Level 3: Critical Game Studies
Critical Game Studies focuses on the close analysis of how games actually function. The goal is often to more about what makes the genre unique. As James Paul Gee says in "Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul," "Next to nothing is good or bad for you in and of itself and all by itself. It all depends on how it is used and the context in which it is used. ... So good video games are good for your soul when you play them with thought, reflection and engagement with the world around you" (8). The "proper" way to play games is the same as the "proper" way to read a text or to watch a movie: namely, to do so actively and critically. Videogames are particularly prone to "improper" play because of the level of involvement that of a player in creating the text, as well as the unrelenting flow of content. If time isn't set aside to think about the game and how it is acting within a particular space, important features/world-views/discourses can go by unnoticed (more on passive play).This is not to say that games don't also have within their very structure the ability to stop player, to make them reflect. For instance, the plot of Atlus' Catherine is largely about the relationship problems of the main character, Vincent. The player moves Vincent through the game and interacts with other people in ways that affect Vincent's relationships. Then, in loading areas between levels, the character as Vincent, is asked numerous questions about his/her view on relationships: questions like "Does life begin or end at marriage?" In both of these cases, the player given feedback on his/her actions based on a morality scale that ranges from chaotic to lawful. By giving feedback, and by seemingly asking direct questions to the player about relationships, Catherine forces the player to reflect on his/her direction of Vincent. Furthermore, this is, by no means, the only game to introduce active morality into its system, and in doing so encourage the player to critically assess actions taken in the game.
But we can also go further. In a composition classroom, the critical study of games would take the place of studying other texts. We could approach them as rhetoric, as literature, as communication. We could begin to help students critically engage with a media that they are interacting with outside of class. In order to begin imagining how we can lead students to critically address games in the place of other texts, it would be helpful to identify some of the most influential theories of gaming. In the subsequent pages, we will look at the theories developed by two major scholars in the field.
Ian Bogost's theory of Procedural Rhetoric claims that some games can be seen as persuasive through their coding--games act as a set of processes run by a computer, so the way to analyze them is to see how they interact in terms of input and output.
Alex Galloway's schematization of videogames according to four "gamic actions" helps to subdivide these games in ways that can help us look at them as analyzable objects and not indivisible wholes.
Works Cited
Gee, James Paul. "Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul." Good Video Games + Good Learning. 1st ed. Peter Lang Publishing, 2007. Print.