I’ve never fully embraced the academic side of our field as others in the industry have. I’m an intensely practical person, and academics, frequently, are not. So it was with some interest that I read Mark Barrett’s indictment of game academia. He starts off with an illuminating bit of background:
In college I took a run at academic criticism, including semiotics. I spent time studying films and writing them, studying fiction and writing short stories, and studying theater and writing plays. The most surprising thing I learned in my criticism classes was that most of the people sitting in the chairs beside me had no interest in making anything. They were there to learn how to talk about the medium they loved, not how to better create in the medium they loved.
MMOs, due to their shiney new nature, their social aspects, and the insights they can offer on sociology, psychology, economics and social network theory among other things, attract more than their fair share of observers, more than willing to give you their two cents about what you’re doing wrong.
Often, I feel pity for Bill Parcells, whose second-guessed by people who have never set foot on a football field, much less have 17 years of head coaching experience. While I am not an Iraq war supporter, I understand the frustration that generals must have, dealing with Monday morning quarterbacks that have never had to deal with the real issues of morale, logistics, bad intel, chain of command and diplomatic concerns that they’ve had to deal with for a lifetime.
Similarly, when reading many criticisms out there about my field, it’s incredibly frustrating to read about what I and other designers and my position SHOULD be doing, from people who don’t have to worry about salaries, resources, team morale, market timing, market positioning, maintaining a fragile consumer base or competition, among other things.
Mark again:
Another more concrete lesson that can be taken from the failed interactive storytelling attempts in the commercial industry is that some things simply do not work. Many of these failed efforts were in fact valid approaches born of reasoned theory, which in turn helped define and describe the barriers we still face.
Translation: many of the ideas that we’ve seen thrown around on message boards, often described as silver bullets, have been discussed in design meetings already, and some of them have even been tried out and discarded. You can’t imagine how annoying it is to see these failed features described in Messianic terms. One example: I still see people suggesting virtual ecologies — without at least acknowledging that we’ve tried it once with UO, and using the failures of that as a starting point for the next go-around.
Of course, the really annoying academia is the ones that go way into wonkland. As Mark writes, about the article that set him off to begin with:
I need to know how to make things, and that means I need practical solutions and reliable techniques to draw from. If that be bias, then I would say it is the bias of the surgeon who needs scalpel and sutures to save the patient…. I mention all this as preamble to my response to Janet Murray’s essay in First Person. I have read Murray’s essay three times now, and as a creator I must report that I can find nothing in it that is of use to me. This is not a criticism of Murray’s rhetoric or of her essay, but a simple fact.
I love the Terranova guys. I follow the site closely. But it seems that every fourth thread or so goes into wonkland, that area of game design that might be fun to think about, but almost impossible to actually use from a nuts-and-bolts perception. Intelligent Artifice is even harsher than I am:
To wit: the majority of video game academic output that I’ve seen is just not about making better games, and therefore I find it completely useless, if not worse.
The ‘worse’, in my opinion, is when it creates a groundswell of support for a really bad idea (like permadeath). He points out this key part of Mark’s post:
The last thing any of us needs is another generation of designers thinking they’re getting in on the ground floor of the interactive storytelling problem when they’re not.
This is just as true for MMO design, believe me.
On my design teams, I throw around a term called ‘ant-farming’. ‘Ant-farming’ is when you design with a gods-eye view in mind – it’s when you throw around concepts which are ‘interesting’ or ‘provide fascinating social dynamics’ or ‘would really feel like a virtual world’ – but fail the basic ‘fun’ test. This is when the designers are designing a game that’s more fun to observe than to actually live in. The market will almost always reject this game.
Useful academia starts with player fun in mind – and the academia that embraces that can be starkly relevant. However, non-useful academia is almost always ant-farming.
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