I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day (before the power went out all over Rochester due to our Ice Storm 2003) about the development of the MS in Game Design & Development. And we were talking about the degree, and its overlap with our social software initiative, and how all of this ties together and what we were going to do academically, and what courses they would take and which path and this and that and blah blah blah. And something stuck me in the middle of the conversation which was: The study of games (and more generally any other social software architecture), will depend largely in part upon the social community of the degree itself - possibly moreso than other disciplines.

First off, understand that college is in itself an incredibly social thing. We (faculty) argue about courses and content, but there are a thousand other factors as to whether students get the experience they need to have. Who they date. Where (or if) they do their laundry. What clubs are on campus, and if they identify with them. Who they live with. Who they have classes with. Whether or not they like their classes. Whether or not they like their campus. (Both liking and not liking something have their plusses and minuses). Millions of things that somehow form the collective event of 'being a student'. There are thousands of ways to do it, and some of them work for some people. It is my belief that studying social software will be impossible in a vacuum.

I can almost believe that people can study 'how to build X' without a lot of the above - provided there is a set of predefined goals and step-by-step instructions. Thus, 'how to build a castle that looks exactly like this with this set of building blocks' can be done either alone or one on one. No interaction required. But once we get to 'why' we would build such a castle, the whole thing changes - the faculty member is only a facilitator to the correct experience or set of experiences (who in fact has only so much control on the process because all we are responsible for are courses), because there is no single and correct reponse to 'why'. (Although on is tempted with the childhood response of 'Becuase').

Life, in its absolute, becomes the vehicle of education, because to truly understand a culture, you have to be a part of it. I am not convinced that you can effectively understand what it is to be a gamer, for example, without being one (and if you try to, you will likely become a gamer before you can claim any reasonable measure of success). And this makes them very hard to study and it also makes building a degree in gaming not only an academic exercise but also one of careful social engineering. This runs contrary to the very notion of impartial observer and experimental theory.

I can see this with games, because games effect their makers so strongly. When students come to me their questions are not 'will I study technique XYZ?' or 'will I get a job?' but 'how can I learn to make [game X]?' ( where [game X] is a game that they played in childhood ). Bard's Tale, Asteroids, Pitfall, Zelda, these are all popular choices. Yes, they all want to do it with new fully immersive ultra high-def 3D and whatnot, but generally people getting their feet wet are not interested in studying new forms of play - they are interested in lavishly recreating the old ones with better technology. And there is nothing wrong with studying the old forms first, indeed it is difficult to explore new alternatives without first understanding the major genres and niches - but at some point originality is key... regardless of what we try to study anyone in this culture invariable relates any idea back to a basis in another game, and anyone who isn't in this culture has long since left the room out of disinterest.

As I sit here (and I've had two prospective student emails thus far even while I write this in spite of the fact we only have a concentration at the moment and not a degree) I am floored by the number of people that wish only to recreate, albeit with better tech, that which has been seen and described before. And it is in part because they are a part of the gaming culture, and that is what drew them here. The culture is so iconic, worships its past with such fervor, that it is nearly impossible to break the mold. You can see this in the chicken-and-egg problem described in the GDC coverage about sequels and licensed property, in the venture capital models that are only willing to fund games that are almost exactly like other successful games. I've seen game proposals that literally say 'We want to build a Quake-like thing but that takes place in a kind of giant bee-hive with insectoid enemies'. ("Not that there's anything wrong with that!"). This attitude is now beginning to permeate the study of games in academia, or at least in the way we as faculty and administration are thinking about it.

Example question: What will these students be able to do when they graduate?
Sample response: Build games. You know like [insert example of modern successful game here]. They can be successful like company XYZ, who grew by four thousand percent last year.

So where do they learn to think outside of that box? If all you can point to are successful past instances and what made them successful, how do you learn the art of innovation? When I went to art school no one (ok a few people but not a lot) said 'paint like this person does'. So why do we force developers (through a variety of market forces and cultural norms) to 'build games like that person does'?

This happens in part because we all still lack a frame of reference for the study of this. We all still lack a vocabulary (as was pointed out at the Academic Summit at GDC 2002, see a synopsis here). Academics are great at coming up with mumbo jumbo like 'A successful student will be able to effectively evaluate the competing forces of designs that produce a successful title in the electronic entertainment marketplace". What did I just say? A student will be able to look at a game and determine which features are most like other successful games and thus how likely it is that the game in question is going to be successful. Except - all of the huge successes in the games industry have been the odd-balls, the things that have flown in from 'off the radar' to take the world by storm. Can you teach that ?

I see the same problems in social software on the whole. We study technology, but we do not study with the same effectiveness the culture that makes the technology useful - we look instead only at the past: How this is like / not like the telephone. How this is like / not like the television. And now we're starting in on how is this like / not like email - like / not like the MUD, or MOO. And this is not meant as derogatory towards those many studies, its a great way to begin to understand - to fit current phenomena in a frame of reference that can be understood. But it is not the only way to place this in a context, and it may be that placing it in several contexts at once could be more academically interesting. We try to separate content from presentation from delivery, when it is only by merging these things that anything usable, anything desirable, exists. Perhaps the age old addage of 'break it apart into component pieces until it can be understood' fails in the study of modern computing/communication.

Are we already so far past the birth of the Internet that we can only stare now at the original birth of the browser, forever focused on our collective navel? Or is it deeper than that. It is easier, and one can claim more success, if we focus solely on what we already almost know. It is easy to claim advances in delivery mechanisms, leaving for someone else how that will eventually be used. And that is good and important work, basic research at its core. And we can study how something is already used, what made it successful, digital archeology, even if it happened last month. But how do you get at the in-between, the thing that springs with/from a culture, and produces technology to mold so form-fitting around it, to nurture it and grow it and produce not only a product but a set of people with it, in unison, the way online games have done since their beginning? How do you study that? How can you begin to come to terms with that?

Today is a day my job feels hard. I took a duck in the face (an homage to Pattern Recognition).

UPDATE: An interesting counterpoint to this was presented here by Clive Thompson. Worth the read, he thinks I'm nuts (which may be true).