Monday 7 January 2008

Rise of the Video Game

The video game revolution has been under way for decades, progressing from simple amusements created in the 1950s to an all-pervasive force in today's popular culture that rivals — and will perhaps soon surpass — film and television. What began as a subculture pastime has evolved and transcended genres to become a unique form of expression impacting everything from modern warfare to interpersonal relationships.

Rise of the Video Game is a comprehensive and progressive exploration of the past, present and future of video games and video gamers. From the early days of Pong to today's ever-popular Halo 2, and from Atari 2600 to Nintendo to PlayStation, Rise of the Video Game tells the story of the people, the ideologies and the technology behind video games and how they have exploded into a cultural phenomenon. The evolution of gaming has seen the pendulum move from the days of games replicating society, to society replicating games. Featuring interviews with giants in the gaming industry of yesterday and today, this five-part series examines the evolution of the video game and its cultural impact on the world of entertainment today.

The Medium of the Video Game

There is an entire class of books that are intellectual dissections of the videogame, all written for people who don't play videogames. And I have to wonder: Who are these books written for? Will people who can't tell a Playstation from a gas station really be inclined to pay for a book that spends about half its time discussing things that are blatantly obvious to anyone who's ever picked up a joystick?

Put another way: If you've never seen a movie, are you going to start by reading two hundred pages on camera angles?

That said, this book has some redeeming features - but there's a lot of ground that will be too dense for those who don't know videogames, and too redundant for those who do.

Mark J. P. Wolf is a professor of communications - and he's not only the editor, he's the author of five out of the nine essays in this book. He comes from a film background, and ultimately he's trying to do a noble thing with his essays - he's trying to catalogue the various approaches that videogame designers take to approaching technical limitations. Filmmakers have struggled with similar limitations for years, and their attempts to get past the confinements of the screen have consistently led to more interesting cinema. For example, filmmakers only have a small section of screen to work with, so they had to develop shortcuts: The pan, the close-up, cutting from scene to scene...

Film students routinely dissect how a director chose to present a scene - what cuts, pans, and shots did he chose to use in order to capture the moment? But what they don't do is sit there, listing off approaches on their fingers: "Jump cut - close-up, another close-up - and a zoom!"

What students try to do is to figure out how these elements contributed to the effectiveness of a film. We all know that quick cuts from place to place can create suspense, and slow, sweeping pans across landscape create a feeling of serenity - and it would be fascinating to take that approach to videogames. After all, videogames started with the simple and story-free Pong and have evolved into sweeping love stories like Final Fantasy X; how has this changed people's approaches to play? Do people get more attached to the iconographic Pac-Man - or does the fully-rendered, raspy-voiced reality of Solid Snake draw them in deeper?

Sadly, Mark is the student who's checking off the styles of cuts. He lists over eleven approaches that videogame designers take to approaching "hidden space" - space that cannot be seen on the screen - but they're all listed as if they're equally effective. A first-person shooter like Doom has a totally different feel to it than the overhead perspective of Berserk, even though both games are about a man running through a maze, shooting enemies - and yet this is barely mentioned. As such, these chapters have all the excitement of reading an annotated grocery list.

In addition, even though it was published in 2001, the book seems to stop paying attention to videogames somewhere in 1998 - Myst is mentioned frequently, but Half-Life - a revolutionary game that took the concept of storytelling to levels that the videogame industry has strived to match ever since - is not mentioned once. The Sims, which has sold over eight million copies and caused gamers to develop unprecedented attachments to their on-screen representatives, is only mentioned in passing. Whereas games that vanished without a trace, like Dactyl Nightmare and the Virtual Boy's Mario game, are referred to on numerous occasions. This creates the rather odd impression that most of the significant advances we see today were created in the 1980s.

The last three chapters lend some insights into the videogame industry, and they're very worth your while - even though one of them was written ten years ago. The first, an essay on the creation of the first videogame museum, has some fascinating discussions on how games created so recently can feel like ancient history - as well as some great anecdotes of trying to find machines that, at the time, were considered little more than junked merchandise. The second, a musing on why videogames and computers can suck away hours of your time in a way that books and movies cannot, has many witty insights - and considering that it was written in 1988, it has some extremely prescient comments on what the videogame industry was to become. And the last essay discusses the death of storytelling; all of our myths are videogames. And why not? After all, when you have the choice of hearing about the brave knight who saved the princess or becoming the brave knight, which would you choose?

(For those of you paying attention, yes there are nine essays - the first one is the obligatory "history of videogame" chapters, and it does what it's supposed to do.)

This is a book that really has three must-have reads - one of which has been published elsewhere. The rest of the book is a sad misunderstanding; The Medium of the Video Game wants to investigate the videogame as "an artistic medium," but it fails to understand that art is not about the act of creation, but rather about the art's effect on the viewer. As such, it spends a lot of time telling you how, but never asks "why."

William Steinmetz, MCSE and A+-certified, worked as a chainwide buyer for Waldenbooks for five years, picking out only the best computer books to send into malls across America. He currently works as a freelance writer, doing reviews for Amazon.com and editing various websites. He likes Magic: the Gathering, roleplaying, and other ridiculously geeky activities.

The Medium of the Video Game

Table of Contents
  • Foreword: Ralph H. Baer
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Mark J. P. Wolf
  • I. The Emergence of the Video Game
    1. The Video Game as a Medium (Mark J. P. Wolf)
    2. Super Mario Nation (Steven L. Kent)
  • II. Formal Aspects of the Video Game
    1. Space in the Video Game (Mark J. P. Wolf)
    2. Time in the Video Game (Mark J. P. Wolf)
    3. Narrative in the Video Game (Mark J. P. Wolf)
    4. Genre and the Video Game (Mark J. P. Wolf)
  • III. The Video Game in Society and Culture
    1. Hot Circuits: Reflections on the 1989 Video Game Exhibition of the American Museum of the Moving Image (Rochelle Slovin)
    2. Play It Again, Pac-Man (Charles Bernstein)
    3. Archetypes on Acid: Video Games and Culture (Rebecca R. Tews)
  • Appendix: Resources for Video Game Research (Mark J. P. Wolf)
  • Index
  • About the Contributors

Introduction

The year 2001 marks the thirtieth anniversary of commercial video games, which began with Nolan Bushnell's coin-operated Computer Space arcade game in 1971. Initially seen as an experiment, novelty, or toy, the video game grew into an item of mass consumption during the 1970s and quickly expanded through the 1980s and 1990s into a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry. During its first thirty years, the video game market has rapidly expanded and has proven to be powerful competition for film and television; and as films like Super Mario Bros. (game, 1985; film, 1993), Street Fighter (game, 1987; film, 1994), Mortal Kombat (game, 1992; film, 1995), Wing Commander (game, 1990; film, 1999), and Tomb RaiderDoom (1993). And stand-alone arcade-style video games found in malls are also keeping pace with games of increasing speed and complexity, moving into ever more detailed three-dimensional environments, virtual reality, and simulator games. (game, 1996; film, 2001), and so on, have shown, a source of material for films and television as well. During the 1990s, home computers and CD-ROM drives took over a large sector of the gaming market, although game systems such as Super Nintendo, Virtual Boy, X-Box, Sega Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, and others continue on in the game-console tradition. Newer technologies like DVD-ROM now feature games, and "level editors" allow players to design and play their own levels of games like

Despite three decades of development, there has been relatively little scholarly study of these games, or even an acknowledgment of the medium of the video game as a whole. Acceptance of the medium as an art form is still in its early stages. Yet film and television industries realized the potential of the new medium as early as the mid-1970s, when they sought to have a hand in the video game market; CBS Electronics and 20th Century Fox made their own game cartridges, and several dozen movies and television shows were adapted into game cartridges for the Atari 2600 system alone. As audiovisual entertainment whose content is largely representational, video games have a lot more in common with film and television than merely characters, settings, and plotlines. During production, producers of video games sometimes hire the same special effects houses that film and video makers use for animated sequences and motion-capture sessions. In the area of exhibition, video games compete for audiences at the same sites as film and TV: most multiplex theaters have video games in the lobby, if not separate side rooms devoted to them; home video game systems use the television set itself, encouraging their owners to play game programs instead of watching broadcast programs; and video rental companies, such as Blockbuster Video, also rent games and game systems. In record stores, alongside compact discs of film soundtracks, there are now CDs like Duke Nukem: Music to Score By and the soundtracks to Myst (1993), Riven (1997), and other games. And there's even competition at the Academy Awards, with the 1998 nomination of an animated sequence from the game Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus for Best Animated Short.

Theoretically, many of the same issues and concepts in film theory can also be applied to video games, and video games are themselves becoming more like film and television, embedding video clips within the games, or like many laserdisc, CD-ROM, and DVD-ROM games, relying on video sequences almost entirely. Many games now use recorded sounds rather than just computer-generated ones, and they have elaborate opening and closing sequences, in an attempt to create a more cinematic experience (including long crawls of end credits). And as graphics grow more representational and detailed, product placement and imbedded advertising may also become as common in video games as they are in movies (for example, Sega's Top Skater (1997) features over a dozen billboards for Coca-Cola). Video games are also rated just as films are, due to violence, nudity, and adult themes. Whereas films are rated by the MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association), many video games are now rated by the AAMA (American Amusement Machine Association). Naturally, then, video game theory finds its roots in film and television theory.

Video Games and Film and Television Theory

As media, video games are already widespread and unique enough to deserve their own branch of theory. Currently, they are best approached and analyzed using conceptual tools developed in film and television theory and media studies. The study of video games overlaps these fields in many theoretical areas, including those of the active spectator, suture, first-person narrative, and spatial orientation, point of view, character identification, sound and image relations, and semiotics. Video games often rely on a knowledge of cinematic conventions (for example, in the construction of space and narrative action, continuity editing, the use of off-screen space, and concepts of point of view), and the possibility of one-on-one interaction means video games can extend them in ways that film cannot. While films traditionally position the spectator to identify with the main character through point of view and other techniques of suture, the actions of the player's on-screen surrogate character in the video game are controlled by the spectator/player, who vicariously experiences the game through the on-screen surrogate as a participant and not just an observer. Though we may refer to film spectatorship as "active," due to the viewer's ongoing attempt to make sense of the film, the video game player is even more active, making sense of the game as well as causing and reacting to the events depicted. Many games depict their diegetic worlds from a first-person perspective, and much of what occurs is due to the intervention or curiosity of the player, although in other games, quick thinking and fast reactions are required during game play. Only when a player becomes attuned to the design of the game and the algorithms by which it operates will success be possible; thus a certain manner of thinking and reacting is encouraged. In both film and video games, an inherent worldview is embodied in how actions are followed by outcomes and consequences; when a criminal is caught at the end of the film, we can read it as a cautionary tale, and likewise, other actions can appear to be condoned or encouraged. While film or TV may influence behavior, in the video game, the player is called upon not just to watch but to act; simulation becomes emulation, and sympathy becomes empathy. Alternate endings and branching storylines also help to define the inherent worldview by rewarding or punishing certain behaviors. A look at the medium of the video game may also bring to light certain unacknowledged assumptions in areas of theory dealing with reception, spectatorship, narrative structure, and the nature of the diegetic worlds seen on-screen and one's experience of them.

The study of video games also adds new concepts to existing ideas in moving imagery theory, such as those concerning the game's interface, player action, interactivity, navigation, and algorithmic structures. The interface bridges the gap between the diegetic world and that of the player. Whether by mouse, joystick, trackball, gun, head-mounted display, or keyboard, some additional means of inputting player actions must be integrated into the design of the game. Informational graphics and nondiegetic displays are combined with game play in a variety of ways, each of which has a particular effect on the gameplay experience. Likewise, the way players' actions are transmuted to their on-screen surrogates are often designed to be as transparent or intuitive as possible, though not always. Navigation of the diegetic world also frequently figures as an important element of game play, and maps and mapping are common. Navigation also enhances the feeling of a consistent, three-dimensional space, through which one can freely move or at least have the illusion of moving. And finally, the algorithmic structures controlling the game's events and characters are gradually discerned, and knowledge of how they function is often needed for success in the game. While figuring out these structures, or solving puzzles or challenges posed by the game's author, players try to think like the designer or programmer, which sometimes forces them to momentarily take on the author's way of thinking. The interactive nature of video games, the possibility of many different outcomes, and the illusion of effectiveness and power on the part of the player can make video games potentially more attractive to people than more passive media; indeed, video games have even been shown to be clinically addictive. Public debate as to the effects of video game violence occurs alongside debates regarding violence in film and television.

Examination of all of these elements will enrich moving imagery theory, pointing out unacknowledged assumptions which may lead to a better understanding of traditional media and the way they are received by an audience. And, audiences accustomed to interactive media like video games and the Internet may also begin to regard traditional passive media in different ways as they come to seem more passive and linear or more manipulative by comparison. Yet at the same time, the illusion of freedom one has in a partially navigable video game world can serve to obscure the points of view and assumptions which in some ways are even more present than they are in an on-screen world in film or television. Worldviews and ideas may be more effectively intertwined with the diegetic world in a video game, because a player's experience seems less directed than that of the viewer of a linear, noninteractive work. If knowledge of how film operates on the spectator is still incomplete, consider how much more incomplete is the knowledge of how video games operate on players, and what their effects are. Video games have become well integrated into other cultural forms and media, and yet are often overlooked as a cultural influence, despite a long and prominent presence in American culture.

Cultural Importance of Video Games

Historically, the video game has occupied several other important positions in culture; it was, in the early to mid-1970s, the first computer that could be used by the public in the form of stand-alone games in the arcade. And shortly after arcade games, home video game systems became the first entrance of the computer into the average American household. Some early systems even used the term "computer" as a selling point; the Atari 2600 was released officially as the Atari VCS CX2600, the "VCS" standing for "Video Computer System." In this way, the video game helped to build a positive, fun, and user-friendly image of the computer, which helped to usher in the era of the home computer only a few years later. In the long run, game cartridges were a good marketing tool for early home computer systems. Many people at the time wondered if they really needed a computer, or what they would use it for, since typewriters, board games, calculators, ledgers, and other technology already served their needs. Games made the computer a recreational device instead of merely a utilitarian one.

The video game was also the first medium to combine moving imagery, sound, and real-time user interaction in one machine, and so it made possible the first widespread appearance of interactive, on-screen worlds in which a game or story took place. Simple as they were at first, they fascinated the public, and quickly grew into a major industry. Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space brought him around $500 in royalties in 1971; a little over twenty years later, in 1992, the video game industry grossed over $5.3 billion, an increase of more than ten-million-fold. Sales in 1998 were 22 percent higher than 1997 sales, making 1998 a record-breaking year, with $6.3 billion in U.S. video games sales alone. The year 1999 broke the record again with a total of $6.9 billion. Worldwide sales are substantially higher, and the annual sales for individual companies can be in the billions of dollars; in fiscal 1997-98, Nintendo of America made $4.0 billion and Sony Computer Entertainment of America made $5.3 billion. Not only does the video game industry now make more money than the film industry, but video games often take up more of the audience's time than films do. Whereas a movie can be viewed in its entirety typically in under three hours, video games, with their multiple levels, fast-action challenges, and puzzle solving, can require many hours of game play even when players have become familiar with them.

Today, the on-screen or diegetic worlds found in video games have grown tremendously in detail, size, and interactive potential. The shapes these diegetic worlds and the manner in which they are depicted have been heavily influenced by those of film and television, but have not remained limited to them. As video game graphics increase in resolution and rendering speed, and film and television move into the digital realm, the gap between them continues to close. Gradually, films are joining video games in the realm of computer graphics, not only through the growing use of digital effects in film and the use of video clips and film language within games, but with films like Toy Story (1995), AntzA Bug's Life (1998), which are all entirely computer generated. Toy Story was also adapted into a Super Nintendo game, the graphics of which, although of much lower resolution, still managed to retain quite a bit of detail from the film's characters. Live-action films also have their equivalent in full-motion video games like Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Star Trek: Borg (1996), and others. Actors, storylines, and cinematic conventions are crossing over into video games, and many of the familiar titles, series, and franchises are often found in both. (1998), and

The medium of video games itself has evolved with astonishing speed, and it is still changing—rapidly. Its growth is most striking when compared with that of other media; for example, film was still largely black and white and silent after its first three decades. In the same span of time, video games advanced from PONG to 64-bit and DVD-ROM-based games, and it is difficult to predict what they will be like even five years from now. With a rich three decades of history already behind video games, the medium is ripe for study.

Difficulties in Studying the Video Game

Why, then, has the video game largely been ignored in academic media studies? One reason might be its status as a "game," which separates it from traditional media such as books, film, radio, and television, despite its audiovisual nature and often narrative basis. Early games were also very simple graphically and narratively, and rather limited in subject matter. Since then, however, both graphics and storylines have improved, warranting more analysis and comment. Greater complexity and depth give the video game designer more opportunity to embody a message, worldview, or philosophy into a game in the same way these elements can be incorporated into novels and films. While it is true there are still a good number of games which are the gaming world's equivalent of slapstick comedies or plotless action films, more serious work continues to emerge and develop. The social effects of video games may also be difficult to pin down exactly—not that those of film and television are any easier to determine—but considering the position video games occupies culturally, it cannot be denied that an influence is present. And considering the amount of attention given to marginal films and TV programs, certainly video games are deserving of scrutiny under the academic microscope.

Perhaps the main reason for the neglect of the video game is that it is more difficult to study than traditional media. Admittedly, the video game as a "text" is much harder to master. Whereas someone can listen to a piece of music, read a novel, or sit and watch a film from beginning to end and be satisfied that he or she has seen all there is to see of it, this is usually not the case with a video game. Indeed, game-playing skills may be required to advance beyond the first few levels, or some puzzle-solving ability may be needed just to enter a locked door encountered early on in the diegetic world. Instead of fixed, linear sequences of text, image, or sound which remain unchanged when examined multiple times, a video game experience can vary widely from one playing to another. Even if a player has the right skills, there are often courses of action and areas of the game which are still left unexplored even after the game has been played several times. Mastery of the video game, then, can be more involved (and involving) than mastery of a film; in addition to critical skills, the researcher must possess game-playing or puzzle-solving skills, or at least know someone who does. Guides and cheat books are also sometimes available.

More time is also needed to experience a video game. Whereas movies are generally no more than a few hours in length, video games like Riven (1997), Tomb Raider II (1997), Final Fantasy VIII (2000), The Longest Journey (2000), and so on, can average forty or more hours to complete, not including all the possible endings they may contain. Sometimes it is not even clear how many choices a player has, and discovery of alternate narrative paths or hidden features (known as "Easter Eggs") is also a part of game play. It make take a good amount of playing time and attention to detail to say for certain that one has seen and heard everything a game has to offer (that is, all the screens, sounds, and video clips). Often, one needs to grasp an underlying logic in order to do so.

***

This book examines the video game as an artistic medium which has developed quickly in a short span of time. The first part, "The Emergence of the Video Game," begins in Chapter 1 with a look at the properties of the medium itself and the range of games that the term "video game" has been used to cover, along with explanations and definitions of some video game terminology and technology. In Chapter 2, Steven L. Kent offers an overview of the first twenty-five years of video game history.

The second part of the book, "Formal Aspects of the Video Game," features four chapters in which I examine the use of space, time, and narrative, and finally, how the video game challenges existing notions of genre, along with a descriptive list of video game genres. When possible, examples in this section will be taken from games that are more common, familiar, or easier to find; thus many examples will be taken from Atari 2600 games and more common games like MystSpy Vs Spy (1984), were only available as home computer software; likewise, networked games are played mainly on home computers, so mention of computer games will be made as well. (1993), although unusual games will also be noted when necessary. Typically, I will also focus mainly on stand-alone arcade games and home video game systems, as video gaming is their primary purpose and function; the home computer came on the scene relatively late and subsumed the functions of the video game as it did the typewriter and calculator. On the other hand, some games, like First Star's

The third part of the book, "The Video Game in Society and Culture," looks more broadly at the social and cultural function of the video game. In Chapter 7, Rochelle Slovin, director and founder of the American Museum of the Moving Image (AMMI) in Astoria, New York, relates her experiences of museum exhibitions of video games. In Chapter 8, Charles Bernstein's "Play It Again, Pac-Man," an essay commissioned by the museum, takes a look at the American attraction and addiction to video games in the late 1980s. In Chapter 9, Rebecca R. Tews examines approaches that psychological research has taken toward the video game and suggests that Jungian archetypes may provide a key to understanding the role that video games play in culture. And finally, the appendix, "Resources for Video Game Research," includes some books, articles, websites, and suggestions for those interested in video game research.

Although "video game studies" is not yet an accepted field of academic study in the way cinema studies or television studies are, the video game has had a great impact on society and culture, and its influence on life in the late twentieth century should not be ignored. It continues to grow and mature, and has not yet shown signs of leveling off technologically. Aesthetically, a canon of "classics" is already developing. The video game's rapid growth, widespread appeal, and uniqueness as a medium behoove us to pay it closer attention and give it the examination and analysis that it is due.

Japanese vs. American Video Games - Do Cultural Differences Exist in Game Production?

Japanese vs. American Video Games - Do Cultural Differences Exist in Game Production?

Japanese video games are every bit as different from American video games as Japanese animation and manga are different from their American counterparts. Just as in the case of anime/manga versus American animation/comics, the differences in the video games are surely there, yet it is often difficult to describe exactly what is different, or what makes it specifically "Japanese." Much of this difference has gone largely unnoticed by American consumers. There is no segregation between American and "foreign" games on store shelves, and even the names of the companies that release the games usually aren't very indicative of which country the game originates from. Furthermore, most American gamers have no particular reason to make any distinction between a game made in the U.S. or anywhere else. The Japanese video game is not seen as directly linked to Japan as anime almost always is, and for that reason the same "Japanophilia" that often results from an interest in anime is much less likely to develop from an interest in Japanese video games.1 While we don't want to promote cultural biases and prejudices toward products produced in certain countries, it is useful to recognize that we commonly make this distinction in various areas of cultural production such as animation; and by making this distinction we avail ourselves the opportunity to understand what is happening across international markets.

Interestingly, instead of distinguishing between Japanese and American software, American gamers have traditionally made a distinction between hardware; specifically between console games and PC games. American gamers would tell you that the gaming experience one gets from a PC is different from what one gets from a console, and thus the types of games made for PC are inherently different from those made for consoles. However, it could be said that the distinction that is being recognized here is actually more closely linked to country of origin than it is to platform. These associations are made because the selection of PC games available in the U.S. is basically devoid of any Japanese titles, and it is usually blockbuster Japanese titles like "The Legend of Zelda" and "Final Fantasy" that get associated with the console experience. Besides, if an American gamer were to try Japanese PC games by companies like Falcom or TGL, they would likely agree that Japanese PC games have much more in common with Japanese console games than they do with American PC games. Therefore, the distinction that the American gamers are really making is based largely on a Japanese vs. American dichotomy rather than the supposed console vs. PC dichotomy.


Gamers: Do these screen shots from Japanese PC games remind you more of American PC games or Japanese console games? "Farland Story: kyoushin no miyako" (left) and "Zwei!" (right)

Only in more recent years have American gamers begun to make a distinction between certain Japanese and American games. This is occurring with regard to the RPG genre. I have now even heard the term "Japanese RPG" used on the television program "X-Play" which is a television show devoted to video games shown on the U.S. cable network TechTV. In the RPG genre, the differences between the Japanese and American approach have become so apparent that many now regard Japanese RPG's and American RPG's as two separate genres. The two countries' versions of the RPG have diverged a great deal. In the beginning, the two were more alike and it was not uncommon to see similarities and imitations from both countries, but they have now become separate entities through specialization and the seeking of niche markets. In the book Fresh Pulp: Dispatches from the Japanese Pop Culture Front (1997-1999), Jason Thompson writes, "Though the initial influences were translated American RPG's... Japanese RPG's [have] developed a life and subculture of their own..."2 We can see now that it is beginning to be a more widely recognized fact that the Japanese approach to making games (certain types of games at least) is different from the American approach.

It is very difficult to put into simple terms what exactly the general differences between American and Japanese games are. For each different game genre there are certain conventions that drive that genre. In most genres these conventions are different depending on the country it is developed in. As stated already, the conventions of Japanese RPG's tend to be different from those of American RPG's. The same thing goes for other genres such as platform action, fighting, strategy, adventure, etc. Rather curiously, there are some genres such as sports and racing which oftentimes have little or no distinguishable differences based on country of origin. That is not to say that there aren't plenty of examples in which very real differences can be easily distinguished in these genres as well. Most games from other genres are easily identifiable as either Japanese or American to the trained eye.3 Differences in art style used to draw characters and the different types of characters presented are fairly obvious. For instance, Japanese games tend to have a higher occurrence of female characters, and the characters can be either cute or highly sexualized. Female characters in American games are almost always the latter of the two. If the reader is not an avid player of video games, s/he may have a difficult time grasping all of the minute differences that often exist between Japanese and American video games. It can take a lot of experience playing a large number of games in order to begin recognizing the differences and to move away from the PC vs. console distinction and toward the Japanese vs. American distinction.4 If one pays enough attention the differences should eventually become apparent.

One might argue that since the games are often developed to be sold both in and outside Japan that they are not a 'pure' form of Japanese media5 and should not be examined using the same terms that we use when examining other forms of Japanese media intended (for all practical purposes) strictly for Japanese consumers. We must recognize, though, that Japanese companies have traditionally focused almost entirely on their domestic market, and given very little thought or consideration to their non-Japanese consumers, which is to say that their understanding of local (Japanese) taste is what drives production. This is understandable when you consider that the ratio of video game consoles to households in Japan has always been larger than that of the U.S. or any other country. This gap between the number of active consoles in use in Japan versus the U.S. has been gradually narrowing, and has only become comparable in relatively recent years. Therefore, the Japanese video game market has been historically much more profitable for the Japanese companies than other markets have. At its peak, the Japanese video game market accounted for one-third of total world video game sales.6 Thus, it is understandable that Japanese companies would concentrate on developing games that they feel will sell well in their domestic market. The selection of Japanese games available in the U.S. is a small piece of a local video game market which has been removed from the local and placed in the global. In that way, one might say that the video game market outside of Asia is actually quite similar to the anime market.

To sum things up, the differences between Japanese and American video games are created by two basic factors. The first is the different structure and organization of the video game development companies which doubtlessly exists between the U.S. and Japan which amounts to a different approach to game making. The second and more powerful factor is the structure of each country's local market and the companies' perceived taste of their consumers.

Click one of the following links to continue to the other sections of this editorial:

1. Introduction: A Brief History of the U.S. Video Game Market

3. Assimilation of Japanese 'Otherness' into the U.S. Market

4. Orientalism: When Exotic or Japanese-looking Imagery is Used to Sell Games in the U.S.

5. American Games in Japan: The Other Side

6. The Asian Video Game Market: Not Profitable Enough?

7. Conclusion

France glimpses art in video games

France glimpses art in video games
By David Chazan
BBC News, Paris

Five young video games players hunch over computers in a cellar in northern Paris on a damp weekday evening.

Screenshot of Ubisoft's Far Cry game
Some experts say the majority of games have no cultural content
Wearing red team jackets and headphones, these intensely focussed men in their twenties are semi-professional players practising war-games strategies for an international tournament in Italy.

There is big money at stake and their slightly older manager stands behind, encouraging and occasionally reprimanding them.

Whatever you think of video games, many people would find it difficult to see them as a cultural activity.

But the French government wants to give video games the status of a cultural industry like its music and cinema industries, which are eligible for tax breaks and government support to preserve the cultural heritage of a people proud of their auteur films and passion for the arts.

So what is the government playing at?

Some people play video games exactly for the artistic part of it - to play nice games, for the nice music or what the story's telling, just like movies
Nicolas Cerrato
Gaming team manager

"I believe that a video game is a true creative work based on a lot of artistic talent, involving script writers, designers and directors," says the Culture Minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres.

In an interview with the BBC, he shrugged off the fact that some critics have labelled him the minister of video games.

"Cultural products are not like other goods," he said.

"States must make sure that there is cultural diversity. And we, as European countries, need to nurture that in order to maintain our cultural and artistic presence in Beijing, in New York and elsewhere."

Industry in decline

France used to be home to three of the world's top 10 video games companies but they have been facing hard times and tough competition.

That has forced a number of them to move most of their operations abroad where costs are lower.

So the government's answer is what some would consider a typically French recipe, blending high culture with lower taxes for French companies, to help them stay in a tough game.

Young gamers in France
Young people play games for different reasons, Mr Cerrato says

But the players in the "Goodgame" team, busy plotting strategy and testing tactics at their underground base in northern Paris, say the government's proposed intervention comes a decade too late to save the French industry.

"Ten years ago we had a video games industry in France we could be proud of," says manager Nicolas Cerrato.

"But the people that used to make the good video games in France have gone to other countries such as Canada."

That is disputed by the culture minister, although he acknowledges the need to act quickly. And he concedes that not all video games would qualify as cultural.

Mr Cerrato agrees. "Some people play video games as a sport like my team does," he says.

"There's no cultural aspect to it, I mean, no artistic aspect to it. They don't care about the graphics, they don't care about the sound, just the game."

But he also agrees that for some, video games can be a cultural activity.

"Some people play video games exactly for the artistic part of it - to play nice games, for the nice music or what the story's telling, just like movies."

Mr Cerrato and the players in his team are well-educated professionals, fluent in English.

'Brain drain'

They say the government should improve conditions for all companies in France, not just the cultural industries.

"The brain drain isn't just in the video games industry," says Mr Cerrato. "That's the issue we should be addressing."

His sentiments are echoed by Jean-Claude Larue, the head of the French Leisure Software Publishers' Association.

Jean-Claude Larue
Mr Larue says most games have no cultural content

"We never asked to be part of what we call in France the 'cultural exception'," Mr Larue says.

Publishers make most of their money from imported video games and he argues that state support for video games would only subsidise French developers to produce games people do not want to buy.

"The risk is that we have to support a sort of tax in order to give the opportunity to some studios, to some developers, to develop products without a real market," he says.

"The foreign companies will in this case subsidise the French developers and as we will finance this industry, it is completely wrong."

Mr Larue estimates that 95% of video games have "no cultural content".

But the Nemopolis company, just outside Paris, makes video games which do have cultural value.

Their latest product teaches schoolchildren the history of France under Napoleon while they play.

The managing director, Antoine Izarn, supports the government's initiative, but says he wishes the bureaucracy would move faster.

He and his developers are justifiably proud of the artistic quality of their games, with specially composed music, beautiful graphics and engaging plots.

Many schools or parents might want to buy them.

But will they fire children's imaginations the way more commercial games do?

And do they need state support to survive alongside war and football-based games?

Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact

March 12, 2007

Is That Just Some Game? No, It’s a Cultural Artifact

When Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, started preserving video games and video-game artifacts in 1998 he thought it was closer to professional oblivion than a bold new move into the future.

In just a few years, however, Mr. Lowood’s notion that video games were something with a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying has gone from absurd to worthy of consideration by the Library of Congress.

On Thursday at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr. Lowood announced a game canon, an idea that grew out of a proposal submitted to the Library of Congress in September 2006 by a consortium made up of Stanford, the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois.

“Creating this list is an assertion that digital games have a cultural significance and a historical significance,” Mr. Lowood said in an interview. And if that is acknowledged, he said, “maybe we should do something about preserving them.”

Mr. Lowood and the four members of his committee — the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist — announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994).

Mr. Lowood’s canon was closely modeled on the work of the National Film Preservation Board, which every year compiles a list of films to be added to the National Film Registry, managed by the Library of Congress since 1989 (a consequence of the National Film Preservation Act, passed in 1988). The first list of films included “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Searchers” and “Nanook of the North.”

Almost all of the games on the Lowood list represent the beginning of a genre still vital in the video game industry. Spacewar!, for example, created by a group of early computer programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the first multiplayer, competitive game, and the first action game too. The first three Warcraft games represent the introduction of real-time strategy overlaid on a narrative; and Zork introduced the world to the adventure game.

SimCity helped establish the genre known as god games, in which players take on an omnipotent role, controlling the game world rather than simply participating in it. It also broke convention by refusing to establish criteria for winning, leaving the decision of what constituted success up to the player.

SimCity was selected by Mr. Bittanti, a researcher at the Humanities Lab at Stanford who works with Mr. Lowood. The game is “one of the most important art works of the 20th century,” Mr. Bittanti said, adding: “It completely reinvented the whole notion of games. And then it transcended the game world to become a cultural phenomenon.”

SimCity and its four follow-ups have sold 17 million copies, and the franchise it spawned, the Sims, has sold 85 million copies.

Mr. Grant, the editor of the popular Web site joystiq.com, who selected Super Mario Bros. 3, said the game was important for its nonlinear play, a mainstay of contemporary games, and new features like the ability to move both backward and forward.

Mr. Lowood said that preserving video games presented certain challenges. For example the hardware that games are played on changes so frequently that there are already thousands that can only be played through computer programs called emulators, which, while readily available on the Internet, technically violate copyright laws.

“We have to be really careful here because the technology is just going to make this harder for us,” Mr. Spector said. “The game canon is a way of saying, this is the stuff we have to protect first.

Cultural Framing of Computer/Video Games Kurt Squire

Cultural Framing of Computer/Video Games

by Kurt Squire

Since their inception, computer and video games have both fascinated and caused great fear in the politicians, educators, academics, and the public at large. In the United States, this fear and fascination goes back to the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan extolled the virtues of games to create a generation of highly skilled cold war warriors, while U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop proclaimed games among the top health risks facing Americans. To be sure, such extreme cultural reactions to technological and cultural innovations are hardly new; mid twentieth-century critics feared that television watchers would become addicted to television, never leaving their homes, and critics before them feared that film would pervert viewers.

In educational and social science discourse, the reactions to new technologies, including digital gaming technologies, have been equally excessive. Some advocates of digital game-based learning imply that developing educational games is a moral imperative, as kids of the "videogame generation" do not respond to traditional instruction (See Katz, 2000; Prensky, 2001). Other educators, such as Eugene Provenzo (1991; 1992) worry that games are inculcating children with hyper competitive or warped sexual values. Looking at the range of values and powers that educators ascribe to games, games begin to look a bit like a Rorschach test of educators� attitudes toward modern social, technological, and media change, rather than an emerging and maturing entertainment medium. Indeed, similar statements were made about the potential for radio, film, television, and desktop computers to revolutionize learning, yet the overhead projector continues as the most pervasive piece of technology in most classrooms (Cuban, 1986).

The recent enthusiasm for educational gaming directs researchers, politicians, game developers and the public toward some important, overlooked issues. What are people learning about academic subjects playing games such as SimCity, Civilization, Tropico, or SimEarth? Might games be used in formal learning environments? This essay argues that these are critical questions to game studies, and educational studies, particularly work in the learning sciences, and offers some important practical and theoretical traditions that games studies can draw upon as it matures as a field.

Pawns of the Game: The Current State of Games-Based Social Science Research

In the United States, and increasingly in Europe, games such as Doom or Quake have garnered a disproportionate share of attention in the press, as they have become pawns in a culture war waged by cultural conservatives. As many gamers, critics, media scholars, and social researchers agree, this discussion has been devoid of any serious study of games. For example, in 2001, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft cited the game Dope Wars as an example of the "the culture of violence" that may have contributed to a spate of recent deadly school shootings" (Reuters News, April 4, 2001). How a simple, text-based game (based on a nearly 20 year old DOS game) that is downloaded over the Internet, played on Palm Pilots, and features no graphical imagery is contributing to the increased violence among teens, given the amount of violence in American culture is questionable. As this example reveals, much of the rhetoric in this culture work has much less to do with any real knowledge of games than with fears about violence in American culture.

It is difficult for many to make sense of this contentious and politicized cultural debate because to date, there has been very little disciplined study of gaming. Some social science researchers have compared "violent" games like Doom to "non-violent" games like Myst or compared the rates of aggressive and violent behavior between gamers and non-gamers. Unfortunately, this research suffers from many problematic conceptualizations: violent acts are removed from the narratives contexts in which they are situated (Jenkins, 1998); researchers used invalid comparison techniques, studying games from different genres that differ along multiple variables -- such as comparing Myst, a slow-paced puzzle adventure game to Castle Wolfenstein, a fast-paced 3D action shooter (Anderson & Dill, 2000). These studies generally lack any real-world evidence linking game-playing to acts of violence; they ignore broad trends that that show inverse correlations between game-playing and violent behavior; finally, they make wild logical leaps in linking very constrained behaviors in laboratories to violent acts where people really get hurt. Anderson and Dill (2000) found that players who lost a round of Wolfenstein 3D "punished" opposing players with a noise blast that lasted 6.81 seconds, compared to Myst players, who blasted opponents for 6.65 seconds - a .16 second difference (there was no difference between players who won their round of Castle Wolfenstein and Myst players). To suggest that a .16-second increase in duration of a noise blast is qualitatively the same as committing mass murder is not only an illogical leap, but a disservice to the worthwhile enterprise of studying what are the root causes of tragic events like school shootings or youth violence. Fortunately, a handful of social science researchers such as Jonathon Freedman (2001) and Jeanne Funk (2001) have begun to call for more rigorous research and are taking a much more disciplined look at the impact of gaming on people's lives. Hopefully social science researchers will follow suit; as a generation of game players move into academic positions, perhaps such poorly defined research studies will be challenged and a more rigorous body of research will evolve.

What's missing from contemporary debate on gaming and culture is any naturalistic study of what game-playing experiences are like, how gaming fits into people's lives, and the kinds of practices people are engaged in while gaming. Few, if any researchers have studied how and why people play games, and what gaming environments are like. The few times researchers have asked these questions, they have found surprising results. In 1985, Mitchell gave Atari 2600 consoles to twenty families and found that most families used the game systems as a shared play activity. Instead of leading to poor school performance, increased family violence, or strained family interactions, video games were a positive force on family interactions, "reminiscent of days of Monopoly, checkers, card games, and jigsaw puzzles" (Mitchell, 1985, p.134). This study suggests that investigators might benefit by acknowledging the cultural contexts of gaming, and studying game-playing as a cultural practice. If nothing else, it highlights the importance of putting aside preconceptions and examining gamers on their own terms.

Rethinking the role of Educational and Social Science Research in Digital Gaming

Underlying this unease about video game violence research is a growing disconnect between anti-gaming rhetoric and people's actual experiences playing games (See Herz, 1996; Poole, 2000). The first generation of gameplayers is now in its 30s. Despite (and perhaps because of) the hundreds of hours I've spent playing war games, I'm pretty much a pacifist. I love Return to Castle Wolfenstein, yet I'd never own a gun. The successes of such books as Joystick Nation and Trigger Happy suggest there is an maturing generation of gamers who feels the same way: games are integral parts of our lives, yet they've largely gone unexamined.

So far, concerns about the effects of "violent" video games have drawn our attention away from the broader social roles and cultural contexts of gaming. There is some evidence that this trend could be changing - in the past six months humanities researchers have turned more attention to games. Art museums in both the United States and United Kingdom have developed or are planning substantial game exhibits in 2000-2002 (See Barbican, 2002). Panels at conferences are almost ready to give up on the "Are games art?" question and begin asking "What kinds of art are they?" or exploring how and why they work (Jenkins, in press; Jenkins & Squire, 2002). Other humanities researchers are examining games to see what they might teach us about the future of interactive narrative (Murray, 1997).

Despite this increasing attention as a maturing medium, the pedagogical potential of games and social contexts of gaming have been woefully unexamined. Already, entertainment games allow learners to interact with systems in increasingly complex ways. Digital game players can relive historical eras (as in Pirates!), investigate complex systems like the Earth's chemical & life cycles (SimEarth), govern island nations (Tropico), manage complex industrial empires (Railroad Tycoon), or, indeed, run an entire civilization (CivilizationCaesar I,II, & III), Rome (Age of Empires I, and II), North America (Colonization), or manage an ant colony, farm, hospital, skyscraper, themepark, zoo, airport, or fast food chain. Anecdotal evidence from teachers suggests that the impact of gaming on millions of gamers who grew up playing best-selling games such as SimCity, Pirates!, or Civilization is starting to be felt. series). Or, they might travel in time to Ancient Greece (

Still, little is known about what players are learning through playing SimCity? Is it deepening their appreciation for geography, helping them develop more robust understandings about their environment, or perhaps promoting misconceptions about civic planning? How does a game such as Civilization III work as a cultural simulation? Does it impact players' conceptions of politics or diplomacy? Is there any way to reappropriate Civilization for use in history classes? Given the immense influence of SimCity and Civilization in present game design, what innovations might be sparked by games built around science, engineering, literature or architecture subjects? How might these innovations have an impact on the rest of game design?

These questions suggest at least three fruitful contributions from an educational or social science perspective: (1) Studying the role that games like SimCity and Civilization play in people's lives and how it mediates their understandings of other phenomena; (2) Examining how such games can be used to support learning in formal and informal learning contexts; (3) Creating and examining new modes of gameplay through games that draw metaphors from other domains. Although there has been woefully little research in this area, there are several research traditions in education and social science outside of media effects research tradition that offer useful models for thinking about gameplay.

Studying the Impact of Gaming

With SimCity more than a decade old, a generation of youth has grown up with edutainment. Yet, we know very little about what they are learning playing these games (if anything). Are sim games, civilization-building games, or war games having any impact on how students perceive social studies? Games such as SimCity depict social bodies as complex dynamic systems and embody concepts like positive feedback loops that are central to systems thinking. Are students developing intuitions about systems as a result of playing these games? Do players think they are learning anything about history or urban planning through these games? Are the perceived educational benefits part of the attraction of these games?

The study of games and learning might begin with qualitative study of game players and game playing communities. Although there have been a few survey or experimental studies of game players (See Malone, 1981; Cordova & Lepper, 1996), there have been few studies characterizing players interactions and experiences in game playing environments since Mitchell’s (1985) study of families who were given Nintendo machines. Mitchell studied how purchasing Nintendo game consoles affected twenty families, finding that playing Nintendo was an important part of family play, and brought families closer together, much as a traditional board game might. More recently, researchers such as Funk and colleagues (1996) have studied correlations between game players' characteristics and popular genres, but these broad statistical studies fail to open up the complex relationships behind game players and their games or acknowledge the social contexts in which game playing is situated. Even a quick glance at fan communities around games such as SimCity, Dance Dance Revolution, Railroad Tycoon, Everquest, or The Sims, each of which has dozens of fans websites where players create and trade game objects, maps, levels, scenarios, and stories points to rich relationships between fans and these games and complex social structures that mediate the game playing experience (See Jenkins, 2001; Squire, 2000; Yee, 2000 for descriptions of these communities).

The closest examples of studying gaming communities may be examinations of online communities. In the 1990s, Sherry Turkle and Amy Bruckman studied MOO players, yielding insights into how people negotiate among their many virtual identities (Bruckman, 1993a; 1993b; 1994; Turkle, 1996). These MUD and MOO studies were not specifically of game playing communities, but they have provided both theoretical models and specific insights about online behavior that have become foundational to the design of online games and learning environments alike. Drawing more explicitly from anthropological, educational and cultural psychology traditions (e.g. Cole, 1996), future study of gaming communities might focus specifically on the shared practices, language, resources, understandings, roles that emerge through game play. Among the outcomes of examining gameplay in naturalistic contexts might be creating guidelines for more usable and playable games, leveraging and promoting social interactions and relationships in the gameplay, and insights for creating games that appeal to broader audiences.

Games in Educational Contexts

Most people assume that games like SimCity are used frequently in geography or urban planning classes. Indeed, Maxis has published a set of resources for teachers on its website, touting that, "SimCity 3000(tm) can be used in the classroom to enhance just about any instructional unit. It can stand alone as an enrichment computer activity, or it can be used as a pivotal activity connected to other activities and projects done before, during, or after using the computer program. Use the lessons in this guide to integrate SimCity 3000 into your curriculum, with minimal preparation, or to create custom lessons to suit your needs."

As Doug Church commented at the 2002 Electronic Entertainment Exposition, most people who have played SimCity recognize that it can be an excellent resource for understanding urban planning, most people would also not want to live in a real city designed by someone who has only played SimCity. As urban planner Kenneth Kolson points out, SimCity potentially teaches the player that mayors are omnipotent and that politics, ethnicity, and race play no role in urban planning (Kolson, 1996). Using SimCity 2000 at Boys and Girls clubs Barab, and colleagues (et al. in preparation) have found that students definitely learn from exploring relationships between supply and demand and population growth and taxation, but they might also develop naive concepts of how cities form, grow, and evolve. For example, one six-year old player noted that people began moving into his city when there was electricity, because people wanted to have lights for seeing in the dark. This example illuminates how the process of interpreting game play, of drawing analogies between symbolic representations in the game and their real-life analogs is one of active interpretation, and suggests that students might benefit from systematic explanations or presentations of information. In similar research in anchored instruction and problem-based learning environments, John Bransford and colleagues have found that students perform best when given access to lectures in the context of completing open-ended complex problem solving tasks (Schwartz & Bransford, 2001).

The challenges behind using games to support learning are far from new, particularly in social studies education. In 1973, Wentworth and Lewis summarized the findings from nearly fifty research studies on learning through gaming: "In the majority of these studies, students did neither significantly better nor worse than other learning experiences in their impact on student achievement as evidenced by paper and pencil scores." In his 1991 review of the research on games and simulations in social studies, Clegg reached similarly inconclusive findings. Consistent with contemporary instructional design theory (e.g. Heinich, Molenda, Russell, & Smoldino, 1996), Clegg argues that the instructional context that envelopes gaming is a more important predictor of learning that the game itself. Specifically, how the game is contextualized, the kinds of cooperative and collaborative learning activities embedded in gameplay, and the quality and nature of debriefing are all critically important elements of the gaming experience. This tradition of games and simulations in instructional technology, chiefly promulgated through the The Society for the Advancement of Games and Simulations in Education and Training and the Sage journal Simulation and Gaming has resulted in a rich body of practical knowledge about designing effective games to support learning; however, there is actually very little agreement among educational technologists as to the theoretical underpinnings of why we should use games, how games should be designed to support learning, or in what instructional situations games make the most sense (Gredler, 1996).

The research on games and simulations in education cautions against overexhuberance about the potential of digital games to transform education. In using a game such as SimCity, minimally, there needs to be a close match among desired learning outcomes, available computer and supporting human resources, learner characteristics (such as familiarity with games conventions), "educational" game play, and potential supplementary learning experiences. Fortunately, one can imagine creating instructional resources around a game like SimCity or Civilization that pushes students to think about their game-playing more deeply. For example, Civilization players might create maps of their worlds and compare them to global maps from the same time period. Why are they the same? Why are they different? Students might be required to critique the game and explicitly address built-in simulation biases. Finally, students might draw timelines, write histories, or create media based on the history of their civilization. The possibilities for using a game like Civilization as a springboard into studying history are endless, but so far, there are less than three magazine or journal articles published on the topic and no one has done empirically-grounded research in the successes and challenges of using such a game to support learning (See Berson, 1996; Hope, 1996; Lee, 1994; Prensky, 2001; Teague & Teague, 1995).

Creating Next-Generation Educational Media

Despite these cautions about the potential of games to support learning, games may be the most fully realized educational technology produced to date. Tom Malone (1981) showed how games use challenge, fantasy, player control, and curiosity invoking designs to create intrinsically motivating environments. More recently, Lloyd Rieber (1996) has argued that digital games engage players in productive play - learning that occurs through building microworlds, manipulating simulations, and playing games. Rieber gives reason for renewed optimism for using games to support learning in leveraging the increasing power of the computer to immerse the player in interactive simulated worlds. Whereas historically educational games have relied heavily on exogenuous game formulas, games where content is inserted into a generic gaming template, like hangman, a game like SimCity might be thought of as an endogenuous game design, where the academic content is seamlessly integrated with gaming mechanics. In an endogenuous game, players learn the properties of a virtual world through interacting with its symbology, learning to detect relationships among these symbols, and inferring the game rules that govern the system.

While edutainment games such as SimCity and Civilization are intriguing educational materials, the most promising developments in educational gaming might come through games that are explicitly design to support learning. One example of such a project is the Games-to-Teach project, a project led by Randy Hinrichs at Microsoft Research and Henry Jenkins of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. In 2001-2002, the Games-to-Teach Project (http://cms.mit.edu/games/education/), presented 10 conceptual prototypes of next-generation educational games to support learning in math, science, and engineering at the advanced high school and introductory undergraduate levels. Among these prototypes is: The Jungle of the Optics, a game where players use a set of lenses, telescopes, cameras, optical tools, and optics concepts to solve optics problems within a role-playing environment; Hephaestus, a massively multiplayer resource management game where players learn physics and engineering through designing robots to colonize a planet; Replicate!, an action game where players learn virology and immunology through playing a virus attempting to infect a human body and replicate so that the virus may spread through a population. Supercharged! A flying / racing game where players learn Electromagnetism by flying a vessel that has adopted the properties of a charged particle through electric and magnetic fields. The Games-to-Teach team will be developing and testing two of these games in 2002-2003.

Such games will demand a broad, industry-wide investment if they are to succeed. Long-term, this kind of project requires creative game designers who understand the tools and capabilities of the medium, educators who can help ensure an effective product and visionary thinkers who can design a suite of games that will appeal to a broad market. A primary goal of the Games-to-Teach Project has been to create games that will engage a broad audience of players by creating rich characters, nuanced gameplay, complex social networks, and interactive stories that tap into a broad range of emotions and player experiences. Hopefully other projects trying different approaches will emerge in the next few years, as there have been signs that perhaps the industry and medium are ready for such a challenge.

Understanding and unpacking how learning occurs through game play, examining how gameplay can be used to support learning in formal learning environments, and designing games explicitly to support learning are three areas that educational research can contribute to game studies. In the next section, I argue that socio-cultural learning theory, activity theory, and educational research on transfer are three theoretical traditions that might also be of use to game studies. Although I present each of them from an educational technology perspective, each one is interdiciplinary in origin, sitting at the nexus of anthropology, sociology, cultural psychology, cognitive psychology, and educational studies and for simplicity, will be referred to as the Learning Sciences.

Unpacking Gameplay Through The Learning Sciences

A fundamental tension facing game studies is that if games do not promote or "teach" violence, then how can researchers claim that they might have a lasting impact on students' cognitive development? Far from trivial, this concern touches on many core social science research issues. What is the role of the viewer/participant in consuming media? What are the cultural and social contexts of media consumption? How does - or doesn't - knowledge transfer from one context to the next? Educational discussions of transfer, practice, and social activity offer three promising ways for game studies to think about gameplay as cultural practice.

Transfer. Much of the hype and hyperbole surrounding games and their potential impact on human behavior (whether it be fear about games’ impact on human behavior or hope that games are teaching students to think sharper or more quickly) rests on assumptions about activities developed in game–playing contexts transferring to new contexts. In educational research, this phenomena is commonly called the "transfer problem" (See Detterman & Sternberg, 1993). In the early 1900s, E.L. Thorndike and colleagues (e.g. Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901) conducted a pioneering set of studies challenging popular notions that the mind functions as a "mental muscle" and that excellence in general subjects such as Latin or Calculus could result in increased mental functioning. Thorndike and Woodworth (1901, cited in Schwartz & Bransford, 2001) write "The mind is ...a machine for making particular reactions to particular situations. It works in great detail, adapting itself to the special data of which it has had experience.... Improvements in any single mental function rarely brings about equal improvement in any other function, no matter how similar, for the working of every mental function group is conditioned by the nature of the data of each particular case" (pp. 249-250).

One classic example of challenges in transferring thinking across contexts is mathematics. Across industrialized nations, most citizens learn the basic skills needed to solve everyday mathematical problems using fractions or Algebra, but most people rarely use but the most simple computational math in their every day lives. Psychologists working constructivist and situated learning traditions argue that human behavior is circumscribed by context (e.g. Barab, Cherkes-Julikowski, 1999; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Solomon, 1993). The purpose of human activity, our goals and intentions, constrain the kinds of information we collect in the environment, and how this information is used (Barab, et al., 1999; Lave, 1988). For example, studies have shown that students who learn Algebra through problem-solving are more likely to use Algebra in solving problems than students who learn Algebra through traditional means (e.g. Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1992). Situational constraints also shape and constrain activity. Studies of navigators sailing ships, office workers using computers, and students in classrooms all show how the tools and resources that are available in our environment both guide thinking and constrain actions (Solomon, 1993). For example, people doing fractions in cooking frequently simplify the problem to make mathematics simpler, or manually divide ingredients using kitchen tools rather than using Algebra. As a result,, people who have learned Algebra become very good at using Algebra to solve textbook-like problems within school situations, but develop very different strategies for solving real-world problems (Bransford, et al., 1977; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Pea, 1993).

Unfortunately for educators looking to use games to support learning, this skeptical transfer limits what we hope players might learn from gaming. While pundits and theorists suggest that game-playing might be increasing kids critical thinking or problem-solving skills (See Katz, 2000; Prensky, 2000), research on transfer gives very little reason to believe that players are developing skills that are useful in anything but very similar contexts. A skilled Half-Life player might develop skills that are useful in playing Unreal Tournament (a very similar game), but this does not mean that players necessarily develop generalizable "strategic thinking" or "planning" skills. Just because a player can plan an attack or develop a lightning quick reactions in Half-Life does not mean that she can plan her life effectively, or think quickly in other contexts, such as in a debate or in a courtroom - one of the main reasons being that these are two entirely different contexts and demand very different social practices.

The particularities of gameplaying as social practice, the contrived and computer-mediated nature of digital game play raise serious questions for educators using gaming to support learning that will transfer across different contexts. What are the goals and intentions of players in gaming environments? Do these overlap with the situational constraints of other social or classroom practices? Do game players have opportunities to think with authentic tools and resources in gaming environments? Examining gameplay as social practice provides one model for approaching these questions.

Game-Playing as Social Practice

Anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) use the term "practice" to discuss how actions are situated in their socio-cultural contexts. Essentially, a practice is an activity that involves skills, resources, and tools, and is mediated by personal and cultural purposes. One way to produce more meaningful educational games would be to design games in which players are engaged in richer, more meaningful practices. A game like Civilization III, which involves analyzing geography in order to determine the best geographic location for a city, negotiating trade deals with other civilizations, and making taxation and social spending decisions, comes closer to the kind of meaningful practices educators would like to produce than, say, Half Life.

Note that despite the wonderful educational opportunities in playing Civilization III, playing the game is still simulated activity – as opposed to participating in historical or social practice. Sasha Barab and Tom Duffy (2000) distinguish between practice fields and legitimate participation in social practice. Playing Civilization III is exploring a simulation / model – whereby learning occurs through interacting with and observing the outcomes of a model, which is clearly not the same as actually participating in social practices valued outside of school - like writing history or in participating in political, government, or commercial institutions that extend beyond the school context, or creating a model for research purposes. In short, playing Civilization might be a tool that can assist students in understanding social studies, but playing the game is not necessarily participating in historical, political, or geographical analysis. Therefore, building on our earlier discussion of transfer, there is very good reason to believe that students may not use their understandings developed in the game - such as the political importance of a natural resource like oil - as tools for understanding phenomena outside the game, such the economics behind The Persian Gulf War or contemporary foreign policy, even in a game as rich as Civilization III.

Understanding learning as participation in social practice, however, also suggests ways for educators to transform game playing into participation in social practice. For example, Civilization could be presented as a tool that can be used for answering historical questions, such as why Europeans colonized North America, instead of vice versa, or the comparative advantages and disadvantages of political isolationism. In a hypothetical Civilization III unit, students might spent 25 percent of their time playing the game, and the remainder of the time creating maps, historical timelines, researching game concepts, drawing parallels to historical or current events, or interacting with other media, such as books or videos. In this way, the educational value of the game-playing experiences comes not from just the game itself, but from the creative coupling of educational media with effective pedagogy to engage students in meaningful practices. Indeed, research on teachers’ adoption and adaptation of materials suggests teachers will adapt the learning materials we create to maximize their potential to support learning regardless of designers' intentions (Squire, Barnett, MaKinster et al., in press). As such, the pedagogical value of a medium like gaming cannot be realized without understanding how it is being enacted through classroom use.

Activity Theory

Conceptualizing practice conceived broadly enough to capture the individual’s goals and intentions, the tools, and resources employed in practice, and the social organization and institutions that mediate practice – all within empirically grounded cases, is challenging. Restated, how can one theoretical framework account for both the moment-to-moment interactions that constitute gameplay (including the player’s goals and intentions) while also accounting for the broader socio-cultural contexts that situate the activity?

Over the past decade, socio-cultural psychologists have been struggling with this issue, and proposed Activity Theory as one theoretical framework for understanding how human activity is mediated by both tools and cultural context (Engeström, 1987; 1993). For an Activity theorist, the minimal meaningful context is the dialectical relations between human agents (subjects) and that which they act upon (objects) as they are mediated by tools, language, and socio-cultural contexts (Engeström 1987; 1993). A generic activity theory system is portrayed in Figure 1. Subjects are the actors who are selected as the point of view of the analysis. Objects are that "at which the activity is directed and which is molded or transformed into outcomes with the help of physical and symbolic, external and internal tools" (Engeström, 1993, p. 67, italics in the original). As such, objects can be physical objects, abstracted concepts, or even theoretical propositions. Tools are the concepts, physical tools, artefacts or resources that mediate a subject’s interactions with an object. The community of a system refers to those with whom the subject also shares transformation of the object; the cultural-historical communities in which a subject’s activity is situated. Communities mediate of activity through division of labor and shared norms and expectations.

Figure 1: Visual Depiction of an Activity System

Understanding the basic components of an activity system can be a useful way of mapping and categorizing key components of experience. However, for Activity Theorists, it is not the presence of these components in isolation that make for meaningful analysis, but rather, the interactions within among these components. Engeström (1993) refers to such relations as primary and secondary contradictions. Primary contradictions are those that occur within a component of a system (e.g. tools), while secondary contradictions are those that occur between components of a system (e.g. subjects and tools). In a situation where Civilization III is used in formal learning environments, one might imagine tensions between winning Civilization III and learning social studies as the object of an activity system, depending on whether the student or the teacher is the subject of the activity system.. Predicated on Hegelian / Marxist philosophy, Activity Theory suggests that the synthesis and resolution of such contradictions brings change and evolution to the system, and Activity Theorists argue that characterizing the tensions of an activity system can help participants understand and react to changes in the system.

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky’s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players’ understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated. Learning is conceptualized not as a function of the game itself - or even a simple coupling of the player and game; rather, learning is seen as transformations that occur through the dynamic relations between subjects, artifacts, and mediating social structures.

As games studies matures as a field, no doubt it will draw theoretical concepts from a range of disciplines and research traditions. Thusfar, most social science research around gaming has come from the media effects tradition, leaving a range of other research traditions unrepresented. The impact of digital games on learning and behavior, as conceptualized through researchers in the learning sciences communities is an important, but frequently overlooked area of games studies. My hope is that in the upcoming months, discussions around gaming and cognition will draw upon research in the learning sciences. While I have argued for the value of theoretical positions developing out of cultural psychology, cognitive science, and educational psychology, certainly there is room at the games studies table for other researchers in these fields contributing their theoretical models, as well as researchers from the Humanities, History of Science, Media Studies, and other disciplines.

The author would like to thank Henry Jenkins, Principal Investigator of the Games to Teach Project, for sharing his vision of using educational games to expand the cultural sphere of gaming and his contributions to this paper. The author would also like to thank Alex Chisholm, Co-Producer of our first Games-to-Teach Project prototype on optics, for comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

References

Anderson, C. A. & Dill, K.E. (2000). Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings and Behaviour in the Laboratory and in Life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Barab, S. A., Cherkes-Julkowski, M., Swenson, R., Garrett. S., Shaw, R. E., & Young, M. (1999). Principles of self-organization: Ecologizing the learner-facilitator system. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 8(3&4), 349-390.
Barab, S. A., & Duffy, T. (2000). From practice fields to communities of practice. In D. Jonassen, & S. M. Land. (Eds.). Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments (pp. 25-56). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Barab, S. A., Thomas, M.K., Dodge, T. Newell, M. & Squire, K. (in preparation). Design Ethnography: Establishing a Culture of Enrichment Where There Was None1
Becker, H.A. (1980). The emergence of simulation and gaming. Simulation and Games, 11, 223-345.
Berson, M.J. (1996). Effectiveness of Computer Technology in the Social Studies: A Review of the Literature. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 28 (4), 486-99.
Bowman, R.F. (1982). A Pac-Man theory of motivation. Tactical implications for classroom instruction. Educational Technology 22(9), 14-17.
Bransford, J.D. & Schwartz, D.L. (2001). Rethinking Transfer: A Simple Proposal With Multiple Implications. In Iran-Nejad, A. & Pearson, P. D., Eds. Review of Research in Education. (24) pp. 61-100. American Educational Research Association (AERA): Washington, DC.
Bransford, J. D., Franks, J. J., Vye, N. J., & Sherwood, R. D. (1979). New approaches to instruction: Because wisdom can't be told. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning (pp. 470-497). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.
Bruckman, A. (1993a). Community support for constructionist learning. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 7, 47-86. Available online at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Brocman/papers/index.html.
Bruckman, A. (1993b). Gender Swapping on the Internet. Proceedings of INET, 93. Reston, VA: The Internet Society, 1993. Presented at the Internet Society (INET '93) in San Francisco, CA. Available online at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Brocman/papers/index.html
Bruckman, A. (1994). Approaches to managing deviant behavior in virtual communities. Proceedings of CHI New York: Assocation for Computing Machinery. Available online at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Brocman/papers/index.html.
Cassell, J & Jenkins, H. (1998). From Barbie to Mortal Kombat : Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clegg, A.A. (1991). Games and simulations in social studies education. . In Shaver, J. P., (Ed). Handbook of research on social studies teaching and learning. New York: Macmillan. Pp. 523-528.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1992). The Jasper series as an example of anchored instruction: Theory, program description, and assessment data. Educational Psychologist, 27, 231-315.
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A Once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Press.
Cordova, D. I., & Lepper, M. R. (1996). Intrinsic motivation and the process of learning: Beneficial effects of contextualization, personalization, and choice. Journal ofEducational Psychology, 88, 715-730.
Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and machines : The classroom use of technology since 1920. New York: Teachers College Press.
Detterman, D.K. & Sternberg, R.J. (Eds). 1993s. Transfer on Trial: Intelligence, Cognition, and Instruction. Ablex, Norwood, NJ.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding. Helsinki: Orienta-konsultit.
Engeström, Y. (1993). Developmental studies of work as a testbench of activity theory: The case of primary care medical practice. In S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds.) Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 64-103). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Engeström, Y. (1999). Activity theory and individual and social transformation. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen, & R. Punamaki, (Eds.). Perspectives on activity theory (pp. 19-38). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Freedman, J. (2001). "Evaluating the Research on Violent Video Games". Paper devlivered at Playing By the Rules: The cultural policy challenges of video games. University of Chicago. (Available online at: http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers/freedman.html
Funk, J. (2000). The Impact of Interactive Violence on Children. Testimony before the United States Senate Commerce Committee, March 21, 2000.
Funk, J. (2001). Children and Violent Video Games: Are There 'High Risk' Players?. Paper devlivered at Playing By the Rules: The cultural policy challenges of video games. University of Chicago. (http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers/funk1.html)
Gredler, M.E. (1996). Educational games and simulations: A technology in search of a research paradigm. In In Jonassen, D.H. (Ed.), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology, p. 521-539. New York: MacMillan.
Grossman, 2000. Testimony before the United States Senate Commerce Committee, March 21, 2000.
Heinich, R., Molenda, M., Russell, J.D., & Smaldino, S.E. (1996). Instructional media and technologies for learning (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.
Herz, J.C. (1997). Joystick Nation. How videogames ate our quarters, won our hearts, and rewired our minds. Princeton, NJ: Little Brown & Company.
Jenkins, H. (1998). Voices from the combat zone: Game grrlz talk back. In Cassell, J. & Jenkins, (Ed.), From Barbie to Mortal Combat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jenkins, H. (in press). Game Design as Narrative Architecture.
Katz, J. (2000). Up, up, down, down. Slashdot.org. Originally published November, 30, 2000. (http://slashdot.org/features/00/11/27/1648231.shtml)
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice: Mind, mathe matics, and culture in everyday life. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lave & Wenger, (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, J.L. (1994). Effectiveness of the Use of Simulations in a Social Studies Classroom. ERIC Documents.
Malone, T. W. (1981). Toward a theory of intrinsically motivating instruction. Cognitive Science, (4), 333-369.
Mitchell, E. (1985). The dynamics of family interaction around home video games. Special Issue: Personal computers and the family. Marriage and Family Review 8(1-2), 121)-135.
Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyperspace. New York: The Free Press.
Pea, R. D. (1993). Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education. In G. Solomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions (pp.47-87). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Poole, Steven (2000) Trigger Happy: Videogames and the entertainment revolution. London: 4th Estate.
Prensky, M. (2000). Digital Game-Based Learning. New York: McGraw Hill.
Provenzo, E.F. (1991). Video kids: Making sense of Nintendo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Provenzo, E.F. (1992). What do video games teach? Education Digest, 58(4), 56-58.
Rieber, L. P. (1996). Seriously considering play: Designing interactive learning environments based on the blending of microworlds, simulations, and games. Educational Technology Research & Development, 44(2), 43-58.
Solomon, G. (Ed.), Distributed cognitions (pp.47-87). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Squire, K.D., Barnett, M., MaKinster, J., Luehmann, A., and Barab, S., (in press). Acknowledging the primacy of local context. To appear in the Journal of Research on Science Teaching.
Squire, K.D (2000). The most fun you can have with model railroads... Joystick101.org. Available at: http://www.joystick101.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/9/22/135449/369
Squire, K.D. & Jenkins, H. (2002). The Art of Contested Spaces. In Ed. Game On! London: Barbican.
Thorndike, E. L., & Woodworth, R. S. (1901). The influence of improvement in one mental function upon the efficacy of other functions. Psychological Review, 8, 247-261.
Teauge, M. & Teauge, G. (1995). Learning and Leading with Technology, 23 (1) 20-22.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Wentworth, D.R. & Lewis, D.R. (1973). A review of research on instructional games and simulations in social studies education. Social Education. P. 432-440.
Yee, N. (2001). The Norathian Scrolls. Available at: http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/report.html.