Butler’s institutional perspective correlates with Franz Mäyrä’s view, which is oriented toward content: “scholars […] bring with them the methodologies typical for their original disciplines.”50 The same conclusion is reached by Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Joan Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca:
“[G]ame researchers are an eclectic bunch with a multidisciplinary background. Humanist scholars with film or literature backgrounds constitute the largest single group, but game research conferences are also attended by social scientists (mostly sociologists) and, very importantly, game designers. [...] Most researchers, at least at present, choose to adopt methods and approaches from their primary fields. Ethnographers tend to observe players. Those trained in film studies tend to analyze the games themselves and communication scholars tend to analyze interactions between players.”51
This diversity results in, on the one hand, the necessity for creating a common ground for Game Studies: defining the object and the borders of the discipline, as well as specific approaches and methods. On the other hand, this diversity also presents the twofold question: To what degree, in a time of transmedial media technology and also transmedial media production, can individual disciplines of media—especially of the audiovisual media of film, television, web video, and games—still understand the transmedial development and the embedding of different media in this process? Or is, maybe, an all-encompassing comparative media studies required?
Part III Game Studies presents the development and central positions of various approaches in the theoretical and—more or less—academic study of digital games. The starting point is formed by philosophical and single-field studies of analog games, from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, to Johan Huizinga, all the way to Marshall McLuhan (III-1 Theories of Analog Games vs. Theories of Digital Games). This prehistory of Game Studies closes with an outline of the existing three big avenues for research: approaches from game design theory, the social sciences, and the humanities (III-2 The Schisms of Game Studies). The observation and description of them working together and, even more frequently, side by side, reveals the necessity for replacing the existing schisms in Game Studies with an analysis that no longer operates with imported approaches. Instead its focus and methods would arise from the direct confrontation with and the analysis of digital games themselves (III-3 Desideratum: Overcoming the Schisms). In conclusion and looking ahead, research perspectives will be developed that could serve the desired evolution of Game Studies (III-4 Perspectives of Research 1: Digital Games; III-5 Perspectives of Research 2: Serious Games).
The prevention of a rift between artistic and academic practices—as it exists in older forms of media—is equally important for a successful adaptation of Game Studies to its subject. The epilogue reflects, therefore, how game design and Game Studies are and should be conveyed in academic and artistic education. In a special contribution, André Czauderna analyzes the structures of six undergraduate game design programs from five different countries, while I discuss the objectives and the organization of game design education by the example of one artistic-academic bachelor program. In conclusion, I reflect on the consequences of this on-going academization—from changes in aesthetic production to a possible maturation of the medium and an increase of game literacy. (Epilogue: Academization and Aesthetic Production).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has many co-authors. I would like to mention them in the order of their appearance. First of all my sons, Leon and George Freyermuth, made me play again in the 1990s after a long pause—even if I could never be an equal opponent for them on any console. I would also like to thank my director-colleague Björn Bartholdy for, over a decade ago, giving the first push towards founding a stand-alone games education—even if it became a long, strenuous road that would appear to transform into a dead end before our very eyes more than once, until we could take on the first bachelor students at the Cologne Game Lab in the fall of 2014. Those, without whom we could never have reached this goal and without whom this book would also never have been written, are Rainer Weiland and Joachim Metzner, who helped us during the founding phase of the Cologne Game Lab.
For more than a decade now, I have gained motivation, information, and most importantly inspiration from the students of the BA and MA programs at the ifs international film school Cologne and since 2010 from the students of the further education Master’s Degree at the Cologne Game Lab. My thoughts on digital games were continuously influenced by conversations and debates with three colleagues, with whom I’ve had the privilege of editing two anthologies on games over the last few years: Benjamin Beil, Lisa Gotto, and Fabian Wallenfels, as well as through lectures and encounters with numerous guest lecturers, whom we were able to invite to the Cologne Game Lab, including Espen Aarseth, Georg Backer, Csongor Baranyai, Chris Crawford, Tracy Fullerton, Martin Ganteföhr, Thomas Hensel, Jörg Müller-Lietzkow, and Eric Zimmerman.
Different versions of parts of this text have already appeared in anthologies—in German and English; I must also thank the editors of those versions for their proofreading.52
Numerous suggestions and corrections from my Game Lab colleagues Björn Bartholdy, André Czauderna, and Katharina Tillmans as well as Carmen Schneidereit helped to improve the German manuscript. Carmen Schneidereit also provided the layout. For this edition, André Czauderna, Nathalie Pozzie and Eric Zimmerman graciously provided valuable contributions for which I am very grateful.
Leon Freyermuth diligently translated most of the German text and helped me edit my own translations. Curtis L. Maughan helped with the copy editing of the English manuscript, thereby significantly improving its linguistic quality and clarity—which of course does not change the fact that all of the remaining mistakes and deficiencies remain my fault alone.
Last but not least, Elke Freyermuth patiently followed along with the protracted process that went into creating this book in its different versions.
To all of you: Thank you!
I dedicate this book to my academic mentor Eberhard Lämmert (1923-2015). I owe him so much.
1 Juul, Jesper: Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (Kindle edition) 2005, loc. 26 and Donovan, Tristan: Replay: The History of Video Games, Lewes, East Sussex: Yellow Ant (Kindle edition) 2010, loc. 74.
2 Social and technological changes effect semantic change. The use of the word computer demonstrates that. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, computer was first used in 1613 as a designation for humans who were making calculations or computations (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37975?redirectedFrom=computer - eid). In 1869 computer was used for non-human calculators for the first time (ibid.; see also OED, ibid.). In everyday live, however, computer continued to denote “a person who solved equations; it was only around 1945 that the name was carried over to machinery.” (Ceruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 1998, p. 1) At that point it came to mean analog computing machines. If you were discussing one of the few existing digital computers, you had to explicitly emphasize this. Within a decade, however, this relation reversed: By the end of the 1950s, computer meant digital computer. If you were discussing analog computers, you had to explicitly emphasize this.—The cultural rise of digital games seems to effect a similar change: The word “game” has come to mean digital game. If we are discussing analog games, we soon might have to explicitly emphasize this.
3 Compare for a definition of these fields of work below. p. here.
4 Zimmerman, Eric: “Manifesto for a Ludic Century,”