Casey 1
Julia Casey
CSCT 701
David Clark
Video Games as Potential Challenges and Productive Spaces in the Humanities
In considering the challenges to the contemporary university – the invasion of
technologies to informationalize knowledge, the growth of administration in power and
importance, the dominance of professional schools – it would seem counterintuitive to suggest
that this is an appropriate time to consider a discipline devoted to the study a of contemporary,
enormously profitable technology. However, the academic study of video games seems not only
to be necessary work in response to the growth of this medium, but one that might address, not
exacerbate, some of these threats to the academic community. I say necessary because this is a
body of texts that is being most notoriously addressed by reactionaries in the public who
reproduce assumptions about the communication of deviant values. As this medium becomes
integrated into more of the lifestyles of our culture, the rigorous analysis and reflection
characteristic of the humanities needs to be applied to these texts and to the discourses
surrounding which surround them. How this study might address the threats (while instigating
more tensions) in the academic community is in the particular potentials of the medium as a
technology and an object of study. One space in which the humanities might see video games as
resisting the tendency of technology to reduce knowledge to the communication of information
is in the contemporary developments for immersive, interactive and challenging educational
software. While these games are being developed and the pedagogies they suggest are being
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debated, it will be among the important roles of the humanities to keep in the forefront this
difference between knowledge and information, and to ask how these technologies, rather than
confuse these issues, might challenge existing assumptions about teaching and learning.
Considering video games as a pedagogical tool within a humanities education is not a
new idea, but one that faces serious challenges in overcoming prejudices against the medium and
in establishing an appropriate context around their use. The history of games used for instruction
and learning is more notoriously tied to militaristic use (Jenkins & Squire 8) in which the most
relevant potential for games is their ability to simulate scenarios demanding fast reflexes,
accuracy, and willingness to shoot hostile targets, but this example of the pedagogical functions
of video games only makes use of one genre of the medium and not those which would be most
relevant to a humanities education. Though the scenarios for and uses of video games in the
classroom are varied, in the humanities the challenge would be to find opportunities to take
advantage of the interactive nature of games to overcome what Alfred Whitehead termed the
“inert knowledge problem” (cited in Jenkins & Squire 28). By providing students with the ability
to take part in history or literature, games could contextualize and motivate other forms of
learning occurring in the classroom. However, for this to happen, certain kinds of games will
have to be developed and a school environment with the ability to establish and contextualize
their use will have to be available to receive them.
Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire, theorists whose research interests repeatedly address the
concerns of the new media landscape, children’s culture and the interaction between the two,
present in “Harnessing the Power of Games in Education” an optimistic overview of developing
and established uses of video games in American classrooms. While some of their examples
extend into scientific and professional learning contexts, the variety of sources and applications
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they observe for the use of this technology is relevant to the humanities is very clear ways. Their
first example, of adapting a game developed for the commercial market to classroom use,
discusses the ways in which Squire has observed students using Sid Meier’s Civilization III to
play out, understand and debate the interactions between the economic, the political and the
diplomatic in global history (Jenkins & Squire 12-15). As a simplified simulation of the
development of world civilizations from prehistory to the present, the game allows students to
understand the different factors that influence growth, wars and political structures and to
experiment with alternate histories. Squire notes that the minority students in his research were
particularly conscious of and enthusiastic to explore “hypothetical history” in which colonial
encounters could have played out differently (Jenkins & Squire 15).
While the game has great potential to bring students’ attention in a new and engaging
way to the factors their teachers have been introducing, its status as a simulation meant for the
mass market, and one which must simplify the processes of diplomacy and the complexities of
geography, means that students will find inconsistencies between its lessons and that of the
textbook. As a “low-fidelity simulation,” Civilization III emphasizes the conceptual aspects of
these processes by leaving out some other influential variables (Squire 5). Rather than see this as
a danger of bringing video games into the classroom, Jenkins and Squire name this conflict as
one of its strengths. In approaching the game as a simulation of real world processes, a teacher
can lead students to engage in “critical reflection about their underlying models and their basis in
reality” (Jenkins & Squire 12). Just as the accuracies of the model might help students
understand why the world’s nations have developed to their present states and interrelations, its
inaccuracies are productive sites to explore the biases of the designers, what factors are not
included in the program, and what the limitations of such a simulation might be. Within a
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humanities education, this appears to be the most attractive and fruitful potential for the use of
interactive simulations. For students to be able to act out what they have read or heard in the
classroom is one thing; to be able to question the limitations of the representation of that
knowledge, the forms in which it appears and the biases of those mediums is to learn not only
history, political science or geography but to learn that these disciplines must always be reflected
upon and questioned.
Jenkins and Squire also explore the possibilities for games designed and developed for
use in the classroom. Prospero’s Island, being developed by MIT and the Royal Shakespeare
Company, is a single-player game that immerses students within the world of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, interacting with its characters but not necessarily following its plot. Drawing
thematically from the play, the game is “centrally about the process of self-discovery” (Jenkins
& Squire 20). The description of this game reveals another valuable potential of this medium for
a humanities education; playing Prospero’s Island is revealed to be attuned to the work of
literary analysis as the gameplay asks the student to “decipher symbols, manipulate language,
and uncover secrets” (Jenkins & Squire 21). Beginning from the point-and-shoot “twitch” games
used in military training, one might not expect such a nuanced and creatively engaging
application for games in teaching. However, this example shows that the variety of genres within
the medium can extend the potential for the interactive pedagogy of video games into the
humanities – even into literary analysis.
With such interesting and productive ventures being taken in educational video games,
their lack of success and application in schools must be considered in relation to the criticism
against video games and the difficulty with implementing games in classrooms. While Squire
notes that the question of video games in pedagogy has a long history, going back to reflections
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on the popularity of Pac-Man (Squire 3), the resistance against games has a voice as least as old.
Eugene Provenzo, one of early leading voices in video game criticism, asks “What Do Video
Games Teach?” and answers that they teach children violence, sexism and individualism while
they do not teach ways for children to develop their own stories. Conclusions against the use of
video games in classrooms based on this criticism, which is not unique to Provenzo, miss one of
Provenzo’s main points in his study; Provenzo was observing existing games which he
recognized as “limited by the technology of computers and the social content of the game
scenarios in which they are based”. Games do not contain these negative values as a rule of the
medium; they are a product of the imagination of individuals who live in a world in which
violent media and gender stereotyping are all too familiar. The value of the content will change
as the society which produces it changes its values, as different minds come to the designing of
games and as the market recognizes that engaging play can happen without gratuitous violence
or problematic gender relations.
The criticisms that Provenzo makes based on the structure, rather than the content, of
games, will and has changed with the development of the technology involved. While Provenzo
states that video game players have “no sense of community” and that “team play is impossible
in most games”, this is based on observations and the technology of 1992, before the domination
of online games and online player communities. A community of players may have been hard to
find in 1992, but the ease with which players can find each other and communicate strategies
over the internet and through forums makes this an undeniably widespread occurrence.
Massively multi-player online games are based on interaction, cooperation and competition
among a global network of players. Conclusions such as Provenzo’s, which see isolated, solitary
play as the dominant style of play, will have to address the overwhelming success of multiplayer
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titles such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft which has reached a player base of more than 6
million players worldwide (Blizzard, Press Release). The complexity that contemporary
technology allows also affects the possibilities for content and narrative; while Provenzo notes
that in games “there is no understanding of why things are as they are – no history, no context”,
recent games such as the above mentioned Civilization III take this as their primary focus.
Most damaging to the potential for the use of video games in pedagogy is the assumption,
articulated by Provenzo as well, that video games are merely “a means to activate the ‘passive’
medium of television” and are inherently linear stories in which players take on the role of
already developed characters. Comparing the activity of game playing to the more creative
possibilities of children writing their own stories, Provenzo makes a questionable assumption
about what children do when they are not playing Nintendo. Still, here, he specifies that there is a
potential in games for players to explore and define their own goals and identities, but that
existing games are more likely to present linear scenarios in which the player has little to no
creative control. Considering the style and goals of Prospero’s Island, we can see that video
game design has moved beyond these tendencies and, in commercial as well as educational
products, has focused on the player’s ability to explore and influence an offered reality.
Even if video games are accepted as offering an educationally valuable site for students
to interact with histories and texts, the problems with implementing these programs could delay
their integration with existing pedagogies. While Jenkins and Squire are academics within the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and can bring this expertise and funding to their projects,
the reality of limited educational budgets will affect the teachers to which they are addressing
this research. Alan Liu, in discussing the exciting possibilities of immersive technologies for the
humanities, admits that the implementation and support for these programs will require “a high
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level of overall institutional commitment, organizational innovation, and sometimes
academic/industry collaboration” (319). While these technologies are still new to teachers, and
especially to those in the humanities, it will take institutions interested and capable of taking the
pedagogical and financial risk in attempting their integration. The financial issue could, in part,
be answered by the suggestions presented by the models of Jenkins and Squire. First, existing
games could be adapted to traditional learning environments, as in the case of Civilization III.
While the case of Prospero’s Island, in which a game is designed specifically for educational
purposes, might be beyond the resources of many institutions, Jenkins and Squire name their
“immediate task” as developing the tools for teachers to customize their own educational games
and to take advantage of the computer literacy of the next generation by providing students with
the tools to design their games (Jenkins & Squire 26). In another piece, Jenkins notes that the
potential for collaboration between game developers and educators can also be profitable for the
former; making adjustments to commercial titles to make them appropriate for educational
scenarios could provide a “secondary revenue stream” from already developed material (“To
Inform and Entertain”).
While educators struggle with the implications of new technology in the classroom, the
informationialization of knowledge and the problematic space of the online university, video
games may offer a creative and adventurous site for the contact of the humanities and
contemporary computers. Not meant to replace but to complement instruction and lecture, video
games could provide another space in which students, especially those who do not learn best
from traditional approaches, can interact, practice and question the knowledge of the classroom.
The examples I have chosen from Jenkins and Squire’s study are not those of the university
environment; there, it is easier to see how scientific and professional educations could benefit
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from interactivity. However, this does not mean that video games in the humanities must be
limited to the grade and secondary schools. The creativity and resources necessary to develop
and experiment with the next generation of educational, interactive software will be found in the
conversations that occur between the video game industry and the university; at this moment,
when these projects and the questions of their applicability and futures are being posed, it is
important that the academics of the humanities engage with and take part in the conversation.
The critical engagement and particular perspective offered by the humanities will
influence the direction of educational games not only in how they are adapted to this particular
faculty of learning but to how we think about games in relation to knowledge. How we
understand the work of game playing will affect the theories and practices we suggest in their
pedagogical use. Rather than merely instrumentalizing the knowledge of the humanities towards
this task, we can see the space of the game as allowing us to ask new questions of educational
practices. This will lead the humanities not only towards an influential and important role in
determining the future use of games in education, but will provide the humanities with a new
object of study with its own values, textual practices and creative potentials.
The text Homo Ludens has been a canonical starting point for many theorists in game
theory and remains “a standard reference” in texts of the profession game design (Rodriguez).
Johan Huizinga’s text carefully explores, through a variety of examples, the theories that have
been posed for the motivation to play games and rejects those that prioritize extrinsic benefits in
favour of a value and joy inherent in the act of play. In many ways, Huizinga’s text challenges
the dominant perspectives on the use of games in education as it rejects any theory of play that
puts an extrinsic benefit ahead of the central function of play, “the modulation of experience”. In
Rodriguez’s reading of Huizinga, using a game to motivate a child to a goal outside that game is
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to misunderstand the nature and potential of games. This reading can also explain some of the
failings of “edutainment” products that artificially combine educational goals and interactive
technologies; first, the game must be “engrossing and absorbing”, otherwise the possible
secondary effects of the activity will be diminished. Any real-world benefits to game-playing –
whether they be educational, physiological or psychological – will depend on the game’s ability
to immerse the player in its world, its logic and its demands. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly describes
this as the experience of “flow” in which “a person is so engaged in activity that selfconsciousness disappears, time becomes distorted, and people engage in complex, goal-directed
activity not for external rewards, but for simply the exhilaration of doing” (cited in Squire 3).
However, Hector Rodriguez’s reading of Huizinga’s text still challenges the popular
assumption that this focus on the value of play negates the possibilities for “serious play”. While
any game that insists on a player’s focus on an external rewards will undermine the possibility of
entering a “flow” state, the borders between the internal world of the game and the external,
“real” world do not have to be imagined in such a way that the acquisition of knowledge belongs
solely or mainly to the latter dimension. Rather than limit game playing to an experience
irrelevant to the knowledge of the academy, we should recognize the playfulness of our
knowledge. While Rodriguez explains this concept through the analogy with avant garde artists
who challenged the separation of art from the world, creating and performing pieces that could
not be easily defined as art and freeing their work from “the tyranny of gallery walls”, we can
see in the work of the most rigorous thinkers in the humanities a “serious” use of play. Derrida,
through his word and language play, speaks and writes in ways that highlight the contradictions
and insights of the text at hand in a playful but no less serious way. Kant, in his opening The
Conflict of the Faculties with “It was not a bad idea”, employs his “well-known humor” and
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“pretends” to come across the idea of the university as an unknown solution to the problems of
the acquisition and exploration of higher knowledge (Derrida 83-84). Still, these ideas of playful
language and expression are not the limits of what Rodriguez is proposing as the playfulness of
knowledge itself. In understanding play as the unfettered exploration of the theorist through the
possibilities of the text he or she encounters, or in the material sense of the play as the possibility
for movement within a space, such as one piece of a machine against another, we see that
learning is inherently a playful activity. Even in Aristotle’s description of literature as mimetic in
his Poetics we see the centrality of playfulness to the creation and communication of ideas; in
representation we are always playing with the possibilities of the medium to recreate the
conditions of our world, and in our more fanciful and utopian ventures we play with what kind of
world might exist if it, instead, was mimicking our fictions.
Rodriguez notes that one of Huizinga’s most influential contributions to the field of game
theory was the idea of the “magic circle”, the “spatiotemporal frame” which defines the game
space from the outside space of the world and in which the rules and assumptions of the game
are held. In discussing the acts of avant garde artists, Rodriguez recognizes the disruption of the
edges of the magic circle of the art world; in the humanities our task might be to ask how games
might be used to challenge the edges of the magic circle of the academy. Scholars in the
humanities need to take farther what Jenkins and Squire see as the potential for games to address
the “inert knowledge problem”. While these thinkers see games as providing a site in which
students use and participate in the subjects at hand, contrary to traditional methods in which
knowledge is merely and ineffectually transmitted, we have the opportunity to refigure the
university and the classroom as places in which no knowledge is inert. The video game in this
way becomes a conceptual object from which we revalue the importance of play, the joy of
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immersion and intensity, against the utilitarian imperatives that figure our work in the humanities
as obligated to external goals and benefits. There may and should be real world consequences for
the work that is done in the humanities classroom, but the idea of flow and Huizinga’s insistence
on the joy of “the ludic experience of tension, uncertainty and release” (Rodriguez) reminds us
that none of this will be possible if we do not make the play occurring within the classroom and
in our research and writing the focus of our efforts.
This reading of the nature of video games proposes a challenge and a revaluing to the
way that work is done within the humanities. The nature of play within games, not specifically
video games, proposes a certain way of framing the work done in the classroom against possible
real world applications of this knowledge. As a medium with specific priorities and demands on
the user, video games need to be considered under the humanities in this way. Just as oral poetry
and the novel suited their cultures in specific and revealing ways, video games and the
experience of playing are appropriate to the contemporary moment and must be considered for
more than the reminder outlined above. Though they might not yet represent “the best that has
been known and thought”, to borrow Matthew Arnold’s definition of the literary canon, video
games are a popular entertainment medium and, if for no other reason, should be considered in
regards to their growing dominance in the entertainment industry. More than this, they should be
considered for the specific statements they are making, allowing users to interact with, and the
existing discourses with which they are taking part.
While video games might be compared to other visual mediums, as Provenzo did in his
criticisms, or seen as more closely related to traditions of board and table-top gaming, the visual
and interactive features of the medium must be understood as interacting in unique and
significant ways. While Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” essay might have been seen as
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explaining our relation to fictional characters in a variety of mediums, in video games the gaze
on the character and the ability to interact and gain agency through their figure has made this a
particularly interesting way of reading these particular texts. Bob Rehak undertakes such a
reading of video games in “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar” proposing that
games combine “spectatorship and participation in ways that fundamentally transform both
activities” (103). If it is the case that video games present, through their avatars (on-screen
representations of the player), figures of agency and wholeness parallel to the child’s image in
the mirror, games need to be read in how they recreate the “misidentification” that is central to
Lacan’s description of this event. How, in the shaping of the avatar through its competitive goals,
potentially violent environment and far too often problematic gender relations, is the player’s
identity being formed through this act of agency?
Reflecting on the possibilities and empowerment of identification with the avatar, I have
before suggested that the death of the avatar, or the end of the game, needs to be closely
examined (“Power and Loss: Melancholy and the Avatar in Digital Games”). Such an
identification, I proposed, can lead to a melancholy attachment to the game, in which the player
continues to return to the space, refusing to exorcise the figure of the avatar from their libido and
instead, or because they must, confuse it with their self. Furthermore, it seems that games are
predicated on this narcissistic and melancholic relationship. Video games are texts inherently and
uniquely invested in the practice of repetition, whether it be the repetition of certain actions to
reach a goal, the repetition of encounters until the player succeeds or the repetitions of play as
the player returns to the text to further master its challenges and revisit that site of “flow”. In
asking the player to learn “to think like a computer” (Friedman), the game presents the player not
only with a set of explicit rules of play and victory conditions but also with unknown rules of
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physics, consequence and the strategies of computer-controlled characters that the player can
only learn through experience. As not only a text to explore but a task to master, the video game
cannot be exhausted by a single visit, and much of its content will not be accessed in the simple
journey from start to finish.
This particular quality to video games can be approached in the humanities in more than
one way. First, we can examine what it is about games, such as the implicit rules of the code and
the mastery to come, that make players continue to return to them. As sites of agency or sites of
flow, video games have proven capable of demanding the attention of their users. Scholars
familiar with the interactions between text and reader, the hidden values in poetry or prose only
accessible through exhaustive and close readings, might find in video games a parallel structure
and desire to explore. We could also approach this particular quality of video games, and others
we are likely to identify, as expressing values and practices appropriate to this time and place. At
the risk of investing ourselves in what Rajan describes as “a foreshortening of history” in order
to explore contemporary interests and expressions, we might ask what this new and dominant
medium is expressing about us. It would be easy to answer that the technology for this medium
has only recently been developed, or that our visual culture would naturally accept and
ravenously consume another offering of that kind, but even if we are to accept that the rise of the
medium of video games is a matter of coincidence to the technologies of our times, we must ask
what effect this has. Going beyond the critics who worry about the inoculation of violent habits
through operant conditioning, we might ask what sort of departure from dominant mores might
be occurring when a group of texts is constantly asking its readers to be melancholic, to be
obsessed and pleased by the constant return to the site of lost identification. We might ask of this
medium that frequently presents simulations, attempts realism and is criticized for blurring the
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distinction between fictional and real world moralities what kind of realities it is capable of
producing. We should ask, if these are simulations, what sort of world is being imagined by texts
that present worlds in which the deference to reality always proves that what is lost can be
regained, if enough effort and skill is applied.
The growth of new disciplines is never an easy process, either for those excited and
invested in that field of study or those belonging to established canons of knowledge in the
academy. Especially with the rise of “interdisciplinary” subjects, the question will continue to
arise as to whether these should be figured as disciplines or departments at all, or if such a status
only provides ease of definition for administration and its interests. We have to ask whether
giving a discipline definition in this form deprives the university of the interesting work that
comes out of the interaction and struggles of scholars with different methodologies and archives
working in close quarters. Even if we are to accept that new, distinct disciplines are developing
out of the knowledge and experiences of the contemporary moment, it is not clear that the study
of digital games will be welcomed as one of these. Studying a medium notorious for content of
questionable morality and a structure that suggests addiction and mindlessness would move the
academy farther from the old assumption that our task is to define “the best that has been known
and thought”. More in the tradition of Cultural Studies, such a discipline has and will demand
that we consider the values and practices of a growing medium of entertainment that, despite
what critiques we might make of its quality in comparison to great works of literature, is being
used and celebrated by a significant number in our culture. Such a justification for the dedicated
study of these texts is perhaps the most pessimistic and defensive possible; rather, we might
suggest to those in the humanities that these games present a new structure with unique and
interesting practices, languages and values to consider. While a department or program in game
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studies might house scholars employing the methodologies of the social sciences or those
exploring issues of design, its relationship with the Faculty of the Humanities will be important
for both the growing and also the established disciplines. In reflection, comparing these texts to
those of traditional study, or in further exploration, asking what these unique offerings these texts
make to readers, scholars in literary studies and critical theory in particular should see this form
of study not as a threat to the sanctity or rigour of the faculty but a site of potential challenges
and new insight. If nothing else, we in the humanities will owe our voice to the growing
discussion of the intrusion into or utilization of these games in our world of education. Though
they might not soon present themselves to the university as technologies of teaching and
learning, they are being integrated into earlier pedagogical practices, and as disciplines obligated
to question the assumptions of our discourses, the humanities should be there to see what
questions need to be answered and now have a space to be asked in this new interaction.
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Works Cited
Blizzard. “Customer base reaches 6 million players worldwide as Blizzard Entertainment®
prepares its award-winning MMORPG for continued growth in Europe.” Press Release.
Posted February 28, 2006. Retrieved April, 2007.
http://www.blizzard.com/press/060228.shtml
Casey, Julia. “Power and Loss: Melancholy and the Avatar in Digital Games”. Thesis presented
to St. Francis Xavier University. Antigonish, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques. The Eyes of the University. Trans. Jan Plug & Others. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004.
Friedman, Ted. Friedman, Ted. “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and
Space”. GameResearch.com. Posted May 18, 2006. http://gameresearch.com/index.php/articles/civilization-and-its-discontents-simulation-subjectivityand-space/
Jenkins, Henry. “To Inform AND Entertain”. The Ivory Tower. Digital Games Research
Association. Posted October, 2003. Retrieved April, 2007.
http://www.igda.org/columns/ivorytower/ivory_Oct03.php
Jenkins, Henry and Squire, Kurt. “Harnessing the Power of Games in Education”. Insight.
Volume 3, Number 1 (2003). pgs. 5-33.
http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/insight.pdf
Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Provenzo, Eugene. “What Do Video Games Teach?” Education Digest. Volume 58, Number 4.
pgs 56-58.
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Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”. in The Video Game Theory
Reader. Ed. Mark P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003. pgs.103128.
Rodriguez, Hector. “The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo
Ludens”. Game Studies. Volume 6, Number 1 (December 2006).
http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/rodriges
Squire, Kurt. “Video Games in Education”. International Journal of Intelligent Simulations and
Gaming. Volume 2, Number 1. pgs. 49-62.
http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/manuscripts/IJIS.doc