Henry Jenkins recently interviewed Nick Montfort and me about Racing the Beam and the Platform Studies series.
The two part interview is online now at Henry’s site:
A New “Platform” for Games Research?: An Interview with Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (Part One)
A New “Platform” for Games Research?: An Interview with Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (Part Two)
I wanted to take the opportunity to respond to something Henry says in the introduction to the interview:
As someone who would fall far short of their ambitious bar for the ideal games scholar, I read this discussion with profoudly mixed feelings. I can’t argue with their core claim that the field will benefit from the arrival of a generation of games scholars who know the underlying technologies — the game systems — as well as they know the games. I certainly believe that the opening up of a new paradigm in games studies will only benefit those of us who work with a range of other related methodologies. If I worry, it is because games studies as a field has moved forward through a series of all-or-nothing propositions: either you do this or you aren’t really doing game studies. And my own sense is that fields of research grow best when they are expansive, sucking in everything in their path, and sorting out the pieces later.
I appreciate Henry’s concern here, but as our responses suggest, platform studies isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s an invitation to consider the underlying technical systems that drive videogames and other computing systems, and to correlate those observations with the cultural uses of computing as creativity.
Indeed, one might even hoist Henry on his own petard: if fields of research grow best when they are expansive, what harm can come of letting game studies suck in matters technical as well?