When, several months ago, I posted about the Chris Deering’s presentation in Barcelona, I pointed out that one of the most important conclusions I had extracted from the talk was that Deering stated the industry had to take seriously games as a media. A couple of days ago, at the ECGBL08, I attended a inspiring video-presentation made by Ben Sawyer, in which, among a lot of very interesting ideas, the founder of Digital Mill said that there’s little comparative media discussion in the field of video games. Sawyer said (in fact, he showed on a slide): “Do we even understand games as media?”
As an academic interested in the sociology of media, and as a player and game researcher, I feel terribly alone (even though I’m always accompanied by my colleague from UOC Daniel Aranda) when I talk with industry representatives and they turn out to be geeks absolutely convinced of its superiority over other entertainment industries, or when I talk to software engineers who deliberately and proudly ignore what sociology and cultural theory can provide to help them to make better games. On the other hand, I feel very comfortable with my friends in the community of education researchers, but I still suspect that they cherish games for what games can offer them for their innovative and ambitious curriculum designs, but they don’t have much interest in what young people do with games when they are not in class.
This note is just to remind myself that there is a lot of work to do and we can’t wait any longer to do it.
By the way, my good friend Nicola Whitton has posted about the other ECGBL keynote speaker, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, in her blog.
