Gamers Wearing Tweed?

Setting the ludologists and the narratologists aside, there's another division in the games community that can be drawn against academic and professional lines--those who go to school to learn how to make games and those who go to school to learn about games, which is called game theory. Mateas notes that all too often the camps do not see eye to eye. "I think some of the best academic games studies happen when you're engaged in design, and you're doing this sort of theoretical analysis that allows you to sort of step back [to] take stock [to] try out your theories in design and [to try to] step back [to] take stock and try them out again, and so forth," says Mateas. The alternative, he says, is for game studies to go the way of film studies. Mateas sees "almost no relationship anymore between film studies and people who make films. They're like two independent communities that never talk to each other. They only talk to each other through their artifacts. One makes artifacts, [while] the other analyzes." Mateas says the situation is a shame, because the best designers are theoretically informed designers. "I sort of sense this split starting to emerge, and I hope that doesn't go too far," he says.

Mateas' students have "very strong rounding in commercial games," he notes, "but they've also been very interested in interactive story. And that's been a place that's been sort of a natural for radical innovation, because we don't really have truly interactive stories in the game world yet."

Georgia Tech's New Media master's program includes 40 students, and the school's doctoral program includes five, with as many as 20 to 40 percent of them at any given time focusing on games. The master's program was established in 1993, and the doctoral program will begin this year. To Murray, the growing interest in game studies can be attributed to a few different factors. "I think, frankly, that The Sims was an enormous breakthrough, and it proved that you could have a wildly popular game that has a very down to earth, everyday narrative to it. And it engaged a wide range of players--more women than men," she notes of the breakthrough game. She adds that the growth of multiplayer online games is creating a "new culture around gaming" and that interactive television is joining that circle. "In Great Britain, for example, a large portion of the television audience is playing online quizzes and online gambling all because they have an interactive button right on the TV remote," she says. Widely available and highly accessible Web-based games are a factor too, Murray says. All of these things are building what she calls "critical mass" on the availability and range of games. Murray sees games as an "age-old" cultural form and finds it more surprising that we haven't studied them in any depth before.

Lowood, who doesn't believe that academia has had much of an effect on games yet, refers to the tension between the game development community and the academic community as a "pet peeve." "You have the practical game design community, and you would have scholars working on game studies. And, very often for a more scholarly type, to gain credibility in the game design community, [he or she has] to do something that's more akin to designing a game," he says. "It may be an issue that games designers may or may not be interested in what you, as an academic, write. But that doesn't mean that the work that the academic does is not worthwhile." Lowood is not someone who writes about games from a detached viewpoint from the industry frame of reference. He is in contact with many game developers in his work. "I haven't really designed much in the way of games, but I have been involved, in the way of support, [in] both computer and noncomputer games. So I kind of know what they do."