all games are serious games (but some games are more serious than others)

Via Game­Pol­i­tics, news that the new-ish Game Design BFA offered at GMU has met with“over­whelm­ing” stu­dent response.

A story in the Fair­fax Times reports that the school has already enrolled around 200 stu­dents into the pro­gram, best­ing an inter­nal goal of hav­ing 110 stu­dents in the pro­gram by 2012. As Scott M. Mar­tin, Assis­tant Dean for Tech­nol­ogy, Research and Advance­ment at the school stated, ‘We’ve been over­whelmed. Our antic­i­pated enroll­ment for the fall is 500 per­cent higher than we expected.’

One of US News and World Report’s top “Up and Com­ing” national uni­ver­si­ties, GMU has an espe­cially solid rep­u­ta­tion in all sorts of tech-oriented stud­ies. In par­tic­u­lar, their Cen­ter for His­tory of New Media is giv­ing impor­tant thought to bet­ter­ing our dig­i­tal future (even though they now must do that think­ing with­out Roy).

So a Game Design degree at George Mason makes some sense. Bioware Mythic (owned, like every­one else, by EA Games) is right next door: Their stu­dio is respon­si­ble for a num­ber of world-class MMO’s, includ­ing Warham­mer Online. Bethesda Soft­works, devel­op­ers of Fall­out 3 — and CEO’d, curi­ously, by Won­der Woman’s hus­band — is just over the Potomac and to the north of GMU. And AOL — cur­rent host to a siz­able col­lec­tion of extremely pop­u­lar, if unin­spir­ing, online games, but at one time a real hub of inno­va­tion — is just a scenic bike ride to the north.

Still, I am filled with mis­giv­ings about a degree like this. Oth­ers have weighed in on this issue at some length, gen­er­ally cit­ing a con­cern that by train­ing under­grad­u­ates exclu­sively on con­tem­po­rary plat­forms with of-the-moment toolsets, the stu­dents who emerge from BFA game design pro­grams will lack a con­cep­tual core — some­thing upon which to fall back when those plat­forms become irrel­e­vant and those toolsets outdated.

That makes some sense to me, but I see a dif­fer­ent dan­ger. Most sig­nif­i­cantly, I worry that for this gen­er­a­tion of code­work­ers, we are fram­ing game and sim­u­la­tion design exclu­sively as the province of cre­ative expres­sion and tech­ni­cal achieve­ment, rather than under­stand­ing them as inher­ently polit­i­cal forms of techne.

Case in point. When Game­Pro mag­a­zine pre­sented Prince­ton Review’s wrap-up of the top 8 game schools in the United States, this is the way they sum­ma­rized the growth of inter­est in game design programs:

Time was to be a game designer, all you needed was a com­puter and a base­ment or garage owned by your mother. The only edu­ca­tion you needed to be a truly great game designer was a stack of Atari 2600 games and maybe a few issues of Pop­u­lar Sci­ence mag­a­zine. Those days are done.

If you want to be a game designer in the matur­ing mar­ket we have today, you need a lot more than your mom’s base­ment and some mag­a­zines. You need imag­i­na­tion, deter­mi­na­tion, and prefer­ably a job with a major game pub­lisher or an indie game devel­oper. And before you can have any of those things, you just might need a for­mal education.

Intense per­sonal expe­ri­ence and ambi­tions to engage with the mar­ket; imag­i­na­tion, deter­mi­na­tion, and an “in” with a pub­lisher: These might also describe those qual­i­ties required to start a band or make it as a comic book artist. “For­mal edu­ca­tion” as I read it here does not sig­nify a critical-analytical lib­eral arts back­ground, but instead stands roughly to large-scale cor­po­ra­tions (i.e., EA) as a guar­an­tor of employee qual­ity and uni­for­mity. Is the can­di­date famil­iar with the con­ven­tions of code doc­u­men­ta­tion? Does she under­stand the dif­fer­ence between a class and an object? Does he know under­stand the premise of Soft­ware Qual­ity Assurance?

Look: There’s lit­tle doubt that stu­dents from GMU will find ample employ in the indus­try when they grad­u­ate. That job mar­ket is only going to expand (although I’m not sure that it will expand on Amer­i­can soil). But while a BFA is implic­itly about expres­sion and craft, those jobs are unlikely to be about either: Pro­gram­ming at giant cor­po­ra­tions like Mythic or BioWare is increas­ingly com­part­men­tal­ized and insti­tu­tion­al­ized. There’s fre­quently lit­tle about the every­day tasks of a low-level Pro­gram­mer to dis­tin­guish “game pro­gram­ming” from, say, “account­ing soft­ware pro­gram­ming” or “ware­house inven­tory programming.”

But, at the end of the day, there is an oppor­tu­nity cost here that I really worry about. There’s no doubt that many of the young peo­ple who enter GMU’s pro­gram will be bril­liant, but how much effort is being devoted to the devel­op­ment of crit­i­cal think­ing skills? We’re busy teach­ing Amer­i­can Stud­ies majors to think crit­i­cally, but I imag­ine that few of them will be involved in build­ing next-generation inter­faces or script­ing online rep­u­ta­tion sys­tems or admin­is­ter­ing com­mu­nity gov­er­nance databases.

It seems to me that we need at least to find ways of inte­grat­ing the critical-analytical con­ven­tions of a lib­eral arts degree with a Game Design BFA. We need to be wor­ry­ing about pro­ce­dural lit­era­cies; about the anthro­pol­ogy of gam­ing; about sacral­ity and the ludic; about the pol­i­tics of sim­u­la­tion. We need to ask: What kinds of worlds are you build­ing? For whom? And to what end?

You can read (a lit­tle bit) more about the pro­gram, as well as see a list of course require­ments. And — my anx­i­eties and mis­giv­ings aside — good luck to the new Pro­gram and every­one involved.