Gaming 101: Why I Teach Games

Two serious reasons, one for practicality, and two more selfish

The importance of games exceeds the admittedly remarkable quantitative measures of their growing centrality to contemporary life. At a qualitative level, the position of games has also been elevated above the status of pastimes and entertainments.

Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games, pp. 4-5

AI art is not punk rock. Make your own.

When I was in college about 10 years ago, I would have taken a game studies class without hesitation. We didn’t know at that time what great gaming scholarship was already getting published.¹ The writings have only gotten better, and game studies departments are now popping up around the world, not all with a focus on development.

The more dismissive academics are in the process of retiring out of university administration. More and more scholars interested in games are taking on leadership roles in the academy. We do, however, still have to justify ourselves to some of the old guard (as an English major has to justify themselves to their engineer uncle).

Our justifications usually lie in three camps: (1) it will help students in the game development and esports industries, or even work as a reviewer or game writer (less common but still technically possible); (2) games are useful teaching tools; and (3) games are worthy of study just like literature and cinema before them.

I’m going to go a step further. Sure, games are just as valid to study as the other forms of media that already have a foothold in the academy. I think, though, that videogames are the most important medium to study. They make us better people.

Reason 1: Games make us better people

Games certainly don’t make us worse

You’ve probably heard that playing videogames causes school shootings. And, just, no they don’t. Not even some. Even particularly violent games have no correlation with violent crime or mass shootings.²

More recently, you’ve probably heard that playing videogames causes social isolation and depression. Again, no. In fact, “play” in all forms is incredibly effective at helping kids learn social skills. This organization, The Genius of Play, exists to increase awareness and provide resources for parents whose kids would benefit greatly from playing games. On the videogame side specifically, during the height of the pandemic, people of all ages played more videogames—both online and on their own—without any correlation of increased feelings of isolation or depression.³ If anything, for some of us at least, playing online helped us feel more connected.

Game studies scholarship of the last five years has overwhelmingly supported the claim that videogames, in fact, make us better people. They reach us more effectively than any other medium about the lives of others, about action, consequence, and responsibility, and about how we can create our own worlds.

Because gaming requires attention and interactivity, the very act of playing does change the way we interact with the world. Games teach us how to play, and our brain adapts. This is the Tetris Effect: if you play Tetris enough, you’ll start to see those tetrominoes everywhere.

My best and silliest experience of this was based in Skyrim’s alchemy. I was working on a project about that game’s alchemy mechanic, so I had gathered tons and tons of ingredients, including tundra cotton, a white flower that bloom is tall bunches. Every time I saw a white-blooming bush in the real world, I had to stop myself from wanting to go up to it and press X.

It’s pretty!

When the game is thoughtful, contains interesting characters or an interesting world, and allows us to play with actions and consequences, it thereby also contains a visceral, impactful lesson. As I said in my first “Pleasing and Practical” post, games are always teaching us, even when they aren’t explicitly educational.⁴

We study literature for similar reasons. If you read a series enough, you’ll start to use their internal language for the real world (I’m reading The Wheel of Time, and I have incorporated “Walk in the Light” into my farewells; also worth mentioning are my generation’s obsession with Harry Potter houses and Percy Jackson cabins). The best literature also teaches us empathy and understanding. Film, too. These media tell us something about being human.

Games, it seems, have yet another level to that empathy, simply because we don’t just read about the character. We force that character on. The player writes their own story each time they play. It’s more personal, more intimate. Indeed, as Bo Ruberg has argued, it’s more queer as well. We get to bend the rules, break binaries, explore realities beyond our own, and inhabit worlds without space. That means a lot for me as a queer teacher, and I know it does for my queer students, too.

Which games have taught you something? Which games have stuck with you because they affected how you go through the world?

Reason 2: Games are worthy of rigorous study in themselves

Videogames are uniquely apt and poised for critical, thorough analysis, and not only because of what they provide for us.

There’s something to be said for the fact that videogaming is taking over media consumption, especially for younger people, who at least as often will watch a let’s play or a YouTube video about a game rather than traditional television.

Games are where so much of our collective artistic expression lives. If we don’t study them, a significant portion of the stuff we do and love goes without study. I dislike that outcome.

If, instead, we treat games as an art form worthy of academic scrutiny and criticism, I think, our conversations and our lives immediately become more interesting and more meaningfully examined. No art requires academic conversation or analysis to be valid. It’s already valid, and that means we should study it.

We should study games because they’re what we interact with, and they’ve become part of the human experience.⁵

Reason 3: Yearning for the mines

Kids are playing games. Adults are, too. This is a practical reason, not necessarily in league with the previous two more high-minded ones, but worth considering just the same. If people are playing games, and if we want those people to engage critically with what they do, then we need to study games, teach classes about games, and encourage that critical thinking through games.

The critical thinking is there. We just need to bring it out.

It is as important as it ever has been to engage students with what they’re interested in. We need to meet them where they are and, with a little luck and a couple good teachers, bring them up so that they can approach more difficult texts. I want students to read some of the medieval poetry I love, but they don’t want to read it (I can’t blame them). However, they know Skyrim. We can start there, and after a few months of conversation, we just might be able to do Beowulf—if nothing else, at least so that they can get Skyrim’s references to the poem.

Of course, teaching games isn’t just about bringing the students to a different medium. It’s also about letting them know that I respect the media they enjoy. Plus, I might be an expert in the academic conversation around videogames, but I am not an expert in all the games. There are tons I haven’t played, and there are tons I’m bad at. I love student recommendations for a game they love—they are earnest and hopeful, and I always take the recommendations seriously.

My students love games about as much as they love hip-hop. And whether they know it or not, they are already nerdy about those interests. (See this video for proof that you can be as nerdy about hip-hop as anything else, though that’s a topic for a different day):

They want to know that their professor is a normal person, and I’m glad to be one of the ones that they can talk about games, music, etc. with (at least for now—they already think I’m old).

There’s an old joke now that Minecraft is popular because “the children yearn for the mines,” based on the fact that we players love doing difficult manual labor only in a game. Despite its advanced age (it came out when I was in middle school and most of my students were 4-7 years old), Minecraft is still incredibly popular among kids. I prefer to teach games with the capitalist history of coal mining in the background, rather than mining ourselves, but to each their own.

And it is true that they yearn (for games in general, if not for Minecraft specifically). And I celebrate that yearning, if nothing else because it fills the seats in my classroom and shows them that they can, in fact, engage with critical analysis in ways they didn’t know they could.

Reason 4: Teaching has never been more rewarding

I’ve talked around this point already. You can probably tell how much I love teaching games.

The LLM-generated responses that have overrun English classes everywhere are relatively rare in my games classes. I only catch a few each semester.⁶

Because writing about videogames and videogaming is so personal, so intimate, and so unique to each player, it is actually pretty difficult to fake a paper about it. Especially because my prompts emphasize personal reflection. It’s easy to spot the hallucinations, as well.

I cannot say enough how much I love reading a genuine reflection about a student working through an advanced concept within a game we played. Their engagement with the texts blows me away. I’ve had them write in a gaming journal, too, and their raw thoughts on games as they play them are fascinating and sometimes quite moving.

The class discussions are also rewarding. While most of my other classes have about a 50/50 chance of leaving me drained by the end of any particular session, the classes about games without fail leaving me wanting more of that conversation and that community. Teaching games brings me to life, makes me a better teacher, and improves my outlook on the profession as a whole.

The communities I’ve formed in these games classes are unlike anything I’ve been able to form elsewhere. And I’m so glad that I can be a support for my students, insofar as I’m able to be. We make real connections, and all of our lives are better off for it.

The best proof of that community I can offer here is that, a couple times a year, a student will turn me into a game character for their final project. The fact that this (very amazing and humbling thing) exists speaks for itself. I will show it off whenever I can. I have to buy a coat like that now.

Reason 5: Games is fun

This one is the most obvious.

I just really like games, y’all.

I’d be talking about them anyway. I’d want to write and ask questions about them. I’d want to play them.

Being able to say that I play games for my job (after all, how can I teach them if I haven’t played through them?) is the best feeling.

I’ll leave it here. It’s the best job I can imagine, and the students prove me right every day.

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“Gaming 101” begins a series that brings together my personal playing and my experience teaching videogames in college classes. I’ll offer some thoughts on the importance of game studies, and I’ll share some advice on how to approach games in a way that makes them more rewarding for serious study without taking away the fun. “Gaming 101” asked the “why.” The next installment of this series, “Gaming 102,” will ask the “how.”

Be at peace.

1. Academics have been interested in videogames since they emerged in the middle of the 20th century. Scholarly texts about them started hitting big in the ‘90s. Espen Aarseth’s foundational book Cybertext came out in 1997, and he began the premier online academic journal for gaming (here is the first issue) in 2001. I’d be happy to provide a larger reading list if people are interested. Even before 2015, there are several great books arguing for videogames’ place in the academy. The issue was convincing our administrations and older department heads that they were, in fact, art (and not just violence simulators, thanks Fox News).

2. Playing games certainly affects the way we see and interact with the world (the field of phenomenology studies this), but they do not make us inherently more likely to be violent.

3. This article goes through tons of research from the past 15 years and concludes, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the research is not conclusive. Some studies suggest that videogames lead to increased mental health issues; others suggest the polar opposite. The differing results seem to come from differing methodologies. Consider this, from the General Discussion section: “none of the present studies provide support for the claim that more time spent gaming will have a beneficial effect on mental health. This is contrary to previous studies that have reported mental health benefits from gaming as a function of time spent playing… Indeed, some studies suggest it is specifically ‘casual’ games that yield a beneficial effect… As different game types were not assessed in the present analyses, it is possible that any beneficial effects that were present in participants playing such games were washed out or masked by data from participants playing other game types.”

4. Point-and-click adventure games are notorious for teaching the player that all objects and people are malleable, pokeable obstacles. They are a means for solving a puzzle, for unlocking an area, for progressing to the next level. They are databases for us to click on and get information out of. Point-and-clicks at their worst teach us that we are the only thing in the world that matters. Everyone else is just an object. At their best, they forgo such puzzles and design, and they teach us about community and empathy.

5. This doesn’t mean that we should study every game, for the same reason we don’t study every novel to this degree: there are too many of them, and we should try to study the best among them. My videogaming and esports curriculum does not establish a “canon” of games, but I try to make sure the ones I teach and show off have something interesting, thematic, and unique to say. Some are better suited for in-class discussion than others, but that doesn’t mean the others aren’t fun. “Best” depends on the person and the experience.

6. A few certainly get away with it, but even if my catch rate is only 30% (and I think it’s much higher than that) it’s still really low compared to other courses.