Gaming Higher Education

Seattle, WA—  One of the remarkable things about college today is the degree to which professors and students engage in activity, that for the cost of admission, they could pursue off campus for next to nothing.

For example, at the 2012 annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, budding professors bragged about developing computer games with the aid of their students. Patrick LeMieux of Duke University and Stephanie Boluk of Vassar College spend much of their time writing about and playing games.

LeMieux is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual  Studies at Duke. Boluk is a post-doctoral fellow in the media studies program at Vassar.

LeMieux also teaches. He informed the crowd at the MLA meeting in Seattle that he gives his students a slow form of a Mario Brothers game to play.

Along with Patrick Jagoda of the University of Chicago, they attempted to give intellectual underpinnings to computer games. Jagoda is developing a game called “Oscillation” with a quintet of his students at U-Chi.

“By designing this game, students were able to engage with narrative theory not only through reading, discussion, and composition, but also by incorporating digital literacy and new media production skills,” Jagoda asserts in his abstract.

“Like readers, computer game players engage in vast networks of patterns that make up the aggregate histories of virtual worlds,” LeMieux claims in his abstract. “The amount of information is vast,” LeMieux claimed at the MLA meeting. Some might argue that it is only half-vast.

For Boluk, the overriding question is “What Would Karl Do?,” Marx, that is.  “Virtual worlds and utopia are conceptually linked in that they both offer models of alternative societies which are technically ‘no place’ (following the etymology of the word eutopos),” Boluk claims in her abstract. “Both can serve as an intervention on the present which contains the possibility for political, economic, and social transformation.”

“Yet the Deleuzean concept of the virtual as potential is often short-circuited by the logic of the market place resulting in games like World of Warcraft which do little more than reify existing structures of capital and conspicuous consumption (to the extent that developing countries now have thriving labor forces producing virtual commodities).”

Boluk warned the crowd at the MLA that “there is a dangerous alliance of games and neoliberals,” citing a game called “Chore Wars.”  That actually sounds like a good stocking stuffer.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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