Gaming imaginaries

[Games designer at Relentless Software Jez] Harris notes that there is a
debate among game designers about what kind of informal education is best:
whether one should play every single game that comes out and be able to
reference them when designing new games, or be a player who has completely
fresh eyes all the time by not paying too close attention to what has
come out in the past.
(Duffy 2007)
These comments are made in relation to informal education, but this is
certainly a debate that extends to games design degree courses and how
students are encouraged to engage with games. In their discussion of
Game Studies, Jose Zagal and Amy Bruckman (2007: 578) recognize how
students are ‘challenged by having to shift from treating a game as a “consumer
media good” to a cultural artefact that can have embedded meanings
and ideas’. Within the production-based and industry-orientated
arena of games design, this is a question that translates less in terms of
embedded meanings and more in terms of the transition from being a
player to a designer. This is a distinction that I unpack in part four, but for
now, the focus is on students’ engagement with games in terms of learning
games design. The question Harris poses on the wide field of reference
compared with fresh eyes may be instructively framed by the notion of the
imaginary. As Lucy Suchman and Libby Bishop describe:
The word ‘imaginary’ is a term of art in recent Cultural Studies where it is
used to reference the ways in which how we imagine the world is shaped not
only by our individual experiences but also by the specific cultural and historical
resources that are available to us.
(Suchman and Bishop 2000: 327 and 332, footnote 2)
The notion of the imaginary is introduced here with the express purpose of
flagging up the cultural and historical resources employed and drawn on
in games design.
In terms of shared cultural and historical resources within games
culture, one part-time industry tutor and games development professional
suggested:
You tend to find that people are all quite similar in games [. . .] chances are
if you make games, one in two will also have painted Warhammer 40,000
characters when they were small – I did, half my guys did. You can sort of
pigeon-hole types in the industry quite easily.
(interview with the author)
In this research session, their colleague described dedicated efforts to
broaden the potential imaginaries on offer to students describing how ‘it is
quite an alien mindset to start thinking about designing something for a
younger audience or a broader audience [and] it is quite difficult for them
[but] we make them try’ (interview). The tutor went on to describe an
example of offering new imaginaries for students in relation to architecture.
After jokingly stating that the library is ‘really great for pictures
which games design students should want to go and look at’, the tutor
suggested how a games design student could benefit from other courses,
stating ‘we have architecture courses – there are lots of books on architecture’.
The tutor suggested that knowledge from other fields has important
points of connection with the game design course, stating ‘if you’re going
to go and build a level, you know, research your architecture properly. If I
ask for medieval architecture, I want it to be medieval’ (interview). A
further illustration of this comes from games designer Ernest Adams who
described the following technique:
In my own workshops, I require the participants to design games based on
ideas that have never been created commercially before. This forces them to
think about how the game would really work, rather than just copying features
from existing games (e-mail interview).
Part of Adams’ concern was for students to ‘understand that a designer’s
primary motivation must be a desire to entertain someone else, not simply
a desire to express himself ’ (e-mail interview). The focus on entertaining
others, the consumer, ties in with the commercial imperatives of the
games industry. For instance, the tutor discussed above stated how:
You talk about markets, growing markets and you talk about the over fifties
and you talk about female gamers, forty-year old women who like to play
puzzle games, things like Bejeweled and how much money that makes, and
actually if you’re going to be a designer in the games industry you might
actually have to design something like that for somebody like that (interview
with the author).
Puzzle and the so-called casual games were noted by tutors at a different
institute in much the same way. Whilst impossible to discern through
my research the extent to which students alter and negotiate their
relationships with games and other media in terms of tutors’ efforts to
expand imaginaries, the importance of this approach was noted by one
student. Suggesting that a limited engagement with potential sources of
inspiration could lead to stifled, referential and limited game design, the
student noted:
An awful lot of people who on the course [. . .] play video games and
then they want to go and make video games and all their experience is
that they’re going to base them on who is playing other games (focus
group).
Expanding imaginaries is a pedagogical tool employed within games design
teaching in terms of broadening design perspectives and for introducing
different markets. This is a practice of what may also be called ‘making
strange’ and as a pedagogical strategy it is one that has been well-theorized
and employed within the critical media education.
Drawing on his experiences as a media educator and taking global
consumer culture and marketing to teens as the animating point, Barry
Duncan, for instance, offers a number of class exercises he ‘found useful in
expanding young people’s critical thinking’ (Duncan 2007: 98). Duncan
provides discussion questions and activities relating to shopping malls,
branding, lifestyle magazines, culture-jamming and satirical collages
geared towards this. Specifically, Duncan notes his turn to the work of
collage artist Richard Slye and offers the following account:
In my experience, having students study sharply focused satirical collages by
politically committed artists in a course with similar models and exercises
helps to lay the foundation for more complex analysis. Subsequently when
students then create their own works, debating their aesthetic tactics with
their peers, they can claim ownership in the process.
(Duncan 2007: 107–108)
The satirical collages for students in Duncan’s scenario became part of
their own later activities and productions. In terms of my research with
students, this combination of the politically committed and personal practices
for expanding engagement raised a provocative question around the
nuances of diverse imaginaries and how certain examples are negotiated
in terms of other contextual factors such as being industry ready. To this
end, I developed the ‘thinking with games’ approach.