What Does it Mean to be a person that study's games?

It's crunch time in grad school. I have many many pages to write before the 11th. Once the 11th comes, i'm hoping to switch this format from freeflowing ideas to well researched or at least partially researched ideas. That said, I wanted to think about what it means to study games.

Studying games is an interesting thing. My discipline, sociology, has a well established speciality called "The Sociology of Sports and Leisure." Almost all ideas of what play is are contained within this little thing. Most of the study here revolves around sports (as the name implies). It looks at how games are socially constructed entities that are given life by the fans who constantly reify their passions.

I look at this stuff, i know very little about it, and I think about what it means to study a video game. Let's talk about video gaming versus professional sports in monetary terms.

I'm linking to gamespot because I didn't want to go searching for the dataset that gave them their numbers. The gaming industry as a whole earned about 21 billion dollars. If you look at professional sports, the average nfl team earns about 30 million dollars a year. Both of these numbers are always going up.

The difference here is pretty staggering. And here is where opinion comes in. Sports like this are still mainly associated with a locality. They are our team and they represent our feelings and our beliefs. When I lived in Ohio, the Browns were everything in the entire world. Bernie Kosar was our god.

Now, with video games, you don't really get this. We have nothing to associate ourselves with in terms of the locality of a game, where it was made, or even what it means to us. Video games and sports also differ in that sports fans are everywhere, and games fans, unless they are games about sports, are sort of in the minority (although growing).

Sports, and the ideas of sports, have been around for a very, very long time. It's had time to become refined and made clear. It's had time to create standards and standard ideas in terms of how trends flow. It's had time to create the standard rules of play and from it, the standard rules of the professional. It's even had time to create different classifications of professionals and different classes of amateurs. Each of these has a place and one can get through them with enough work (and luck).

Video Games haven't had time to do any of this. Our standards fall within years, our professionals are mocked and the stuff of our jokes (when's the last time you referred to the world video game champ?). All of these things are things, ways, we're trying to mock the way everything is now.

Basically, I wanted to get into an argument about the standards of becoming a recognized professional organization. We see some of it happening within gaming and I believe this is the wrong way to go about it. Gaming, and the way games are made, lend themselves to this sort of contest when the game itself is mimicing an already put in place sporting event.

Now, that said, what about the study of these things?

Well, game studies, game critiques, sort of work off of the same principles. You have groups that are going around trying to create programs within already developed disciplines and trying to create another sub-discipline that will allow them to study games.

However, since these games are cross culture, since these games are cross genre, and cross everything else that we have in terms of borders and ideas within disciplines, we have to try and find a way to get all of these disciplines, all of these ideas, to suddenly work together when they've been trying to keep them seperate for the past few hundred years.

So what does it mean to study games?

Well, before we can really get into the study of games and gaming, we need to sit down and think about what a video game is. We need to chart how the games have changed, what the major changes have been, why those changes have happened, and what these changes have meant to the idea of the video game as a whole. Next, we need to study the type of gamers that have existed at each change within the idea of a game. We also need to associate ourselves with the hitorical changes that were present during these changes. We need to associate ourselves with technological change and how these changes have themselves informed all of the other things.

Then we need to talk about these things ad nauseum and with as many different types of people as we can and we need to get them talking to each other about each person's perspective on gaming.

And lastly, we need people who haven't grown up as fans of video games, come in and try and study us from the outside. And it wouldn't hurt if they ended up really find us interesting.

So why talk about all of this stuff? Why even bother to type it out? Well, you see a lot of this happening around the net. You see basic ideas and conversations happening again and again and again. These conversations are tiring, but these conversations are very very important. We need to identify what they are so that we may slowly create a course of learning on what it is that we're trying to say.

From the interactions of the masses, an identifiable whole will appear. We need to be able to trace the connections of each interaction, and further, we need to identify why each of these interactions is important.

In doing this, we can finally start teaching it. If we can start teaching it, we can finally communicate what it is that we've all been writing about, thinking about, and obsessing over for the past 25 years.