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identity as a gamer and my own experiences exploring video game narratives
both inside and outside of the classroom. This was part of the reason why I
began the presentation with humor and a bit of self-deprecation. “I admit it,” I
say, “I’m a thirty-something English Professor who loves to play video games as
often as I can.” As expected, that not only drew some chuckles from the crowd,
but also a few curious glances and looks of disbelief But no, I wasn’t lying. I
just wasn’t what was expected of a mainstream audience when the word
“gamer” gets thrown around. Yet after that introduction, I knew I had the
audience’s attention. I wasn’t what they had expected and there I was, telling
them that video games were important and worthy of serious consideration.
What follows in the rest of this paper is an expansion of the ideas I
raised in my TEDx talk, “Changing Expectations: Video Games and Big Ideas”
through an overview of some of the critical issues concerning video games as
they stand in relation to academia and how they continue to evolve as an
innovative narrative form. Right now, although the field of study is beginning to
open up more significantly, video games tend to remain on the sidelines,
misunderstood at best, sneered at at worst. As a result, compelling and
immersive narratives go unstudied and are often overlooked in courses that
include film and literature as appropriate narrative modes. As a part of the
conversation about why academia, the humanities specifically in which video
games should find an easy home, ignores them at its own peril, this discussion of
video games focuses first on the noise often surrounding any reporting about
video games in both printed and media forms. Such discussions, one-note
treatises on violence in video games, likely prevent many researchers from
taking a closer look. Many of the readers of this article may not have much of a
grounding in video games, although the statistics concerning numbers of gamers
and demographics would indicate that many might. For those of you that have
never really considered video games as powerful storytelling vehicles, perhaps
the following might convince you to reconsider. I focus here on keeping the
argument as jargon-free as possible and I explain all relevant terms related to
gaming as they appear. I begin by attempting to put to rest the media’s obsessive
focus on violence in video games and then transition into why a scholarly
consideration of gaming is so critical.
When many people think of video games, they may well envision
something loud — a digital creation full of color and noise, but no substance.
For some, the consideration of video games stops right there, without further
thought given to what is contained within a video game’s storyline. Although
gameplay times certainly vary widely, many titles out there promote deeply
immersive plots that can take twenty, thirty, forty hours or more to complete.
These are fully realized worlds with architecture, artwork, history, and the like,
all adding to an over-arching narrativ e purpose. Forty hours of gameplay time
proves profound when compared with other forms of narrative. Some novels
might take forty hours to read, but even some of the great masterworks of world
literature might take far less reading time to present stories that can change
perspective or move a reader to tears, or to outrage, or to joy. Films do the same