August 17, 2009
An Emerging Medium
Michael Abbott muses on the cultural relevance of games:
Film studies programs proliferate at colleges and universities while many of us continue to plead the case for teaching even a single course devoted to video games. And as popular culture fetes go, well, there’s the Oscars and the Golden Globes; the Grammys and the Pulitzers…and there’s the Spike TV Video Game Awards.
I say these cultural barometers are mostly irrelevant. They measure and reward factors with few analogs in games, and they rely on formulaic ways of knowing that increasingly seem irrelevant to understanding games. Aristotle’s Poetics – still the blueprint for framing our understanding of literature, drama, film, and television – has served us well for 2300 years, but dramatic theory cannot adequately account for the structural or experiential nature of games. Roger Ebert may be the elder statesman of American film critics, but applying film theory to games is an effort that fails before it begins. Even market validation is problematic. It’s easy to count how many people buy movie movie tickets, but unit sales don’t always paint an accurate picture for games, especially for social titles shared by friends and family over months and even years.
We who love games wait and wonder, but what are we waiting for? To be taken seriously? To be highly regarded? To have our place at the table? I’m not suggesting we’re wasting our time making the case for games. I spend an inordinate amount of time doing just that with my academic colleagues. But if the door to cultural affirmation suddenly opened, what would we gain by walking through it? How would our efforts to evolve and grow change? Might we, upon reflection, decide that an “emerging medium” is actually quite a fine thing to be?
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