 years, perhaps 10.

-- Eric Plante,
M.Sc. in CompSci on hair dynamics,
University of Montreal, 1999.

A poor excuse

The exact academic value of this is still in my mind doubtful.

There is nothing here that hasn't been covered (in less detail but covered none the less) in various computer magazines.

Do any of the writers have a degree in gaming?(http://www.hotecho.org/hotecho/archive/se2 7/sch-uni/sch-uni.html)

Computer games have become feats of engineering

It's about time this happened. Computer game programming has evolved since it's inception from an amusement of a few engineers, to a legitimate commercial enterprise, to a force in the marketplace and finally to an area of academic research.

In fairness for those who look on this with skepticism, the computer gaming industry integrates a variety of areas of research which together can be applied to computer gaming, buy are legitimate areas of study seperately: Mathmatical modeling, Graphic Arts, a whole variety of areas around AI research from the 70s, and the study of sociology, in attempts to create acccurate simulations of human responses. Aparently, all we really needed was some motivation to study these areas, and the pursuit of entertainment is just such a motivator.

--CTH

AAAI 2000 - best of show was a game

The winner of the best paper at the AAAI conference was on AI used to play a board game. So yes, it is taken fairly seriously by existing organizations, but it is good to see more focus on this. (Gamasutra.com has some good research-level information on techniques as well.)

Human Level AI's Killer App - Computer Games

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence [aaai.org] AI Magazine Summer 2001 has a paper by John E Laird and Michael van Lent "Human-Level AI's Killer Application - Interactive Computer Games". The title says it all (and I don't want to get in trouble quoting bits of it).

My Thesis!

Now I can go to my review board with some credibility on Quake mods as a viable master's thesis!

Root DOWN
grep what -i sed?

It finally happened...

Well this is what i get for procrastination... I had thought of starting a similar site - however I kept finding myself playing the games rather than writing about them.

I am thinking of starting a 'Gaming School' type of site - nothing fancy, mostly some tutorials, nice graphics for different examples etc... even a monthly comic. Who knows - it's still in the works, but it's something I think I could enjoy and maybe bring some shiny happiness to someone elses life.... *pffftt* I think I'll do this one for me. ^_^;

Games are a science

Tons of time and resources are devoted to all sorts of games. Algorithms are researched and revised constantly in order to make them more efficient. I'd have to say that even though the "high-society" may not enjoy reading about the latest Sims expantion, I still think that there is quite a bit to be learned from the people that code them.

It's about time

I think this is a good opportunity for the enhancement of video games. For my senior project in college, I made a "human frogger" where a person moved around a room, tracked by digital cameras, and had to interact with enemies on a big TV screen (all done in Visual C.) This was a challenge for me because it not only had to be a smooth running game but it also had to interact in real time with massive amounts of input from the cameras. Anyway my point is that it would have been nice to have such a forum/journal as this to look to for advice, or maybe even contribute my final results to. I hope this journal results in better gaming for everyone.

It's about time !

We've only had professional game developers for at least 10+ years :)

It reminds of the Journal of MUD Research now Journal of Virtual Environments ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/ [pennmush.org] )

Maybe we'll see more well written articles like the clasic Bartle's "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS" [pennmush.org] ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/v1n1/bartle.html )

Of course we've had Gamasutra hosting articles by Ernest Adams.
i.e. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010521/adams_0 1.htm [gamasutra.com]

The papers are weak

I'm not impressed with Issue I. "The Case of Narrative in Digital Media" indicates a complete lack of familarity with the issues of game design. The place of narrative in game design is widely discussed in the developer community, and is examined in detail at the Game Developer's Conference every year. There's a basic tension in modern game design between world-building and narrative. Managing that balance is hard, and it's a recognized problem. The author of that journal article didn't know that.

A game is a place that you go or a thing that you do, not a story you listen to. Game designers who ignore this (usually ones stuck doing a game related to some Hollywood property) produce games that lock the player onto a story track. Such games get lousy reviews, and are only played a few times.

On the other hand, the game designer can easily create a world in which life is nasty, brutish, and short. That doesn't, of itself, make it interesting, although plotless pure first-person shooters do have a substantial market. There's a temptation to add a plot or backstory to give the game depth. But the two are hard to mix. The usual options are to lock the user into a series of challenges to be faced in order, or to build an adventure game with free movement but a finite set of puzzles. Getting beyond those models is a hot topic among game designers.

The author of the journal article was, clearly, totally unaware of these issue. So they were thus unqualified to write that paper.

But at least they didn't quote Derrida.

What a waste

The subject of my post is not the concept of a scholarly journal devoted to computer games--I think it's a great idea. What I want to criticize is this implementation of the idea.

I read several of the papers on the web site, and was very unimpressed. They're about on the level of /. Articles: one person's opinion of some aspect of games. It's possible that my problem with it is that I don't know filmspeak or whatever jargon they're using, but I don't see the point in some of them, and the theses that I can find seem to be obviously false if you've actually played a lot of games.

One article lauds The Sims and bashes fantasy games because The Sims is about people and fantasy games are not (so the author says). It's nonsense to say that no fantasy games are about people. Planescape: Torment, for example, raises issues of mortality, ethics, and identity.

Another article claims that no dramatically compelling games have yet been written. It never explicitly defines dramatically compelling, but says that no games "offer captivating narrative". Considering that I know people (and have been one) who sometimes watch people play some games (Final Fantasy, Baldur's Gate II, Fallout, Zork: Nemesis, just to name a few) for the purpose of seeing how the plot (or narrative) will unfold, I'd say this proposition is clearly false.

I would like to see a high-quality academic journal about games, because I think there's a lot more to them than they are given credit for. Unforutnately, this publication isn't it.

Hosted in Norway?

I think this is a strange place to host the 'academic' face of the videogame industry. Norway has not been known for their great VGI culture, nor their profusion of products. Perhaps this is their way of breaking into the field? Or is the site mearly hosted in .NO and run by established members of the industry?

In any event, as a professional game designer, I am not amused by the hoity-toity leap to exclusive peer review journals cluttering up the landscape. It seems the best games come from the underground, the fresh blood seems to come out of the garage. Well, the current culture of academic arrogance has killed any chance of a new Thomas Edison appearing on the Science and Technology horizon, and I'd hate to see the trend develop for video games. Or we may never see the next John Carmack!

Which One?

I live in Maine. I grew up 10 minutes from his Bangor residence. I know this is a hoax/troll and that he is alive and well, but you could at least be more specific about which of his several Maine homes he proportedly died in! Do yer homework!

Root DOWN
"Study your math, kids. Key to the Universe! - Gabriel, 'The Prophecy'

Re:Sounds like Europe was behind.

Nah, the 16-bit systems really didn't start to appear until 1990, 1991 or so. 8-bit systems didn't die the death until 1992 or 1993. There were some damned fine games written for the NES, for example, from 1990 onward (Dragon Warrior IV, etc).

Re:Thorin starts singing about gold

Whoever wrote that was a bit of twat, though: "The Sims is a landmark in videogame history because it has opened a Pandora's box by replacing the usual troll and sci-fi monster with plain humans."

I'm sorry, but I can't take seriously anyone who thinks that computer games have been about trolls and sci-fi monsters, until a year or two ago.

What is even more ridiculous is that there is a paragraph of that text titled "Little computer people" without even mentioning that game, which, as dull as it was didn't seem to feature either trolls or sci-fi.