My boss and general awesome dude Glenn Platt sent me a link to this article which is an interview by Graham Oliver with games lit star Tony Tulathimutte. It’s full of insights that people who love and want to create games, or scholarship about games, need to read.
One thing that is pointed out in the text is that games are a STEM field; this is something that many seem to forget. Games have all the problems of gender and race that the other STEM fields have, but they’re also perhaps the most unique humanities-friendly STEM field. But a particular exchange in the interview is of critical importance to understanding where games scholarship is and could go:
GO: It’s a question of access. I was thinking about your Clash essay; you have this entire paragraph that has to explain this massively popular and mechanically fairly simple game. Does that automatically turn off an audience who are already proficient in those basics? In which case, are you only writing for people who don’t game? I suppose that’s another conundrum of coverage in a general interest publication…
TT: If you read an essay by Susan Sontag or Martin Amis about the great books, or by André Bazin about film, they can assume a certain level of knowledge about the text or film from their audience. I can write that way about games on my own time and my own dime, but there’s no presumed canon or general readership for games, because they’re not taught in schools and not regularly discussed in big publications. So you either write for the diehards — the equivalent of film buffs or bookworms — or for novices.
This is a major issue with game writing right now. I have had numerous journals lambast my writing for either doing this (devoting time to describing the game, which is at times boring and all but kills the overall progression of ideas) or not doing this (and assuming the readership can understand games). This creates a situation where if you’re writing a piece for publication, you essentially have to pick to either publish in games journals (where you need a certain approach) or to publish in a discipline (which requires something else). And before someone cries out “that’s what we all do,” that’s actually not true of most other interdisciplinary areas. It’s a problem for the field.
But there’s another side effect of this that I find interesting, related to teaching. As if any of you don’t know, I teach games classes. One of the things I often do is… this will be a surprise… assign games. And students have to go play those games. I often get a criticism from non-majors (and even from some of our majors) that they don’t play a game because they don’t like it, or they don’t understand why they should, or it’s too difficult to find.
I ask them if in their other classes they refuse to read the text because they don’t like it.
I think some of them do. And that’s sad. But most of them just admit their double standard. Everyone reads Chaucer when he’s assigned, but if I assign The Last of Us I’m unreasonable.
We have to change that. We have to change the stigma surrounding games in that regard. If we don’t, the field is going to suffer.