Video Games in Academia

Being not only a lifelong video game enthusiast but also someone who’s currently making a video game for his English major capstone, I was naturally very interested in hearing a lecture by Jennifer de Winter of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who specializes in video games research.

Thanks to my own research, I had the privilege of being present at dinner with Dr. de Winter before her talk. Her enthusiasm about her field was very evident, and she pointed out something: video game researchers are in very high demand. It may seem obvious, given how new the medium is (going on only three-ish decades), but it’s still worth considering. This new medium, just like movies before it (and music before that, and literature before that, and so on back to the beginning of human civilization) has yet to be accepted as a serious form of art by the culture at large–and partly due to its youth and partly due that attitude, hasn’t nearly reached its potential for helping us explore the human experience (as art does, depending on your definition).

But it will someday, and many people see that day and would like to hasten it along–or at least I would. I look to the holodecks of Star Trek when I think of the future of games: worlds where we have fully immersive experiences that we could not ever have in our “real” lives. In the meantime, controllers will do–and the experiences we have with them are no less worth analyzing. So next time you think about video game research, don’t think, “What’s the point of analyzing a stupid game?” Think instead of how much more a game could be, if we only gave it a chance.