Video Games:
The Artistics Medium of the future
According to the Academy of Animated Art, 3.2 billion people across the globe play video games and that number continues to increase. Video games are a major form of cultural expression in the contemporary world, and by some estimates draw larger audiences than film, music, and literature combined. But for too long, games have been dismissed as merely popular entertainment by scholars in higher education. The University of Utah’s College of Humanities has long recognized that video games are a significant modern artform and has pioneered courses in the study of video games. Our courses explore video games in all their dimensions, from the impact of formal and design decisions on players’ experiences, to the aesthetics and narrative innovations of this new form of storytelling and art, and the ways that video games express important social and cultural questions of identity, ethics, gender, and equity. The College of Humanities has become a national leader in developing an interdisciplinary curriculum
and engaging in groundbreaking research examining the history, culture, and aesthetics of video games.
The college currently offers courses such as Video Game Storytelling and Literature, Film, and Video Games in English; Video Games and Antiquity in world languages and cultures; and The Aesthetics and Philosophy of Play in philosophy. These courses have been extremely popular with students, and the college continues to add more courses each year. Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, said, “we can’t offer enough sections of Video Game Storytelling to fulfill the demand. Students come from the Games Division as well as from departments across campus to take our video games courses—they are our highest enrolling classes. Clearly, video games are where this generation of students are finding their stories.
There are nearly 20 faculty who study and teach games studies in the College of Humanities. One professor who has become a staple within the field is Dr. Alf Seegert, professor (lecturer) of English and affiliate professor in the U’s Division of Games. A lifelong player of video games and a board game designer himself, Seegert has been teaching ENGL 2090: Video Game Storytelling since 2014, and the class regularly fills with 75 students each semester. The course focuses on the mechanics and the aesthetics of games, how players interact with games and how games offer new kinds of narrative, and aesthetic experiences.
One of Seegert’s examples of this comes from the game, “Thomas Was Alone,” which features “characters” that are simple two-dimensional rectangles. “These simple shapes come to life through interaction,” said Seegert. “They must literally support one another mechanically, one on top of another, to support each other emotionally and overcome obstacles together through teamwork.” He names this specific type of incident, “the IKEA effect.” Much like building a piece of furniture from IKEA, players of video games help create the experience and so become more invested in it and emotionally attached to it. The simplicity of this type of game is an important teaching tool for Seegert because it shows students the fundamental building blocks of narrative and how stories work.
“Human beings are unable to experience something except as a narrative,” Seegert said. “As soon as we apply causes, we imply that there’s an agent involved, which means there’s a character involved, which means there’s a storyline involved.” This tendency has significant implications for game design and aesthetics. “I try to give students games that are as basic as possible, so they recognize it isn’t the fancy graphics that get them invested. It’s the fact that we bring so much meaning and narrative to the simplest cues, because that’s how we’re wired.”
As Seegert’s courses became more popular, he started teaching other, more advanced courses on games, such as ENGL 5090: Literature, Film, and Video Games, which pairs literary texts with video games, and ENGL 5095: Advanced Video Game Storytelling, where students expand their abilities in analyzing video game narratives.
Another faculty member contributing to advancing games studies in the college, is Dr. Thi Nguyen, associate professor of philosophy and adjunct associate professor of Division of Games. Nguyen’s book, “Games: Agency as Art,” which was awarded the American Philosophical Association’s 2021 Book Prize, positions games as a unique art form designed to offer players the experience of being particular kinds of subjects and caring about particular goals. According to Nguyen, one of the key values of games is offering players the experience of immersing themselves in a compelling simulated environment that allows them to adopt new forms of agency and temporary goals for the duration of the game.
In his upper-division course, PHIL 3320/GAMES 3025: The Aesthetics and Philosophy of Play, Nguyen further explores the philosophy of games and play. Although it’s a philosophy class, the course is designed for students majoring in Games and examines the value of games from the perspectives of design, aesthetics, and ethics.
Human beings are unable to experience something except as a Narrative
Students explore questions about games, art, and the role of play in human life. And the course addresses key issues in players’ experiences of games, the role of frustration and difficulty, how games communicate, and the relationship between play and creativity.
With the popularity of courses in video games, the college has recently hired new faculty to meet the demand for more courses and scholarship. Dr. Justin Carpenter, assistant professor of English, was hired last year to teach Video Game Storytelling alongside Seegert. Like Seegert, Carpenter is a lifelong player of video games. Though he initially went to college for post-colonial studies, Carpenter discovered—through a paper he wrote on eco-criticism—the game “The Last of Us,” which prompted him to pivot his focus to games. At the time, the field of games studies was just a few years old, but still there was already a large amount of academic analysis about games for him to engage.
Carpenter’s research has primarily focused on comparing games with pre-existing literature and generative storytelling—a method of creating personalized stories using basic rules and algorithms. Examples of stories being generative come in the forms of lipograms—written works restricted from using a certain letter of the alphabet—and choose-your-own-adventure style books. Carpenter explains that video games have this kind of generative storytelling baked into the medium. Games inherently create worlds and spaces with their own rules for how to interact with them.
One of Carpenter’s recently published works revolves around this topic and its relation to the game, “No Man’s Sky.” The world of “No Man’s Sky,” a planetary exploration game, is procedurally generated—meaning there is a near infinite number of distinctly unique planets to interact with. There is no one-size-fits-all way to play the game to completion and no two players will have the same experience with it. This produces not only thousands of hours of gameplay but also stories that can only be uniquely achieved through this kind of rulebound narrative. With the sheer scope of the game and near-limitless possibilities, games like this generate player stories in the same ways stories unfold in the non-virtual world.
“I think we are quite interested in how these machines can mirror us and be reflections of us,” Carpenter said. “We may not like all the answers that it gives us, but this somehow allows us to enhance the kind of passion we have for [games].”
“ Clearly, video games are where this generation of students are finding their stories. It's important for us as a department and a college to study and teach this dynamic and important form of culture and contemporary art.
Procedural generation has already been leveraged by many games to produce player stories like these. This is most popularly done in the game, “Minecraft,” a sandbox game that randomly generates a world and gives players the broad goal to “survive.” Within the confines of the game’s rules, no two players will have the same experience or generate the same stories in “Minecraft.” Creating procedurally generated games can be cheaper for game companies, but it also allows for a type of player experience that mimics life in the intertwining of novelty and redundancy.
Also new to the college is Dr. Nathan Wainstein, assistant professor of English, who works both in the literature of modernism and the relationship of games to modernist aesthetics. His courses focus on video game aesthetics, difficulty, narrative, and design. In a recently published essay, Wainstein analyzes the video game, “Death Stranding,” in relation to 20th-century literature concerned with labor. Like other arts, video games express the particular values of their historical time and place. However, as Wainstein explains, it’s only very recently that scholars have taken video games seriously as an aesthetic and cultural form, and begun to do the important comparative work that will allow us to see how video games participate in the broader histories of literature and art.
“I do think that in the early 2000s, and maybe even earlier, there was a polemical emphasis on separating video games from other artistic traditions,” said Wainstein. Many of these discussions revolved around belief that works in this new medium required completely new critical frameworks. However, younger scholars like Wainstein are recognizing that even new media like video games still depend on familiar narrative structures and other conventions of aesthetics and design. Wainstein doesn’t believe that we need to continually reinvent the wheel, an opinion that is now shared by many academics in the field.
“Even if you grant the point that it was polemically necessary, I think that necessity is no longer present,” Wainstein said. Like other new artistic mediums, such as film, video games at once offer new kinds of experiences and new forms of familiar pleasures. As the study of video games becomes more accepted by academics and the public, games will be recognized as important cultural forms and legitimate objects of study.
With their passion for the medium of video games, its forms and ways of telling stories, the humanities faculty and students studying games are pioneering one of the most exciting areas of contemporary cultural research. Indeed, the faculty are learning as much from their students as the students are from them. “We’ve entered an era where professors know less about these things than students,” Carpenter said. “My students know just as much about the games that I’m talking about as me, maybe more…It’s like a conversation with people that are your peers, and that’s really exciting.”
Beyond English and philosophy, exciting and innovative offerings are also happening in other areas of the college. For instance, Dr. Alexis Christensen, associate professor (lecturer) of world languages and cultures, teaches Video Games and Antiquity. The course examines how “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” makes use of history, myth, and archaeology from the ancient Greek world. Throughout the course, Christensen and the students explores how video games represent the ancient world and ask whether they represent it accurately—and if that matters. The course also considers central ethical issues such as stealing and killing in a game, and asks about the lessons that can be learned from the past while playing video games.
Christensen, whose scholarship focuses on Roman and ancient Italic social history and material culture, created this course because so many students are becoming interested in the ancient world through video games like “Assassin’s Creed.” And learning about the historical culture of “The Odyssey” has helped students appreciate the game even more.
With some of the most exciting young scholars in the field of Video Game Narrative, Aesthetics, and Ethics, close working relationships with the game design faculty and students in the U’s world-renowned Division of Games, and a large cohort of enthusiastic students, the College of Humanities has become a top destination for students interested in more fully understanding the art and significance of video games.