UJE W A N T TO ELEUATE GAMES TG THE CULTURAL S T A T U S THEV OESERUE. THEY'RE ON PAR W I T H BOOKS OR MGUIES. I FEEL LIKE I ' M ON THE SIDE OF THE FUTURE. 1 1
deserve," Pearce said. "They're on par with books or movies. I feel like I'm on the side of the future."
THOU SHALT NOT KILL In the past decade, the video game industry has been dominated by sports and massive, cinematic series that feature a preponderance of violence. Grand Theft Auto and Halo are two notable examples. At the Art History of Games symposium, John Romero remarked on the entrenched genres of games and took some credit for that evolution. Romero has designed 130 games and created Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom and Quake, which established violent first-person shooter games as a genre of choice for developers and fans. As the gaming industry has boomed into a multimillion dollar business, design companies have become stuck to the formulas they're familiar with, Pearce said. "They've been ruined in a way by their success," she said. "For game design, I have a commitment to innovation." Students in Pearce's game design class have a surprise coming if they expect just to learn the technical demands of creating a video game. For the first four weeks of class, they don't even talk about video games, much less play or design them. Instead, they study folk games that were handed down from one generation to the next. The first assigned book is a history of the queen chess piece and how its role in the game corresponded to cultural changes as queens came to wield more influence. Pearce said the effort corresponds to the 50 Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine
May/June 2010
Illustration by Torian Parker
broader mission of the School of Literature, Communication and Culture to take a humanistic approach to technology. "I'm trying to get them to wrap their heads around the idea that video games are part of a tradition that goes back much farther," Pearce said. "With computer games, I talk about who made them and why." She said most gamers know all of the technical aspects of Space Wars, the first vector graphics arcade game released in 1977. But few know it was inspired by a science fiction novel. Once students finally start coming up with their own games, they're forced to abide by Pearce's rules that prohibit cliches. And of those, one is central: No killing.
Not only must the games refrain from having central characters kill enemies to advance, but Pearce also pushes students to not allow the main character to die. "What things beyond death signify a restart?" she asks them. Students work through those constraints in the Experimental Games Lab on the third floor of the Skiles building. It's a shared room for faculty and students with computers for programming, board games, nearly every gaming console ever created and a library of games. Pearce noted that the lab accepts donated games. On another shelf a book about game theory sits next to a Max Payne strategy guide. The projects that come out of the lab tend to redefine games in significant ways, such as professor Ian BogosTs combination of video games and journalism. Other developing games include one about Ellis Island, one called Mermaids with an ecological focus and a PhD thesis based on Pride and Prejudice.
THE ART OF GAMING The question "Are games art?" never was discussed at the Art History of Games symposium. Instead, the leading game designers and theorists from around the world in attendance talked about the artistry of games. "Games are a dynamic and alive form of art," said Michael Nitsche, one of the event organizers and an assistant professor at Tech. "We only lose time if we return to a debate on whether they are art or not. This conference was a milestone of the discussion."