The history of video games has been quite muddied by initially not being taken seriously & potentially at the brink of collapse due to oversaturation of the market (as well as being an incredibly expensive hobby for what the products looked like pre-NES), to being seen as dangerous to the minds of children due to the creation of violent fighting and shooting games which included bloody imagery like Doom and Mortal Kombat, and as of late has finally been seen as an incredibly lucrative market within the last decade and have reached significantly more mainstream heights. One thing has remained relatively stagnant in terms of gaming’s history until recent times though; the place (or lack thereof) of video games within academia.
At the UChicago Year of Games Symposium the final panel lined up contained many academics who became aware of video games and study and/or create them for different reasons but shared a core interest in the place of video games in scholastic spaces both in why they have been shunned by greater academia in the past and how they can be used as tools to teach a plethora of social subjects.
One panelist, Eddo Stern, specifically recounted his push to have a video game program instituted at UCLA and how he initially had to share the same space as members of the film department who desperately wanted video games (a medium that is seen as juvenile and unserious) out of their department space.
So why were video games so vehemently pushed against, and how have they secured their spots in some major institutions? Well, throughout much of the 80’s and 90’s (when video games became relatively known in contemporary culture) many of the games didn’t contain serious themes and were seen as a distraction rather than a social activity like sports or an enriching experience like novels or film. Despite the fact that as technology advanced allowing for games to tell more fleshed out stories both through dialogue and the composition of the frames in the game, Games and gaming were still viewed as childish activities and were not taken seriously likely until their major surgency during the Covid-19 pandemic which paved the way for gaming culture to flourish and created the necessary interest in the field for the seeds of gaming to be sewn in academia.
It’s fascinating how much stigma there is around studying video games, especially compared to other genres of media. I can vividly remember the reactions I got when telling people about this class, specifically how they don’t think of this class (and the field) as serious or “valid” academic pursuits. In fact, people have told me that they don’t even consider this class a real course. As someone who loves watching and talking about movies (and who goes to UChicago), it feels weird to dismiss any media as unserious or not that deep when it really is that deep. Games (and media more broadly) are reflections of the culture and society they exist in, so they can be used as tools to greater understand their sources of inspiration! Nevertheless, I hope that one day we get to a point where video games are seen as more that games… only time will tell if and when that happens.