Do We Actually Do Anything in a Game Studies Class?

AI, student attitudes, God of War, and more [100 Subscriber Class Discussion II]

In this installment, I’m answering the five questions that Joe | The Saved Game sent in. Go give a sub, and I’ll try to be brief. Today, my drink of choice is tea (no bourbon) and a healthy amount of avoiding the grading I’ll do tomorrow (probably).

SECOND Least scholarly article ever WOOOOOOOOOO…

Let’s jump right in:

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Not frivolity alone

1. How do you best persuade others (especially those outside of the gaming community) that game studies is legitimate and not seen as frivolous classes/courses?

Fantastic question. I have found, anecdotally, that the perception of game studies classes depends almost entirely on whether the person (1) grew up with games, or (2) has some experience doing a new thing in academia.

In general, if an academic administrative higher-up or tenured faculty is over the age of 55 (the majority of them), they’re likely to be skeptical. They have heard of gaming only as a distraction that students have in their dorm rooms, if not something worse (like the long-debunked Fox News claim that games make us violent). So we do have work to do there to legitimize ourselves. Usually, we talk about the gaming industry, film studies as a precursor discipline (insofar as it is multidisciplinary and had a long fight to become legitimate), and funding opportunities. My program leans heavily into esports and the humanities, and the administration is mostly supportive.

For folks outside the academy altogether, usually I lead with something simple: “I meet students where they are, and I trick them into doing really interesting analysis with the things they get to play. We’ll read tougher books later.” Of course, it’s more complicated that “tricking,” but it’s more or less right. My goal as an instructor is that my students will leave the class being more critical, more attentive, and more specific in their conversations, reviews, and independent thoughts. Hopefully this means they’ll be able to see through propaganda easily and not be afraid to defend games against unfair criticism (“not for me” =/= “bad”) and against unfair glazing (be critical with what you enjoy and why).

So we get students in for fun, and we have to do serious work in the class. Most people believe me when I explain it like this. Some will still write it off. Can’t win everybody over.

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AI expectations

2. From your professional standpoint as well as your experience in higher education, what do you think the impacts of generative AI will be in the future? Whether that’s this year or ten years from now or even longer? It can be about AI in general, or focused on games and/or game design!

There are general trends with AI that will continue, without a doubt. Students will use it to cheat because they view most college work to be unimportant for their lives, and they believe college is a requirement. Many don’t have an independent buy-in for why education matters, so they’ll use it when they think they can get away with it. Some of them will be caught; fewer will be sanctioned.

For higher education, we need to admit a few things about the way that we teach and what college is for. Assigning longer essays doesn’t work as well as it used to, and online classes are…well, I don’t want to say “hopeless.” Difficult. This is a huge bummer, since writing solo is the best method we humans have got so far to bolster critical thinking and to work out hard problems without perfect solutions.

Expect some college classes to look more like the 1970s in the next 10 years, if our institutions don’t dogmatically force us to integrate AI into every course (bad). You can see the difficulties with game studies here. I’m a medieval literature guy, but most of my job now is very computer-heavy.

Now, as for game design, I’m hopeful that AI will be much more promising. In 10 years, we’ll see several massive procedurally-generated games (a la No Man’s Sky) that use AI to help the procedural generation. People who love them will love them, and their divergent experiences will be fun to talk about.

LLM writing will be identifiable in mobile, gacha, and pulp games that never cared about the quality of their writing in the first place. We’ve already seen it some; expect more. Many of these kinds of games, excepting a few outliers, already used boilerplate and generic language to get you from one task to the next. Prose was never their focus.

However, I doubt its use becomes standard. There’s been some blowback, and I expect that the companies that are trying to make semi-unique and evocative art will stay away. For now, I believe Larian et al. who have said they won’t use it to generate any player-facing art, dialogue, or story beats. There may be some use behind the scenes. “No Generative AI was used in the making of this game” will be the best sales tactic for indies over the next 10 years.

Sales-focused AAAs will probably use it for both back-end and player-facing material; they’ll be criticized in the same way that we already criticize them for not caring about the missions or messages they carry. Black Ops 10 will feel like Black Ops 9, and they’ll sell a few million copies; Fifa 2032 will have entirely AI-generated crowd chants, and they’ll sell a few million copies.

But I do think that people want to know that other people designed and carefully crafted the experience they’re having. The kinds of weird experiences, experimental mechanics and stories, and heavily thematic games that largely define the “Oscar bait” of gaming I think will remain largely untouched by generative AI. Same goes for music, novels, etc. The things that make us think, that reviewers, critics, and academics will be drawn to, and that will help to define the next eras of their art forms will be proudly human. These are the creations that weren’t aiming for large audiences, commercial blockbusterhood, or even mass cultural recognition in the first place.

To offer an example that goes in the face of my predictions, I recently heard someone talk about creating a new, unique choose-your-own-adventure text game (more properly called “interactive fiction”) with a chatbot—how their experience was tailored and personal, and how it was a fun couple hours. Considering there are thousands of works of interactive fiction and hypertext games, and as someone with some scholarly expertise in those forms, that really pissed me off. Using an LLM to construct an interactive fiction seems like an outlier to me; I’d bet a lot of good money and some bad that most people who want AI in their games don’t even know what interactive fiction is.

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Gaming means it’s easy, right?

3. As bit of a fun one that I’m curious about: Do many students expect your classes to be blow-off/easy classes to breeze through and pass?

Some do, but I wouldn’t say many. If any of my past students are reading this (or god forbid a current one), then I’m sure they can let me know if I’m wrong. I’ve also been teaching at the same university for 6 years, so students recommend me to their friends, and that’s a blast.

My deal with them, every class, every semester: I’m cool as long as you hold up your end. They almost always hold up their end.

I thought that my professor reputation would be “tough but fair,” since that’s more or less what my favorites professors in college were. But I think I ended up something like, “he’s cool, but he grades.” “He thinks he’s funnier than he is” is my favorite student eval to date.

Anyway, yeah, students tend to think that a game class will be fun. They’re not usually wrong, but reading for homework sometimes requires me to get tougher on them. We’re gamers, after all. We can’t read.

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Defining the next generation

4. This is more of an open question, but if you could look back to this generation of gaming 20 years from now, what game or game series do you think will have made the biggest impact in terms of the overall direction that gaming will head towards? Or in other words, what do you think will most influence future games that come out 20+ years from now?

My first thought is, not to shock you or anything, about adventure games. I think that The Drifter and Dispatch proved in 2025 that adventures and adventure-descendants are here to stay. Commercial and critical success all around. Expect us to look back on these as new influences for more narrative-heavy non-AAA games going forward. The reign of Kentucky Route Zero still isn’t quite over. While that game is some indie experimental nonsense, it’s also beautiful; it’s getting more and more canonized year by year.

Silksong and Hades II will have an afterlife of praise at least as long as that of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Those sequels won’t die any time soon and have ensured that Hollow Knight and Hades won’t be forgotten. We will be flooded with copycats of those games, Mouthwashing, Undertale, etc. pretty consistently for the next 10 years at least, as the kids who grew up with those games become devs. I’m personally looking forward to that.

If the remakes go well, expect the newer God of War games to live on. Same goes for Horizon and its third (and final Aloy feature) release. They’ll probably be put up with Uncharted and The Last of Us as Sony-specific high-res story-heavy masterpieces (slightly less likely with Horizon because of the lengths; it isn’t likely to outdo cultural rankings of open worlds any time soon).

Within 5 years, opinions like “Odyssey was the last real Assassin’s Creed” will start popping up in earnest, and people who maintain that “real” AC games ended pre-Origins (currently a large and incorrect group) will have a fight on their hands.

But, all in all, my real hot take here is that Minecraft will still be the #1 game in 20 years. Stardew Valley will still have an active and massive fanbase.

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5. Lastly, I have tried to play God of War (2018) a couple of times but always ended up putting the controller down a few hours in, and have never finished it. Honestly, I just didn’t care of it. I LOVED the old games, but could never get into the new ones for some reason. I’ve read that you played the 2018 game a bit, so if you had to convince me to play it after I’ve tried multiple times now, how would you do it?

Hm. Always the toughest question to answer, right? Sometimes a game isn’t for you. The mechanics don’t “click,” or there’s a buy-in with the story that you missed. Some expectation you had isn’t happening; some itch isn’t getting scratched. I’ll do my best, but no judgment for not going back to it.

But first, an advertisement! The Video Game Storyteller and I are collaborating on a piece that reflects on our experiences with grief while playing God of War Ragnarok. It was difficult to write, but I’m so happy with what we have. Go subscribe to him so that you don’t miss it! It’ll should come out next week.

Should you play Dad of War?

My hook into GoW 2018 was only a few minutes in, when you realize that the tree you cut down as your first action in the game is the fuel for your wife’s pyre. If that didn’t land for you, then chances are a lot of the rest of the game might not either. And if you were a few hours in, then you already saw the basic idea for what the traversal puzzles, optional exploration, and major fights were going to look like. You already know about “the stranger” who demands a fight and can’t die.

I’d encourage no comparison with the older games. You probably noticed that the combat is more methodical: slightly slower hits (at first) with heavier impact, enemies that take several hits to take down, and no bombastic combos. Fighting through draugr and other enemies in the first several hours of the game matches Kratos’s position in life, I think. Your weapon doesn’t just glide through bodies like the Blades did in the first few games; the Leviathan Axe (name goes hard) pauses on every hit, and you should feel the impact.

If you’re willing to give it another go, then you should. The characters are the highlight, even more than the combat system. The friends you meet along the way are unforgettable. Some of the more cinematic moments in the latter half really got me; I think about them a lot. The optional exploration and side quests are also phenomenal. There aren’t too many (completing everything is about 40 hours, I’d say), and every single one adds in to the major themes of the main story in new ways.

It’s also deeply funny, the more time you spend with Kratos and Atreus on their journey. Great, now I want to play it again.

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End

That’s all I got for you all, today. Thanks, Joe, for the wonderful questions. Go check out The Video Game Storyteller. More soon!

(Moore soon?)