Letters
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Letters To the Editor: David Lewis Schaefer is spot on when he criticizes the field of Game Studies for its political bias and general lack of worthwhile content (“The Games That Academics Play,” Summer, 2020). I have been active in the field of game scholarship since 2001 and have watched the field mirror the bad trends of the humanities in general. I had hoped that game scholarship, being new, might go in a better direction. Alas, as Professor Schaefer points out, game studies is largely a leftist enterprise. All is not lost, however. First, the content of games is generally everything a traditionalist would want it to be, with the result that game scholarship tends to be a stream of frustration hurled at the game industry—why can’t it be more progressive? In games—speaking in general terms, of course, as there are always exceptions—there are gods, and there is good and evil. That is a stark contrast to the generally godless and meaningless real world we have created, and is a powerful source of many games’ popularity. The human person yearns for significance and
nobility, a significance and nobility that our contemporary world, informed by our nihilist humanities departments, lacks. The games’ popularity also stems from their use of the trope of “lost civilization.” In almost all fantasy games, there is an ancient race of beings who did marvelous things; their ruins now dot the landscape. The protagonist’s goal is to uncover the ancient magic and use it to revitalize the world. This is the situation young people experience in daily life: Saint Patrick’s Cathedral stands as a reminder of a lost nobility amid a desert of steel-and-glass cubes in midtown Manhattan. It has been one-hundred years since the West lost its energy to build, write, and compose artifacts that uplift the human spirit. Gamers sense that something has been lost and they ache to bring it back. This yearning for a lost civilization was best and first expressed in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, a traditionalist, a conservative, and a Catholic. His influence on games is immense, and generally ignored by games studies scholars. He doesn’t fit the narrative. The fact that his ideas live on in games is a sign that people yearn for the world of long ago. All is not lost. Secondly, we can be optimistic about games in the university because there is an engineering side to it. AQ
S. Forman
readers should pay strict attention to terms. “Game Studies” are the leftists. “Game Design” and “Game Development” are software engineers, whose modus operandi are closer to applied economics than anything else. Game designers try to build little societies that are entertaining to their users. They are concerned with incentives, utility, systems, and policy. Game design is a fascinating laboratory for social experimentation, and game designers are learning amazing things about the way human communities function. In a case from the early 2000s, for example, the designers of Second Life discovered that taxing people depressed their ingame activity, whereas granting t
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