Games from the basement
Reflecting on game educations
A modern academic is many things: a project manager, a fundraiser, an administrative clerk, an occasional researcher, and very often a reluctant educator. Now that I am on sabbatical, the first three things have temporarily disappeared from my schedule, so I have been focusing on research1. This has been great; I have no complaints. But I miss teaching. I am an educator more than anything else.
Next year will mark my 20th year as a games teacher. I have taught courses in game design, game prototyping, game culture, play theory, play design, and board game design. I have also run thematic seminars on game studies. I led the design of the ITU’s first GAMES master and tried to help create its current iteration. I also helped with curricula in Interaction Design programs. There is nothing I love more in my work than trying to think about what we should be teaching.
And that’s why I want to write about how I think games should be taught. Yes, games. Not “game design” or “game development,” but games. I prefer the term playable media myself, but that’s a bit too pedantic. I want to write about this because conversations are going on around game education in Denmark and everywhere. There are key concerns that I want to take seriously as part of curriculum design, namely unhealthy behaviors of the industry, its funding instability, and the type of career that game developers are ambitious to have vs. the one they have on average.
To put it simply, the games industry tends to encourage toxic workplaces. These unequal and fragile economies lead to frequent unemployment while rewarding non-game-related executives, and there needs to be an ageism problem in the workforce composition. In summary, the games industry is a labor and economic mess.
At the same time, there is a general idea that games are becoming the dominant form of culture of this century, and I think there’s a valid point to that. Not because they earn more money than whatever old media. We should forget about those arguments and focus on what it means to be a dominant form of culture. Whether we like it or not, most of our lives are explicitly gamified, with points systems of one or another kind measuring all kinds of performances, from credit to fitness and rest. Our social spaces are also “games,” with Fortnite and Roblox embracing two different but fascinating remediations of social spaces: the playground and the mall (in the case of Roblox, which includes the back alleys of the mall). Our sports are merging with videogames, and videogames aspire to take the attention on the second screen we consume while watching traditional media, as Netflix has clearly understood. These phenomena happen simultaneously as we play board games, engage with digital toys, and occasionally launch Steam and play an AAA title. Undoubtedly, games are a dominant form of XXI-century culture.
Are the game developers of the future ready to deal with this dominance?
Because that is what we should be educating for. Our students will be a part of creating this discourse that will shape our culture and the culture to come, and therefore, they should be ready to explain why games and play matter beyond the stale arguments about economic success2.
So the question is, are we teaching game developers who can argue about the dominant role of games in culture? Do they know how to deal with usual accusations against games? Or are they “simply” technically proficient creators, deeply engaged artists who want to make games and are not interested in anything else? And is the industry ready to support educations that want to commit to this ambition?
Games are essential; they help shape many of our experiences in the world. They are poems and friendships and instruments for hate and love and for imagining the future or trying to reinvent the past. But when we think about future game developers, do we consider this? And worse, does “the industry” want to embrace this central position in culture, with all its ups and downs? Games are interesting because they say something about who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be. This is what students should be engaging with. If all of that is uninteresting, if the only thing that matters is games as technical problems, narrative dilemmas, or games as the visual appeal of a character or a world, they should not be studying how to make games.
On the one hand, I admire the art school approach folks like Brendan Keogh have advocated for3. Sure, let’s teach artists who will not live off their games. This is a fair approach that can help people live with their creative ambitions while not promising them jobs that do not exist or will harm them. At the same time, I fear the risk of turning these educations into cultural basement feeding grounds might be significant. There are no jobs in the industry for these kinds of artists, and there is no economy to support games as a form of expression. However, whatever is produced still has a role in culture and shapes the future, and their makers are still part of that conversation, even if it is from outside the capitalist production model.
On the other hand, there is massive pressure from the games industry to teach industry-ready people. Essentially, there is an interest in turning universities and other higher educational platforms into training programs to ensure that there is always an affordable supply of interns and that the pipeline flows. There’s nothing wrong with these programs, as long as we understand that they are narrow vocational programs that only teach what is needed here and now and that will not always prepare students for career shifts. And, of course, I doubt that the games industry is interested in investing in the continuous education needed to keep workers engaged and up to speed and even to make them progress in their careers.
So, games education seems stuck between the arts/MFA and vocational school models. This would be fine if we were discussing software development or creative writing, but it feels like the wrong angle when talking about “the dominant cultural form of the XX century.” How should we teach games, then4?
I have two premises that I consider unnegotiable:
1. All games education should ask all students to make things, even if they think they are not interested in making them. Games and game developers can only take that dominant position in culture if we see game development as a critical technical practice. This does not mean that whatever people make needs to be good. It just needs to be, and it needs to be out there, having passed the distribution tests. To understand, we need to make and think5.
2. Game education does not fall under the classical paradigms of “technical,” “humanistic,” or “artistic” education. It is at the intersection of all of those. Since games are often vanguards of culture, showing new ways of expressing and engaging with the world, game educators should do the same, exploring new models of constructing knowledge and teaching skills.
So, how should a game education look like? A program should be focused on making things but articulating how those things are in dialogue with culture. Students should know about the means of production in the digital age. They should be aware of the history of contemporary art if only part of the history of art. They should read across cultures, languages, and genres. They should read short stories, novels, and poems. They should watch movies, TV shows, and things like infomercials, trash TV, and reality TV. I assume their visual diet is naturally complete through TikTok, Instagram, and other channels, but if not, that is also their diet. The playable things students make as part of their education should be seen as reflections on the culture they are learning about6.
I used to think my job as a games educator was to spark a creative fire in my students so they would create games they would otherwise not dare make. That fire should come from games and all the other forms of cultural games with which we are in conversation. Students should also know that this fire is both creative and destructive and that part of the cultural importance of games is how that fire works in the dialogue with other media.
Games as a culture are part of a broader conversation with forms of human expression. And we are not teaching that. The exceptionalist argument for games is too simple to endorse: games are a unique form of art, blah blah blah. Sure, they may be. But they are in dialogue with all the other means of expression we are creating culture with. Suppose we graduate students who do not want to participate in that conversation or who cannot participate in that conversation. In that case, we are simply building a better basement for games.
And what is worse, we need to make students curious enough about the world. I don’t ask my students to read Haraway or to watch They Live so they can write an essay. I do it because I want them to be curious, forever. I don’t care which job they get when leaving my classroom. I care about the job they will get in 20 years, or 30, when they have tried “their passion” and are looking for something that says something to them, about them, and the world. They will only be able to find those jobs if they learn to be curious, ask questions, read, watch, listen, reflect, and engage with whatever is not games but is essential for games, too. The most important thing I want my students in a game education to learn is that games are unimportant. Paraphrasing, games are the most important of the not important things, and that’s precisely why they are so central to our culture. Because we have collectively chosen them to represent us.
Games will only become the dominant form of culture in the XXI Century when game makers can defend that argument beyond the exceptionalism of the medium or its economic might. When they have the arguments to place games in a history and a series of practices that are not just about capital or leisure, but that are about finding out who we are.
Despite this rant, I am an optimist. In the past few years, I’ve met students who are better than me in everything: technical, humanist, and creative. But most importantly, my students are more generous, empathetic, curious, fun, and determined than I have ever been. I think the future of games and many other essential things are in good hands. Our duty as game educators and scholars is not to ruin things. Not to multiply our defects and pass them on. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”. We shouldn’t pass our misery, our petty conflicts, and narrow minds and tunnel visions to people who are, I think, better than us.
There is no better job than that of an educator. It is a privilege to be allowed to help this future shape up and to learn from every student things that I didn’t know – about games, about myself, about the world. So my job as their game educator is not to spark a fire anymore, or at least not only to spark it, but to keep it alive, to feed it, and also, selfishly, to get close to it to stay warm.
A note on the images: almost all visual material for this post has been generated with Diffusion Bee, using the Mitsua Diffusion One model. The prompts were: “A portrait of a student of game development, enjoying the first time they realise the importance of games”, and “A pamphlet for a game development education taught at a university”
I often claim that games will become like comic books if we are not careful. I love comic books, and they have an outsized influence on our culture. At the same time, comic books are the basement of culture. We don’t expect well-read people, even those with high culture, to be familiar with comic books. Comic books are the identitarian property of the comic book guy and have devolved into a fan-based subculture that has caused more harm than good. I fear that the same can happen to games: they can become massive cultural forces that are, to a certain extent, culturally irrelevant and the implicit property of “fans.” Comic books are slowly moving out of the basement, thanks to the efforts of many people who care about them and know they are worth more than what the fans show, but getting out of the culture basement is still a slow and painful climb.
Brendan’s argument is more nuanced than mine, so go read the book. Ultimately, the argument considers game education as an analog to art schools.
The following, and everything else, is my opinion, and it does not reflect the views of my employer. But, as Paolo Pedercini would put it, it would be awesome if it did.
If people are interested in learning about video games, they should write code and/or do graphics, music, narrative, and anything else. But I think it’s important that everybody writes code. They don’t need to write “good” code, but enough so that something runs, and they understand the material constraints of computation. They should also understand that there is nothing magical about writing computer programs. It’s just a skill, like juggling or woodworking.
Should students only make “artsy” stuff? No! They must make craven free-to-play games, military shooters, and skinner boxes. They should even be familiar with asset flipping and cloning and even (even!) with blockchain gaming. How would they otherwise understand that what they are making is wrong if they don’t make it? Of course, this is questionable and problematic, but isn’t that what the safe space of education should be about?
Thanks for the rant! Some good food for thought here...