Grand Text Auto » Game Studies Agon

May 6, 2008

by Nick Montfort · , 6:09 pm

Why must you hate gamers, game studies? Thus rants classics professor Roger Travis in The Escapist. Ian Bogost rants back.

Mark Says:
May 7th, 2008 at 11:13 am
It’s a somewhat odd criticism. If anything I’d make the opposite one, that game studies is often too deferential to the stereotypical versions of games and gamers. There’s a tendency to treat the large-budget, mass-market, commercial game as the paradigmatic game, to a much greater extent than a film-studies scholar would hold up the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster as the paradigmatic film.

But film studies academics are helped by the fact that a lot of film aficionados and reviewers “in the wild” don’t think much of many big-budget Hollywood films, either. There doesn’t seem to be an analogous set of game aficionados and game reviewers who don’t think much of what the commercial game industry produces. Perhaps this is partly because the film folks have more alternatives—the experimental, indie, art, DIY, etc. film community is quite large, almost every city has a film festival devoted to it, etc.