aash29: переводы

→6. So two things about this question: I didn't design the course and I'm not the course leader, so cannot take any credit for it. It's a very industrial focused course, so it splits into strands for programming, audio, graphics and production. Design spreads across all of these sub-disciplines so everyone does some design. I think we could probably increase this to include a full design strand as well, but we have a limited number of teachers. But it seems to work pretty well. It's less strongly academic than we try and give our students a very real set of skills and attitude to succeed in industry, and to have ideas and inspiration to make a contribution to the medium. And we can include people like Jeroen Stout, who made Dinner Date as part of his postgraduate research into new game forms, and Peter Howell, who is helping design Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs as part of his Phd, so we seem to be doing well in terms of following the line I've established of always looking for the fusion of theory and practice.

→5. In terms of impact, I don't think I'd be considered a successful academic AT ALL... I don't think I've ever really ever been cited in another academic work. So on those terms, I'm really not important, which is odd, given how Dear Esther is known as a commercial product. It has never got any academic attention at all, although there is a lag of course for publication. But generally, it frustrates me that academics write so little on independent games. I wrote a chapter for a book published this year on First Person Shooters about STALKER and Metro2033, and the editors said "you probably need to explain what these games are in case people haven't heard of them or played them" and my response was "if an academic interested in FPS games hasn't played STALKER or Metro, they are no proper academic at all!" But in terms of my work... I don't know. I think I did good work in my PhD thesis in terms of getting a really good solid baseline of lots of data about FPS games together, but I don't think it's ever really been used. Maybe when this book on DOOM is published next year, I'll get more attention ;)

→4. So in keeping with the above, my interests tend to be quite specific studies, rather than general high-level things. I think Gordon Calleja's work on immersion is excellent, the smartest stuff written about a difficult subject. Miguel Sicarts work is also really good - they both come out of IT University in Copenhagen, there's a real connection here, as so does Espen Aarseth, who is consistently interesting, and it's also where Douglas Wilson did his PhD. Then it's always worth keeping tabs on people like Clara Fernandez who are doing the practice based stuff, and though she writes less academically, Tracey Fullerton at USC is the best game teacher out there for my money. They are not necessarily the most influential authors - you've got people like Ian Bogost in that list - but they are the people I keep tabs on. But I am a little out of touch now I'm developing. Actually, you know when I'm at a games conference I tend to go to the sessions with PhD students, the new wave of scholars. I think you often get much more interesting ideas and debate there than by listening to the old guard in the big lecture theatres... The people trying to make their name, who are still chasing big ideas and taking risks, they are the people really worth paying attention to.

→3. No, I don't think you can create a formal definition of video games, any more than you can formally, structurally define art. It's a constant changing thing, often in response to the definitional debate. Which means even though it is a question that can never be answered, that's not the same as it being a bad question! My feeling about game studies is that what has historically missing is baseline data, there's been a lot of high level debate, but not as much deep level data gathering. - I say that as someone who has not been so heavily involved in the last couple of years so it might have changed! As I said, the problem is often that academic theory exists as a kind of self-perpetuating ecosystem, like Richard Dawkins' theory of memes, so it can relate more to itself than the actual object of study...

→2. Yeah, of course it can. Dear Esther is of course an example of that, so is the work of people like Douglas Wilson and Clara Fernandez. And there are many examples of games that are clearly philosophically driven - Ice Pick Lodge's work is hugely cerebral for example. The question is, I guess, how that theory filters down into practice, and that is something academics should consider. There is an increasing amount of experimentation going on where theoretical ideas are put into a format that is accessible to developers and gamers, often through game making, and that's a good, good thing. And on the flip side, as academics we should recognise that innovation in the industry itself is often pursuing ideas that are every bit as intelligent and ground-breaking as theory, just explored in a different way. Theory is an approach, a means to an end, not something which is self-contained. I think it's important to recognise that.

→1. I think it's necessary for any area of serious study to have specialists. Put it that way. And I think before you start being able to write intelligently about a subject it's a good thing to have a strong background knowledge in that area, or you risk all kinds of errors, repeats, all that kind of thing. Games have been around long enough for this to be in existence, and I don't think there's any excuse now for the kind of academic tourism which was evident in the early years of game studies, where people were making statements about the medium that betrayed a real ignorance of it. That's not saying you have to be a gamer to have intelligent things to say about games, but it would be absurd to enter into a discourse about, say, film studies without having a very strong body of contextual understanding about cinema. But we should also recognise that the medium is so diverse now that as well as a generalist understanding of games, we probably shouldn't be in a position where we lump together Curiosity, JS Joust and Call of Duty and assume they are really the same thing. They are so far apart in so many ways, it'd be like trying to generalise out from literature to "book studies" which is patently absurd. But I am also a little cynical about pure theory, particularly in relation to real world objects. It can disappear into jargoneering very quickly, and become a kind of self-referential ecology that actually has nothing to do with the object it purports to be about. Media studies and philosophy both went here, and it led to just awful, dreadful garbage that had a negative influence on actual intelligent discourse for many years (I'm thinking of rubbish like Deleuze & Guattari) - as a creative exercise, a kind of poetry, it's fine, but it contributes nothing to actual understanding, for me. So i think whilst you don't have to practice development, you must always absolutely ground your thinking in the practicalities of the real world of game development. Theory is great, but it is just that, theory, and it should intelligently frame discussion and open new channels for investigation, but these for me have a practical purpose - the better understanding of games. There's still a lot of theory out there which I don't think contributes anything to a better understanding of games.