Keywords Project

The Keywords for Video Game Studies “project” represents a collection of interconnected and interrelated pieces that argue that video game scholarship and research still needs to establish a working vocabulary.  Inspired by Raymond Williams’s Keywords and the recent Keywords for American Cultural Studies, I wanted to think about how to go about defining and delimiting the key terms of video game studies.  A book project is in the works, but in the meantime, I found other venues and opportunities to generate ideas, conversation, and collaboration:

Keywords Roundtable

asa logoI helped organize for the Cultural Studies Association Eighth Annual Conference held at UC Berkeley in March 2010.  The roundtable featured Timothy Welsh, Alenda Chang, and myself and provided a discussion space at the conference to talk about the emerging “field” of video game theory and scholarship with particular attention to video games as cultural productions.  We felt that the roundtable format–rather than presenting traditional papers–would encourage the free flow of ideas and allow for a more organic and emergent discussion of terms like avatar, code, community, economy, environment, exploit, gender, immersion, narrative, platform, play, power, and sexuality.  The roundtable was incredibly successful–one of the best conference experiences in my career–with a standing room-only room and lively conversation.  It definitely pointed out a need for commonplaces in the field.

Description

Given the recent proliferation of video games, playership of video games, art and film inspired by video games, and most recently scholarship on video games, the moment is ripe for interrogating this growing medium, art form, and cultural production and to produce a critical vocabulary for their analysis and discussion. Alexander Galloway in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture argues that play “is a symbolic action for larger issues in culture” and that video games “render social realities into playable form.” In other words, what might video games reveal about the world we live in, about the culture that produces them, consumes them, and plays them? Moreover, how do we talk about them, write about them, think about them? This roundtable will bring together interdisciplinary perspectives to meditate and articulate the in- and out-of-game richness and complexity of video games, particularly massively multiplayer online (MMOs) games and sandbox games like World of Warcraft, Second Life, Grand Theft Auto, and Bioshock. To relegate video games to the category of pop culture or low art or juvenile pastime can result in the mistaken conclusions that games (unlike other established media) do not reflect, represent, challenge, or critique society, culture, identity, or ideology. This roundtable hopes to bolster the critical engagement with video games and video game culture to address the design of games (as computational, protocological, and rhetorical artifacts), the theorizing of games (looking at narrative, interactivity, race/gender/sexuality), and the pedagogical and political potential of games. Through close readings of games, real-time demonstrations and close playings of games, and discussion, this roundtable hopes to limn central questions, keywords, and even dissonances in video game studies and video game theory.

Keywords Graduate Interest Group

The Keywords for Video Game Studies Graduate Interest Group (GIG) grew out of the CSA roundtable above.  After CSA, Timothy Welsh and I decided that we wanted to develop a similar space for conversation and connection at the UW.  We knew that there were a number of people–faculty, grads, and undergraduates–working on and interested in gaming, but there was no centralized department or home for video game studies.  Therefore, I drafted the initial proposal for support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities and brought together four other scholars representing English, Learning Sciences, and Comparative Literature.  As a group, we organized a series of discussion groups and workshops to talk about topics such as “play,” “immersion/interactivity,” “avatar,” and “pedagogy.”  These public events were very successful, often drawing 20-30 attendees, and provided much needed opportunities for networking, collaboration, and overall visibility.  Because of our commitment to new forms of digital scholarship, the Keywords GIG has been named Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology (HASTAC) Scholars by the Simpson Center in 2010-11 and 2011-12.

Description

In 2000, Henry Jenkins wrote, “The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century,” that video games do matter. But only within the last few years has the state of video game studies, either popularly or academically, found legitimacy and critical attention, pointedly the recent John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning Initiative, which “aims to determine how digital media are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.” Given this recent proliferation of video games, playership of video games, video game technology, art and film inspired by video games, and scholarship on video games, the moment is ripe for interrogating this growing medium, art form, and cultural production and to produce a critical vocabulary for their analysis and discussion. After all, Alexander Galloway in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture argues that play “is a symbolic action for larger issues in culture” and that video games “render social realities into playable form.” In other words, why are video games important as historical, aesthetic, political, poetic, mass media objects? What might video games reveal about the world we live in, about the culture that produces them, consumes them, and plays them? Moreover, how do we talk about them, write about them, think about them?

Drawing inspiration from Raymond William’s influential Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and the new Keywords for American Cultural Studies book and website, our graduate interest group hopes to lay the groundwork for a similar project, “Keywords for Video Game Studies.” The Keywords for Video Game Studies working group proposes to identify and interrogate the key terms, the key moves, and the key players in video game studies. Williams argued, “I have emphasized this process of the development of Keywords because it seems to me to indicate its dimension and purpose. It is not a dictionary or glossary of a particular academic subject. It is not a series of footnotes to dictionary histories or definitions of a number of words. It is, rather, the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings…” Our working group is dedicated to collecting and contributing to a video game studies shared body of words and meanings.

Our graduate interest working group will bring together interdisciplinary perspectives to engage with and articulate the in- and out-of-game richness and complexity of video games, including games like World of Warcraft, Second Life, Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, and Bioshock. Our working group hopes to bolster the critical engagement with video games and video game culture to address the design of games (as computational, protocological, rhetorical, and aesthetic artifacts), the theorizing of games (looking at narrative, interactivity, race/gender/sexuality), and the pedagogical and political potential of games. Through close readings of games, real-time demonstrations and close playings (critical gaming), and discussion, our working group hopes to highlight central questions, keywords, and even dissonances in video game studies and video game theory.

Our framing questions include:

  • What key terms and core concepts animate the field of video game studies?
  • How has the development of these terms and concepts shaped the field?
  • In what ways do these terms and concepts provide a foundation for further video game scholarship?
  • What are the central tensions, challenges, and antagonisms in video game studies?
  • How do we as students, scholars, and game players shape the future of video game studies, video game development, and video game pedagogy?

The Keywords for Video Game Studies working group, in collaboration with the Critical Gaming Project at the University of Washington and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), is supported by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Press

The Keywords GIG has been featured in several publications:

Update

I worked as co-lead with Theresa Horstman to renew the Keywords GIG for 2012-13.  The group gained two new scholars, one from English and one from Sociology.  This year’s keywords include “violence,” “history,” “bodies/sex,” fantasy,” and “close/distant.”  This year’s Keywords group will expand the end-of-year colloquium to the THATCamp (The Technology and Humanities Camp) format.  I am the lead organizer for THATCamp Epic Play 2013, an “unconference” on video game studies, gaming cultures and communities, and different kinds of game and play.

Keywords Focus Group Course

In Autumn 2010, as part of the first quarter of the Keywords for Video Game Studies GIG, we ran a concurrent two-credit focus group course for undergraduates through the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) department.  CHID 496: “Keywords for Video Game Studies” was co-taught by me and Timothy Welsh and introduced students to the general landscape of video game scholarship and research.  The hope for the course was to get students interested in more than just playing games for fun–particularly those students who self-identify as wanting to become game  developers and designers and artists–and to give them the first tools for critical gaming.  Part of the requirements of the class was to attend the Keywords GIG sessions.  I believe that the quarter was successful, and let us situate our own intellectual and critical positions in the field as the students discovered theirs.

Course Description

IN 2000, HENRY JENKINS WROTE, “The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century,” that video games do matter. But only within the last few years has the state of video game studies, either popularly or academically, found legitimacy and critical attention, pointedly the recent John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning Initiative, which “aims to determine how digital media are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.” Given this recent proliferation of video games, playership of video games, video game technology, art and film inspired by video games, and scholarship on video games, the moment is ripe for interrogating this growing medium, art form, and cultural production and to produce a critical vocabulary for their analysis and discussion.

OUR FOCUS GROUP, as part of a continuing series on video games generated by the Critical Gaming Project at UW, will draw inspiration from Raymond William’s influential Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and the new Keywords for American Cultural Studies book and website to identify and interrogate the key terms, the key moves, and the key players in video game studies. We will play a range of games alongside formal video game and cultural studies scholarship in order to investigate keywords like: play, control, immersion, interactivity, identity, avatar, violence, casual, hardcore, race, gender, sexuality, nation, and economy.

THE COURSE will meet once a week for 2 hours to engage reading, guided discussion, analytical and reflective writing, and game play. This course coincides with the inauguration of the Keywords for Video Game Studies graduate interest group sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Students will be required to attend two working group sessions in lieu of two, regular class periods. Students will be asked to participate in discussions both in class and online, write a review of a video game of their choice, and make a short in-class presentation.

Course Website

http://www.timothyjwelsh.com/courses/496fa10/

Other Courses

For more information about the other video game studies courses I developed and taught, go to the “Critical Gaming Courses” section of my portfolio.

For other sections of my portfolio, go to: