When it comes to industry and academic collaboration, I can say with certainty that both sides are dealing in good faith; all of us are confident that some real benefit will come from cooperation. But so far, most talk about collaboration has focused on foreseeable ends. Games are big business, so both publishers and developers need to keep their eyes on the market. And even if money isn’t the only goal, industry folk would like to see what they will get out of their contribution of time, resources, software, or equipment to universities.
Game development does require a great deal of specific expertise, be it in computer science, visual arts, marketing, or other fields. The development community has urged academics to help them fill in the gaps they don’t have the luxury to pursue. Vocationally-focused university programs and trade schools have jumped on the opportunity to supply the next set of technically trained personnel for the game industry. but who will supply the next set of visionaries and artists? In the February 2004 edition of this column, Chaim Gingold suggested a few examples of how academics might help developers, including more critical analysis and more experimental projects in the university. Softer takeaways to be sure, but tangible ones nevertheless.
I’m a humanist by training, so I’m used to hearing the question, how is this going to help me in the real world? from many a student struggling to find enough reason and will to get through their Thomas Mann or Martin Buber. My colleague John McCumber, a professor with whom I taught at UCLA, has an effective response to the charge that the humanities are “useless”. Fields like business, medicine, and computer science seem “practical” because they are predictably useful. That is to say, we can know in advance how to reap immediate gain from them. By contrast, the humanities are unpredictably useful; we cannot know in advance how they might serve us. As the name suggests, the humanities help us understand what it means to be human, no matter the contingencies of profession, economics, or current affairs. The humanities offer insights into human experience that we need when industries, militaries, governments, game engines, middleware and all else fails. This is the knowledge that helps us recover from heartbreak, to make sense of 9/11, to understand betrayal. It is this unpredictable usefulness, this postponed fungibility in the humanities that is so often mistaken for uselessness.
In large part, education for the game industry is a predictably useful business. Studios need skilled workers who can write C++ code, model 3D objects, configure massive networks, and perform a host of other practical tasks. The IGDA’s curriculum initiative provides numerous suggestions for educational standards of this sort, meant to create technical competence. What we need in the game industry are technically competent developers, artists, and designers who are fundamentally versed in the rich subtleties of human experience. This is perhaps the most promising and valuable collaboration academia might provide the game industry: potential developers, artists, designers, and marketers with meaningful understandings of the human condition – and the ability to express themselves through video games. This collaboration is less about the actual than the possible . As such, it requires a leap of faith, more on the part of industry than the academe.
More important than creating future talent who understand human experience and can express themselves through videogames, we need to encourage talent who want to express themselves through videogames. And I don’t just mean gamers who want to make games . I mean artists who have something to say about the world and their condition in it, and who choose the medium of the videogame as their muse. Chris Crawford has spoken frequently about how the game industry has resigned itself to perpetuating a niche market of young males. Often we researchers and developers bemoan the industry’s almost impenetrable risk-aversion, lamenting the fact that no one seems willing to take even the most nominal chance on a title. How can we change this?
The only way to get the industry to take risks on games that explore the missing themes of human experience – heartbreak, betrayal, anticipation, jealousy, despair, eternal hope, grief, and so many others – is to nurture students who are inspired and who are capable of inspiring others with their vision. French philosopher Maurice Blanchot argues that the work itself leads toward inspiration, rather than inspiration leading toward the work; it is a leap of faith, and yet we must use the possibility of finding inspiration as an impetus for searching. If academics can help instill inspiration, then the industry will find itself compelled by its undeniable humanity to take risks on unpredictably useful projects. And I’ll bet many of those projects will also become massive commercial successes.
So what’s the downside? This is a long-term project. I cannot commit to a return-on-investment proposition for inspiration, for talent, for art. This isn’t just about reaping convenient rewards from university-funded experimental projects, getting cheap labor through internships, or plucking brilliant designers out of short-term certificate programs. It’s about taking Blanchot’s leap of inspiration, of producing in order to find that inspiration. And given the fast-paced, non-stop demands of industry, this is an endeavor that the ivory tower has to undertake on its own, without permission, without waiting for a nod of approval from game developers or publishers. Vision is usually iconoclastic; if progress were easy, we wouldn’t struggle against it. Likewise, we need to make clear to the targets of this muse that they tread a difficult path. After all, art and madness have always been intimately related.
That said, I hope that industry will see the potential of what they cannot see and provide the easy stuff – software, hardware, and long-term research support. Inspiration exceeds economics; anodyne risks reap milquetoast rewards. For my part, I believe the inspiration will come, that we will hear the muse of videogames, and that she will make us gasp and shudder in all the real-time rendered candor of her humanity.
(this article also appeared online at the IGDA Ivory Tower)