With Fingers Flying, Students Apply Brains to Analysis of Video Games
Neil Lerner, associate professor of music, teaches the video gaming class as part of the college's Film and Media Studies academic concentration. (Adam Martin photo)
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11/20/2006
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
by Adam Martin ' 06
Aristotle defined different dramatic representations of life in his treatise Poetics, distinguishing music, poems, dialogues, tragedy, and comedy. So how would the ancient Greek philosopher classify video games, the relatively new interactive medium of drama and play? What would Aristotle say about Grand Theft Auto, or the interactive drama, Façade?
These are some of the questions that twenty enthusiastic students are discussing with Associate Professor Neil Lerner in a new Center for Interdisciplinary Studies class, “Interactive Digital Narratives.” The class explores the impact of digital technology on narrative, and how readers and reading have been transformed through interactivity.
“The stereotype is that kids play video games, and then they stop when they get older,” said Matt Owanesian ’08. “But that’s just not true. People who grew up playing Atari are still playing in their thirties.”
Indeed, the Entertainment Software Association reports that more than two-thirds of American heads of households play computer and video games. A Nielson poll found that the average household plays video games thirteen hours per week, more than any other form of media. The NPD marketing group calculates that the gaming industry now generates about ten billion dollars a year—the equivalent of all annual movie box office receipts. Entire generations of males and females have shared the experience of hours on the couch, vibrating game controller in hand, playing Mario Kart, Madden Football, or more recently, Oblivion.
The cultural importance of this interactive medium, said Lerner, makes video games an important subject of study. He said, “Just like the study of film, or music, or any of the humanities, the study of video games raises all sorts of important questions about who we are and what we value. The trick is just knowing how to tease out these questions in texts that are usually thought of only as recreational.”
Lerner reminds those who are skeptical of the value of a video game course that previous innovations were also originally considered as academically inferior subjects. He said, “Elizabethan drama was considered inferior to non-dramatic poetry. The novel was feared by parents who thought kids would waste too much time reading them, just as parents today worry over kids watching too much television. The academy usually moves slowly. In the nineteenth century, Harvard didn't allow U.S. literature to be taught -- only European lit.”
Students in the class include (l-r) Carlos Paredes '08 and Alex Wales '08. (Adam Martin photo)
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As an interdisciplinary class, the readings apply literary, cinematic, musicological, anthropological, and cultural theory to games and those who play. After an overview of the history of games, the class addresses topics like interactivity, ethics, sadism, cruelty, and gender role-playing. Lerner noted studies that indicate that fifty percent of males prefer to play online as female characters, whereas Hollywood films often put audiences in a male character’s point of view. One conclusion is that games provide a safe, consequence-free world for men to explore gender roles.
In addition to regular reading and writing assignments, students play games like the Atari game Adventure, Civilization IV, Katamari Damacy, and the gruesome Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. As they play, said Megan LeDell ’07, they analyze the game based on the message and its moral implications, and components of the game such as the complexity of the characters, the level of visual abstraction or realism, and the dialogue and music.
In one of three paper assignments, students were asked to analyze Civilization IV’s message about construction of civilizations. LeDell, a history major from Minnesota, compared theories of causes of real wars to the theory of expansionism-driven war that the game suggested.
Lerner became interested in creating the class after attending a summer conference on "Digital Gaming" in 2005 at Middlebury College with professors from other liberal arts colleges. He also teaches music history and Humanities courses, as well as courses for the Film & Media Studies concentration, including this one on video games, “Introduction to Film and Media Studies,” and a seminar on the collaborative relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, the music composer for several of Hitchcock’s most famous films.
So what would Aristotle have said about Grand Theft Auto?
Maybe a better question said Lerner is, “Would Aristotle have played Grand Theft Auto? Would he just find himself as immersed in that world as he was in a Tragedy of Sophocles?”
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine.
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