1. There is no communicative “medium” to speak of in art. A medium presupposes a message of some kind - a basic, unambiguous code that can be transmitted from point to point. Because artistic works are inherently ambiguous in their meaning, there are no messages in artistic works. Video and computer games are not a communicative medium, and they have no message.

2. The artist has no hidden message for us. Even when an artist deeply desires to communicate, moralize, educate, challenge, or amuse the audience - their artistic creation will always frustrate, deny, and exceed their intentions. Trying to interpret or understand an artistic work by guessing at the artist’s intentions is a blind, endless, alley.

3. What we think of as an artistic “medium” is simply a set of conventions and tools used for artistic expression, bound together in a common style or genre. Painting or drawing media, such as crayons, charcoal, and paper, are tools used for expressive purposes. Computers are the primary medium through which video and computer games are created; games are therefore not a “medium” in the creative, artistic sense. Games are creative expressions brought to life through many kinds of tools.

4. The expressive qualities of a work of art, or video game, come from many different sources. Some of those sources of meaning are bound up with the artistic medium - the fact that a game must proceed in a logical, rule-based, manner. The artistic methods and techniques of the artist also bring a particular personal expression to the work. The cultural and historical context that an artist works in, responds to, lives, contributes to the meanings we find in the work. The emotional and intellectual depth, imaginative capacities, intensity and breadth of feelings, and sensitivity of the reader/viewer/player/audience bring meaning to the art piece. All of these things, bound up together, give us a “sense” of what an artistic work means. Segregating any of these elements (culture, language, artistic method, the artist, the audience, the piece itself) and trying to pin down the source of meaning onto just one thing is a plain mistake. However, contextualizing and interrelating these elements, one to another, gives us the chance to understand what art is about.

So there are a few distinctions: the first (1 & 2) having to do with the confusion over a medium-as-a-means-for-communication, and the second (3 & 4) having to do with the confusion over a game-as-an-artistic-medium.

In the end, games are no different from other symbolic forms insofar as understanding them, what they mean to us and not simply our opinions of them, demands a holistic view of the particular game, the genre, the artist, the artistic method, the culture, and the audience, among many other things. As Michael suggests, sometimes 21st-century Bolivian painters do have much to learn from 18th-century composers, just as game designers have a lot to learn from books, films, music, drama, and fine art. All human expression is a thick jambalaya of influences, and to single any one particular thing out - for instance by claiming that the language for video games should not include the language for film or music - is a mistake, I believe.

And finally, pulling together the roots, similarities, and relationships of meaning in games are not simply “academic” endeavors that only some elite crowd can do. Even being able to say “I’m playing an FPS” is a step in the right direction - of recognizing that this particular game belongs in a long history of first-person shooters. What is tougher is taking those extra few steps, and showing how the particular feelings the game gives you, the other games it plays like, the style of the art or technical direction, or the culture of war or violence that the game was created within - all give a sense to this being a meaningful thing. This is someone everyone is capable of, as long as they’re willing to make a few more connections they weren’t planning to. Like Michael said - this is something worth doing.

In the article, Michael says,

In the end, it seems unlikely we’ll discover video games make us smart, happy, and productive; nor is it likely we’ll find they make us stupid, anti-social, and violent. Like most things, video games defy binary definitions of good or evil…

… Dr. Joshua Smyth, associate professor of psychology in The College of Arts and Sciences conducted a randomized trial study of college students contrasting the effects of playing MMORPGs with more traditional single-player or arcade-style games…

“Video game play does interfere in some aspects of real-life — such as academic performance, health and social life — but game play can also foster strong feelings of virtual support and new friendships,” Smyth says…

Such studies won’t settle the “what to do about video games” debate…and that’s a good thing. Instead, they may help move the discussion away from entrenched polemics and toward something that looks more like a reasonable conversation.

After working in academic psychology for the last few years, I have to admit that I think Michael’s conclusion was very hopeful but quite misleading (note: clearly I understand that he was using this research example as fodder for his conclusion, so I do not point any fingers here). Regardless, studies like this in fact do tend to further entrench polemical debates, and are not immune from political rhetoric. For two reasons (that I can think of):

1. The most obvious is that studies like these are often picked up by either side of the debate and used as “proof” - that ’see! games really do ruin people’s lives! this is why my kid didn’t pass Math 113!’ News reporting services are very good at twisting research literature into the kinds of spins they wish to impart, along with the kinds of political goals their organizations have.

Want evidence?

• The American Psychological Association reports that violent video games increase aggression. Could this have anything to do with the APA promoting psychologists as a solution for video game violence in children?
  
• The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children watch TV and play games just as much as they play outside. Could this have anything to do with the KFF’s interests in American public health policy?
  
• National Geographic reports that video games boost visual skills. Perhaps for… photographing tigers in the wild!? (Okay, a bit of a stretch here, but you get the idea!)

2. Academic psychology is itself in a major flux. After 75 years of intellectual poverty, psychologists are finally starting to own up to the fact that we don’t actually know how to use science in psychology! Studies like these (a) do not reveal anything we didn’t already know about the ways that students play games, (b) do not posit any kind of clear theoretical claim and are simply empirical shots in the dark, (c) do not have any clear understandings of human emotion or feelings (ie. when’s the last time you called your feelings positive or negative?), and (d) do not offer any clear advice for how we should live in life given the kinds of people we already are.

A Quick Case Study: A review of Smyth’s video game article

Smyth’s article is actually titled, “Beyond Self-Selection in Video Game Play: An Experimental Examination of the Consequences of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Play” and is not a full article but rather a “rapid communication” - a quick 5-page note that describes his experimental methods and discoveries. It is unfortunate that the original source did not bother to read the article, because there are many obvious problems with Smyth’s study and the conclusions the source drew from it:

1. The study was intended to make causal inferences about the effects of game genres on a person’s self-reports of their well-being.
2. The sample was comprised of 100 18-20 year old undergraduate students. 73% of them were male, and 68% of them were caucasian.
3. The study lasted 1 month.
4. The games were: Gauntlet: Dark Legacy (PS2, single-player), Diablo II (PC, single-player), Arcade games (unnamed), and Dark Age of Camelot (PC, multi-player).
5. At the beginning of the study the students were asked to estimate the number of hours they played the games each week, their overall health, sleep quality, academic performance, social life and well-being using a scale from 0 (very poor) to 6 (very good). At the end of the study, the students completed a similar questionnaire that asked them to estimate how enjoyable they thought the game was, how likely they were to keep playing the game after the study, how much they thought the game interfered with real-life socializing, how much they thought the game helped with making new friends, and how much the game had interfered with academic achivement.

Pictured above: file photo of actual World of Warcraft player. Courtesy of South Park on Comedy Central.

With those kinds of things in mind, these are the results that Smyth found:

• MMORPG players self-reported playing 14 hours / week, while computer, console and arcade players reported many less hours.
• MMORPG players self-reported significantly less on a 0-6 scale on their overall health, game enjoyment, real-life socializing interference, new friendships, and academic interference.

Now, putting aside the serious experimental problems this kind of project has, what kinds of things should we worry about as critical readers? What kinds of things should this tell us about academic studies on video games?

1. The results rely upon the self-estimates of undergraduate students, the majority of which were white males. Not only do we not know anything meaningful about these guys - their tastes in games, their daily involvement in games, their tastes in films and books - but it also tells us nothing about the habits of female gamers, or gamers who don’t report themselves as being caucasian (such as myself!).
2. Of the games listed in the study, I’ve only played one of them: Diablo II. There is no discussion of what kinds of genres these games belong to, how much these games suck in comparison to each other (I thought D2 was pretty good!), and if these games are even played anymore! Furthermore, on what basis were these games chosen? If the answer is “because they’re the only games the researcher has ever played”, we should worry about the kinds of people conducting game research.
3. What on earth does this researcher mean by “overall health” and “sleep quality”? Are these categories that are actually used in daily life? I don’t remember ever telling anyone that I would rate my overall health as a “4″ on a scale of 0-6; in fact, I have no idea how I would rate my overall health. In comparison to other people? In comparison to my past health? What is included in my overall health - my fitness? weight? tooth decay? This is just an example, but you should be able to ask yourself: for any of the questions that Smyth asks students to answer, do they even make sense? If a friend asked you how much you thought video games affected your ability to socialize, wouldn’t you just say ‘I dunno. Can’t be sure either way, really.’? By virtue of the questions themselves being senseless, their answers are equally senseless.
4. This is the most troubling aspect of the study, aside from all of the aforementioned problems, I think. The study tells us nothing new. It tells us nothing that we did not already know about video games:

• We already knew that MMORPGs are woefully addictive, and take many more hours to play than the average single player game.
• We already knew that if you stay up all night playing games, you’ll probably have a bad sleep.
• We already knew that MMORPGs often allow people to make new “friends” online.
• We already knew that if you play games all day, your school marks are going to suffer. I call it “The Law of FINITE TIME”.
• We already knew that if Jeff stays home to play World of Warcraft all night, he won’t be able to come out for a beer with us.

There is simply not a single insight into what games ‘are’ to the people who play them here. There is not a single interview with any of the players, nor any observation of just how they play the game. The researcher just chose a few questions he thought were important to him as a social psychologist, and asked 100 19-year-olds to take their best guess at answering them. I mean no direct offense to Dr. Joshua Smyth, but this is clearly just poor research. Is this how we want games represented in academic literature?

Pictured above: Front cover of Bruno Bettelheim’s book on a psychoanalytic interpretation of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment. Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t look so scared of the Wolf, does she? Now, I wonder why…

With those thoughts in mind, I don’t see most academic researchers in any position to advance the debate surrounding video games to something we could call a “conversation”. For that, we have to look at examples of real conversations, social commentaries, books, and philosophers that are in fact providing insightful discussions and debate. This is where we have to turn to a growing mass of thoughtful gamers that are willing to engage in meditative conversations. Academic research in psychology is a world of its own, and rarely has anything insightful to tell us. If you really want to know why violence in video games is a constant moral panic for society, read some psychoanalysis and learn about wish-fulfillment and fantasy and their relations to childhood sexuality. You’ll be disturbed. This is why people want to look to academic studies on games - they don’t want to look inwards.

And if you’re too lazy for that, just watch the World of Warcraft episode of South Park. Even if you don’t like the show, this episode is dead-on.

This of course begs the question, what does he mean by ’success’? Just as the Hollywood film industry and the North American record industry buried their heads in the sand when confronted with poor sales figures, the mainstream game industry blames production processes, business practices, and marketing techniques for mediocre sales, instead of taking a cold, hard look at the quality of the MMORPGs being released.

With that in mind, the “critique” that psychochild offers is rather illuminating: ¹

1. Your game suck? Throw money at it. You’ve got tons.

2. Don’t make a game - make intellectual property. That sells.

3. Have 20 years of back-catalogue handy to force your next turd onto the shelves.

4. “Enjoy total freedom” - have so much corporate clout that you can bully your publisher into accepting any release date.

5. “Lie with statistics” - fool your audience into buying your game, because good games don’t sell themselves.

I apologize if this comes across as being terribly cynical, but it is frustrating to watch the mainstream game industry attempt to re-invent itself using the same dead corporate ideas that got the industry into a creative slump in the first place. It is especially worrying when these ideas come from industry representatives that claim to be concerned with re-inventing the medium in closed-door invite-only conferences. Of course, the author is only the messenger here and it doesn’t make sense to point the finger at him alone, but the message we’re hearing is pretty clear: we still haven’t learned anything from WoW.

Pictured above: Big, dumb, and powerful beast. Barely visible: Creative innovation.

Nowhere have I see an analysis of World of Warcraft that questions its value in the game industry, and the creative advancement that it has brought to gamecraft as a whole. Instead, analyses of the game focus on financial success as the ultimate standard, and only demonstrate the ongoing irony of an industry that howls, “we must innovate; push the creative envelope!” while quickly balking at designs that “might not sell”.

If the industry is so concerned with making a purse of a sow’s ear, the first thing I’d like to see are experimental, dangerous, creative exercises; not evolutionary expansions of the same recycled gameplay/stories/genres that I’ve been playing since 1981.

That’s not to ignore the fact that giant, meandering, beasts of companies with hundreds of employees do have to release some sort of game with financial targets in sight, but as I’ve said before - these financial concerns can only be taken into account after creative considerations have been fully realized.

¹(Keep in mind that the point of psychochild’s article isn’t to critique creativity in World of Warcraft - but it is noticable that the only lessons he covers are financially-driven. I would be interested in reading the possible creative/revolutionary game ideas that he sees in WoW.)