Seeing video games as an academic field of study

I got up this morning with the crazy idea of recommending a website to you all. www.gamestudies.org will surely change your view upon the video game industry. This periodical academic journal has engaged in analyzing video games form all cultural points of view. Whether you want to find out how multiplayer shooters like Counter-Strike generate new language, compare The Sims to other popular titles (Grannies really ARE cooler than trolls, don’t you think?!) or just gain another point of view on one of the most famous games of the 21st century (World of Warcraft), you are surely bound to find out interesting things.

Video games have emerged as a cultural field of study for about nine years, with the launch of the first international scholarly conference on computer games, in Copenhagen in March 2001. The same academic year saw regular graduate programs in computer game studies being offered for the first time in universities. That is when scholars and academics first took computer games seriously, as a cultural field whose value is hard to overestimate.

As Espen Aarseth, in the editorial for the Game Studies journal admits:

We have a billion dollar industry with almost no basic research, we have the most fascinating cultural material to appear in a very long time, and we have the chance of uniting aesthetic, cultural and technical design aspects in a single discipline. This will not be a painless process, and many mistakes will be made along the way. But if we are successful, we can actually contribute both constructively and critically, and make a difference outside the academy. I am not too optimistic about influencing a multibillion industry. But in the long run, who knows?

And I really think games deserve a reality check, before they explode in an uncontrolled, poor quality pseudo-reality.

We need an End of the World to feel alive

I didn’t know particle accelerators were such a big fuss until I heard of the Large Hadron Collider myself 5 days ago. Can’t say I’m really psyched about it (“Que sera, sera”), but one thing is certain, people are acting much more interesting than they did before the imminent “Apocalypse” had been announced. It’s like they’re all reaching out to grasp for air, like they suddenly become alive and shake off their solid contemporary-specific boredom. I even met a couple who had decided to engage (or that’s what they were joking about) because they didn’t want to die without taking this step.

Even Google is playing along

Of course, the reactions of my acquaintances alone wouldn’t have been reason enough for me to mention the LHC scientific project on my blog. I tend to despise mass hysteria. But one thing I cannot understand is how the experiment got into the press in the first place. Such things are usually kept under a deep silence as man defying God experiments always attract conflicting opinions. But this time around even Google decided to celebrate. Local press has been in a boil with live transmissions and death scenarios. And though the project has been launched several hours ago, we are not dead yet. Seems extinction had been postponed to the 21st of October, when protons will truly clash. I wonder what the press will bring up next, if we won’t die then either. So there are several things I want to do before I die:

1. Estimate the increased incomes of hypermarkets as people  rush to buy what they truly dream of before they die
2. Estimate the tendency to rise/fall of violence across the globe because of this LHC buzz
3. Live the rest 70 years I deserve to live

So yeah, I believe it’s about income after all. But it also concerns human rights. Still, somebody attracted my attention that if I have the right to live, everybody else has the right to be stupid from time to time. That includes the over 1000 scientists we will blame in case of disaster.

Also, there are other things that concern me more than the end of the world at the moment. I think that is true for most of us. In my case, I worry more about the Bulgarians building a nuclear powerplant. And maybe most of all, I’m shocked about the death of Bugs Bunny. See below what I mean.

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