Many wistful students have no doubt dreamt of taking a class where, instead of discussing the economic impact of the Irish Potato Famine, you discussed why Sonic & Knuckles is so much better than Sonic 4. Maybe you've wished your homework was less about fluid mechanics and more about the societal implications of The Sims. Well, these dreams could actually be more reasonable than you might think.
Every year, video games are becoming more respected as a legitimate form of media. They have their own award shows and popular critics, and there are even some deeper game analyses coming into the spotlight. These days, video games are beginning to be seen as more than just a hobby. They’re a topic of serious discussion, and this winter, the Northwestern community has effectively jumped into this collective conversation. Two new topics courses in the School of Communication are diving into this fledgling field of video game theory.
One such new course is Approaches to Videogame Design, a special topics course in the RTVF department taught by adjunct lecturer Jake Elliott. The class is designed for students without a background in programming and focuses more about the concepts and processes of designing a game rather than just the hard coding. Elliott created the format of the class after the RTVF department invited him to pitch a specialty topics course.
The class utilizes amateur-friendly design tools to help students craft games without a background in programming. According to Elliott, this kind of class mirrors the progression of an industry that is now drawing in artists and filmmakers instead of only computer scientists.
“I guess what’s really exciting about video games right now is that, as a field, it’s really diversifying,” Elliott said. “Because the tools are becoming so much more accessible, we have a lot more different people coming to video games from a lot of different places.”
Though teaching game design without teaching programming might seem counterintuitive, knowing what goes into an effective game is an essential skill for any student interested in how games are made, whether they see video games as a profession or just a pastime. Much like writing a song involves more than simply knowing how to play an instrument, video games are so much more than the bits and bytes of their code.
Another topics course focusing on the theory of video games is Serious Games, a class in Communication Studies taught by assistant professor Amy Lu. Instead of looking at the actual design of games, this course focuses on the consequences of video game design. It looks at the social and psychological effects games have on its players by merging classic psychological research with the new technology of games.
Lu first wrote the format of the class as a graduate course when she was teaching at Indiana University. Once she came to Northwestern, she reworked the course for undergrads in the quarter system. This is the first time Northwestern students have had access to this course, but Lu hopes it won’t be the last.
“Personally, I would like to make this class recurring, and I think that’s also my school’s plan, too,” Lu said.
In Serious Games, students have access to analyses about the cultural effects of video games in formats ranging from traditional medical journals to recent GoogleTalks, and they are able to play and analyze various video games through Blackboard. Thoughout the course, Lu is also bringing in several guest speakers with experience in this relatively new field who can assign their own games to analyze. By the end of the class, students are expected to either critique an existing game or design their own game, keeping in mind its cultural effect.
This subject matter has implications not just for game designers, but also for any student interested in psychology, sociology and child development, and this kind of intense study could really open up a fruitful, cross-disciplinary discussion. It's important to realize that video games – and entertainment in general – have much more cultural impact than how fun they are.
These Northwestern classes really only scratch the surface of what Lu calls the “burgeoning area” of video game theory. Hopefully, though, Northwestern will see a bigger presence of these studies in years to come.
“I seriously think that more serious academic attention should be paid to the video game, more as a neutral medium rather than starting from approaching video games as bad, negative, violent, too much sexuality,” Lu said. “We shouldn’t look at video games with a tainted glass, but more with an objective mirror.”
It’s encouraging to see these small, video game-focused classes popping up around Northwestern, but hopefully this field of study will be able to go beyond the specialty topics courses in which they are currently seen. Northwestern has fantastic programs in all forms of media. We have an entire school devoted to music, several robust creative writing programs and one of the best Radio/Television/Film departments in the country. Year after year, it’s becoming easier to see that video games are as legitimate a form of media and popular culture as any other form and have just as much poignant impact on society. It’s as easy to be touched by a video game as it is to be touched by a good book, beautiful song or epic movie. They deserved to be studied with the same intensity with which a freshman English Literature major dissects The Great Gatsby or two film majors bicker about whether Citizen Kane is good or just old. Fortunately, it looks like the Northwestern community is heading in the right direction.