![]() GAMBIT Updates: Thoughts Archives. Following up on our previous . This time our friend Doug Wilson from IT University of Copenhagen joins the fray as we dissect the notion of . The fact is, many game studies scholars are approaching video games from different perspectives with drastically different theoretical lenses and research methods. The single unifying thread tying various scholars in the game studies domain is the supposed object of their inquiry: games.. For example, someone might write a text that is approaching games from a philosophical lens, in the most traditional of senses, positioning his/her argument somewhere in a long history of broader philosophical discourse. This is a method I am quite fond of (links to a.pdf). To my amazement this person is former Rockstar writer/designer Navid Khonsari. The Planescape Multiverse. France Sketchbook 2014 Graphite Pencils on Paper Size : cm. The Lost Temple of Estareth w/ PDF download map cartography. To fully understand such a text, one would need to read it within a certain philosophical context. Simply reading the text as a . This is fine for someone who wants to put in the time reading and becoming familiar with Philosophy as a course of study, but what about everyone else? ![]() ![]() No short description problematic sketchbook drawings. Tony DiTerlizzi was born into an artistic household in Los Angeles in 1969, the first of three children. When I went to work on Planescape. Lewis Carroll, the writer of Alice. Cartooning Sketchbook. I'm adapting the format of the Daily Bestiary to write plothooks for TSR's Planescape. PDF Catalog; FEB17 CATALOG. Planescape, and Magic. ![]() With so many lenses, so many methods, and so many perspectives, how could anyone be accurately categorized as a ? Nobody would have the time to familiarize themselves with the entirety of thought necessary to be so broad an academic. Would it not be more useful to be aligned with others who are working in the same discipline, that is to say, philosophers studying games with other philosophers, sociologists studying players with other sociologists, and anthropologists studying games played with other anthropologists? Doug: Is game studies a legitimate ? And should we even want it to be one? These questions have been addressed many times before, perhaps most famously by Espen Aarseth in his 2. Game Studies journal. For Aarseth, the question seems to be inextricably intertwined with academic politics. And when and why does an interdisciplinary endeavor become its own stable discipline? On this question, I can only share my own personal struggles. Currently, as a Ph. D candidate, I find myself immersed in design theory, political science, and contemporary art - three fields which I only grazed in my previous educations (a self- designed BA in . ![]() ![]() ![]() As a result, I worry constantly that I might be misreading a certain theorist, or that I might be naively rehashing old debates. To compound this problem, I do my work at IT University of Copenhagen's Center For Computer Games Research, an interdisciplinary group that houses researchers from a diversity of fields such as artificial intelligence, sociology, philosophy, and interaction design. This means that I have few colleagues who are able to give me thorough, literature- grounded feedback on my work. For better or worse, I find myself in a situation where I am largely on my own. I do think this constellation of disciplines works well for project- based research. In our department, for example, several computer science and serious games researchers are teaming up on large international multi- disciplinary projects. Humanities- based research, by contrast, still seems to be a very solitary, individualistic endeavor. Or at least that's the prevailing culture. You write your manuscript, solicit feedback, publish it as a book, then repeat. If I can be frank, I'm not convinced that I have the suitable training for that kind of work. I've always viewed myself as more of a . Speaking from personal experience, I do worry that my academic work has suffered from my lack of grounding in a ! It has been tremendously empowering to be able to pull from disciplines as disparate as computer science, design research, and art theory. Moreover, my ability to . Game development is, after all, a highly interdisciplinary endeavor. In summary, I don't think it's a coincidence that my Ph. D research (e. g. That wasn't the plan when I originally applied for the Ph. D, but it makes sense that my deeply interdisciplinary background would be better geared to project- based work. As such, I suspect that the answer to your question, Abe, might be: it depends on what kind of research you hope to do! Jason: Interdisciplinarity is certainly a big word around video game development and studies. Comparative Media Studies, the academic department that GAMBIT is affiliated with, puts enormous emphasis on interdisciplinary work. Doug's history is a perfect example of the advantage of this kind of work. But as Abe has hinted, the multitude of scholars working under the guise . Subscribe to the Di. GRA mailing list for a weekend (why is it always busy on the weekend?) and you will see many people arguing vehemently from a variety of perspectives, and it's hard to say whether anything is ever accomplished. I think this is at least partially because of the vast differences between subscribers. Hence the importance of indicating where you are coming from and what your perspectives are. This line of thinking leads me to another point: I sometimes whether now is a good time for the study of . The field desperately needs more genre- and medium- specific studies of games, and those studies need to proclaim their perspective and focus. Interdisciplinarity is certainly valuable, but if I am attempting to describe a board game, and Abe is trying to apply those ideas to baseball, something is going to be lost in that communication. Similar problems occur when comparing games across (or even within) genres. As another example, in response to Abe and I's last conversational blog post, we had an interesting discussion with Doug on Twitter, and it became apparent that we were even operating under different understandings of . While this sounds pessimistic, I actually think it represents an enormous potential for widespread investigation, experimentation and research. I think a simultaneous mix of diversification and specialization - more people studying more games more specifically - would be invaluable in that it would create a stable base for the field. Abe: It may be that I am the biggest pessimist of we three, for I am very afraid of the dilution of a scholastic field like game studies. I am often found asking for some higher standard, some greater sense of rigor in the realm of game studies, one I would be greatly challenged to live up to myself. Indeed, I often find myself slipping into the comforts of lazy analysis or reporting - the comforts of working over ideas without taking the time to dig deep enough into the history of the topic. Perhaps this is why I find myself trying to focus my work on the realm of sports and sports video games from the perspective of cultural anthropology, to have a stronger sense of home. It comes back to this concern I have that without a well structured, historical and contextual lens, we may not even know in what direction we are looking. I try hard to imagine what a standardized . Regrettably my thoughts darken and I inevitably envision top ten lists of important video games, that regurgitate the same narrow, fan informed perspective. Can we agree that it is no longer enough to simply like games, or even to eloquently critique them, rather we need to ground analysis in a history of thought? But what history then? I agree with you both about interdisciplinary emphasis. Starting my work in video games as a sound designer surely taught me the importance of all the constituent parts of game design. That said, I still feel that theory necessarily depends on the works of predecessors. This is the nature of philosophy. I think some of the conflict comes from the conflation of the study, and the creation of games. That, however, is another huge discussion. Doug: Abe, I suspect that some of us game studies people could benefit from examining the history of other academic disciplines. For example, how and why did ? Why didn't it just evolve as a sub- field of existing university departments like mathematics and electrical engineering? Despite my graduate comp sci degree, I don't actually know enough history to offer a coherent answer.(More wishful stage directions: cue historians of science!)But before I defer to the experts, I'd like to ask a leading question: is the professed object of study - the computer game - too narrow in scope? A discipline like biology is quite broad, spanning diverse interests such as molecular genetics, ecology, developmental biology, etc. The discipline of art history studies not only painting, but also a wide variety of different forms and traditions. Yes, I do think . But even if we accept that game studies scholars are branching out into non- digital areas like board games, we might still ask why games studies is so socially and professionally isolated from other academic traditions like sports studies, folklore studies, play theory, etc. Can we ever hope to call ourselves a proper discipline as long as we remain so isolated from (and irrelevant to) those other communities that also study play and games? Gosh, it would be so nice to build some stronger ties to the sports studies community in particular! Clearly there are benefits to be had from incorporating other fields of inquiry into game studies, but there are also benefits to establishing . From whichever perspective one takes, however, it should be immediately clear that citing one's object of study as . The necessary questions of someone who studies . Games are a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of the human condition, and we have barely scratched the surface of understanding precisely what they are, how they work, what roles they serve, and why they even exist.
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