The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [119]
One of the lessons of my course is that all games, from backgammon to Grand Theft Auto and beyond, offer this contrived confinement. What would we gain if our virtual spaces required the same amount of time and effort to get to know as the real world, if the world of Zelda stretched endlessly in all directions or if a chessboard had an infinite number of squares? Our virtual spaces, whether we are talking about World of Warcraft or The Settlers of Catan, scale-down reality so we can admire it, study it, and shake it up like a snowglobe.
While games exist within delimited spaces—a crucial part of the definition of a game—their relationship to the real world has been broadening and growing increasingly ambiguous. Games and game structures (such as competition, point systems, and rewards) have found their way into our everyday activities, from grocery shopping, to online banking, to primetime television. Designers of “serious games” have been using game technologies to recruit, train, and manage workers in the corporate and military worlds. Phones, iPods, laptops, and the Internet are all portals to game worlds. Virtually every free moment we have presents an opportunity to play.
This situation demands a re-evaluation of what games are and how they work from the broadest possible perspective. This raises the question of where in academia the study of games belongs. Sociology? Cultural studies? Philosophy? Literature? Art? Performance studies? Computer science? The difficulty in comfortably situating game studies in any one discipline suggests that it could be its own department, with video games, board games, role-playing games, and collectible card games among the concentrations. Fanciful thinking, maybe, but we need only look to the existence of film departments to realize that we will never gain a full understanding of games if we continue to take a fragmented approach to studying them. Would we learn what movies are if one group studied the chemical processing of film, another looked at narrative in film, while still another examined the social behavior of moviegoers, and the groups never talked to each other?
Getting skeptics to take the study of games seriously can be a challenge, and I am not only speaking of colleagues and administrators. My course on games, which I called “Playing by the Rules: Games In and Out of the Ordinary World,” fulfilled a general education requirement for first-year students. Not surprisingly, it proved a very popular class. What I didn’t expect was that many students would resist the idea that the games they play could be objects of scholarly study. They could accept film, popular literature, high-tech gadgets, and television as topics for college courses, but games somehow were out of bounds in higher education. I found that they easily understood that Mouse Trap, Magic: The Gathering, and World of Warcraft are cultural artifacts, but had a much harder time looking beyond the fun and perceived frivolity to identify the games’ embedded meanings. They belonged to a generation of gamers, yet they had difficulty recognizing the influence of games in their everyday world.
These students, like most of us, partitioned off games from the “serious” portions of their lives, yet could slip easily and unassisted into the game world. To them, the idea of an instruction manual for the self-explanatory realities of today’s games probably makes as little sense as an instruction manual for the real world. Perhaps there no longer is such a thing as preparing to play a game—learning the game is the same as playing the game. That may be just one of the ways that the game world is renegotiating its boundaries, insinuating itself into the real world. This fascinating process of merging, transposing, and metamorphosing is creating virgin territory for game scholars to explore. Like