First – thanks for the original post. I certainly had not heard of the study until you posted it, and wouldn’t have had the opportunity to write a response. As you can tell, my response was directed at the authors of those kinds of research projects and not you yourself – so I’m glad you took no offense!

My outlook, as you can tell, on academic scientific psychology is quite gloomy. As an academic natural science, I believe it has become quite disconnected from the everyday realities that we experience as everyday people. Now, I should have been clearer in my article: the problem is not so much with the psychological discipline per se – the problem is with the scientistic movement that began approximately 80 years ago (starting with behaviourism, and so on). The move from an artistic psychology to a scientistic psychology (if I can make that distinction) entailed a move from the view of a human being as a subjective experiencer to a human being as a computer. With that move came the loss of subjective experience, because subjectivity was seen as inherently non-objective and therefore immeasurable (the hallmark of
‘natural science’ methodologies).

That’s why, in studies like this, we tend to see subjective experiences (ie. the way we play a game, and experience playing it) turned into variables that can be measured on a scale. And to compound that problem, in order to turn an experience into a variable they simply strip away most of the experience: gameplay can be understood in terms of 5-10 variables! I’d challenge anyone to describe their experience of a game in 5-10 words and still capture the meaning of it. (In fact, I think a good poet can in fact do this, but only through the use of very lyrical language – and certainly not the objectivist language of scientifism!)

Your point is very well taken however – that many kinds of academics – especially the aesthetically-driven kinds that you’ve mentioned – tend to have less pronounced and more informed screaming matches. Certainly you don’t see anything to the degree that you see on Fox news with political candidates or pundits.

However, that brings us to an even more important point: some kinds of psychologists, some kinds of narratologists, ludologists, professors of art, drama, literature – they do have something meaningful to contribute to conversations on games. But what did natural science contribute to the meaning of paintings and films in the last century? Understanding that rods and cones are responsible for the excitement of light in the human eye does not make for the enjoyment of a beautiful painting. In fact, if we believe that the only thing that makes a painting beautiful are biological mechanisms that are hardwired into us, we don’t see beauty at all any more – we simply see colors on a canvas. This is the kind of problem we face in psychology: we do not get meaningful insights into human behavior from psychology-as-a-natural-science – we simply get the feeling that the body is a machine that does not feel – does not love or cherish!

If we are to gain anything in video games, as an emerging medium, it will come from scholars with deep understandings of fine art, film, literature, mythology, hermeneutic psychology, drama. It will also come from artists who bend and twist the medium into creations that the medium was never ‘meant’ to do – games that are not simply ‘fun’. After all, a medium is simply a tool – and the artist’s imagination and style is our limit.

So, what I envision for a more conversational approach to games is an “enrichment of language” (to borrow from philosopher Charles Taylor, who coined the idea). That is, we haven’t spent much time in the last 20 years expanding the different languages that we can talk about games in. Only now are we seeing new languages borrowed from linguistics (I’m thinking of Chris Bateman’s video game grammars here), or mythology (ie. Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey stuff), etc etc. There is so much reflection to be done with video games – in order to make them more meaningful (deeper) than they are currently – that I find the whole process invigorating. Personally, I would love to see more of your own reflections as a professor of drama, for instance!

Anyway, I really appreciated your original post. It gave me the right diving board to leap from (or was it rope to hang from?)
Thanks again Michael!

- Chris

Thanks for your response to my piece and your critical reading of Smyth’s project. FYI, I have updated my original post to direct readers here for a more thorough analysis of the issue.

I defer to your critique of Smyth’s conclusions and research since you are far more qualified to judge those than me. I think I’m more sanguine than you about the potential for academics to consider video games fairly and with more success than politicians, game developers, and religious figures. Perhaps academic research in Psychology–at least in this case–may sometimes fail to shed meaningful light on the subject, but your assertion that “Academic research in psychology is a world of its own, and rarely has anything insightful to tell us” seems a bit too harsh an assessment to me. I have a colleague, for example, in our Psychology department whose research on students transitioning from high school to college is helping us significantly reconfigure our orientation program…with some very positive early results.

Granted, when I go to my own national conferences, I sometimes wonder what possible bearing all those arcane papers can have on anything anyone cares about. Believe me, I do get where you’re coming from, and I do sometimes think we’re all just talking to ourselves.

Perhaps what I should have included in my original piece was my belief that academia in general–psychologists, narratologists, ludologists, professors of rhetoric, drama, art, lingustics, etc.–collectively focusing on this emerging medium will sometimes, but not always, steer clear of screaming matches and actually foster an illuminating conversation. This is what encourages me and makes me hopeful.

Michael