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Converging: An Interview With Henry Jenkins
HJ: Well, for starters, we can't rule out the fact that a fair percentage of them probably were wasting time. Seriously, there are ways of engaging with any medium that are productive and ways that are nonproductive. There's nothing especially wrong with unproductive activities. Most of us are overscheduled and overburdened with other aspects of our lives and it ought to be a sacred thing to sometimes goof off with our mates. But I think the issue goes deeper than that. We lack ways of justifying or explaining the value of games as a meaningful form of activity. They are under fire from all sides. Most people treat them as debased and unproductive. And we start to feel guilty because we internalize some of those perceptions and descriptions. This has long been the case with other forms of popular culture. Television fans often embrace metaphors of "addiction" or "zealotry" to describe their embrace of favorite programs, sometimes using these terms ironically, sometimes accepting the negative valuation of their activity. This is one reason why the debates about games as art or games as education gain so much interest - because right now, they represent ways of defending the meaningfulness of our engagement with games in terms which can be understood, if accepted, by nongamers. They give us a language for talking about the meaningfulness of game play. GS: Do you think the games development industry needs change its ways? How would you like to see it develop? HJ: I am saying nothing here that I have not heard from many others working in and around the games industry. Games are moving from an artisanal based economy to one grounded in major studios and that shift brings both advantages and disadvantages. Let's use Hollywood as a parallel case. The studio era in American film is one which many remember with great fondness for the outstanding quality of production overall. The floor is very high. There is a consistent quality to the films produced which is maintained across pretty much every title that was shipped. It is hard to find a bad film - at least a really bad film - made in 1939. But, if the floor is very high, the ceiling is surprisingly low. There is almost no room for individual expression. Even gifted filmmakers are making seven to ten feature films per year at the height of the studio era. They have almost no control over the titles they produce. Now, we can compare this with what has happened to American film
with the collapse of the studio mode of production and the emergence
of independent films or simply of a package system where each film
is conceived on its own terms. There is much more room for stylistic
innovation, much greater diversity, and more opportunities for
distinctive artists to do their own kind of work. Yet, there are
a great number of bad films made - maybe not in a technical sense,
since the technical standards have continued to rise over all,
but in terms of the quality of the scripts and performances, certainly.
So, the floor dropped and the ceiling rose. Right now, we need
to develop at least some greater space for independent or creator-controlled
game projects which will bring about greater innovation, expression,
and diversity. And we need to create more space at the center of
the games industry for at least the best designers to do work that
is uniquely their own. GS: Games are increasingly being regarded as teaching tools. Does the label of 'learning tool' offer video games an opportunity to clean up their act in the eyes of mainstream culture? HJ: Right now, if we look at the way the games industry defends itself against its critics, it's core argument seems to be "hey, we're not as bad as you think we are." All of the energy, by and large, gets spent arguing a negative - trying to prove that games do not cause real world violence -- and very little time gets spent making an affirmative case for games - that the world is a better place because we have games in it. There are plenty of very good reasons why we should be promoting the educational value of games - after all, they are the preferred medium for the current generation that is working their way through schools; there is more and more compelling research showing the pedagogical value of many different aspects of current game designs. By now, we can all make the argument but so far, the games industry is running scared of the L Word. But your question here cuts to one of the two key rationales for why the industry should care about the education and games debate. The first is that educational video games sell. When people ask me these days for examples of serious games? I usually point to Sim City, The Sims, Civilization, Age of Empires, Railroad Tycoon, Flight Simulators - a list which includes some of the top selling games of all time. Look at that list and you can see that nonfictional works - games that model real world processes - perform as well or better in games than they do in any other commercial medium. Second, helping to support the educational value of games may be the single best PR move which the games industry could take in light of the public's continued linking of games to school violence. That's a purely cynical rationale, I suppose, but if that's what it takes to get game companies over the hump in this space, so be it. From the 1920s on, Hollywood recognized that school based outreach was key to overcoming its own negative public perception problem. They began to produce a certain number of films which were going to be valuable for schools - documentaries, adaptations of literary classics, historical dramas - and developing teacher's guides and supporting materials around them. They gave teachers the tools they needed to incorporate those films into their classes; they offered discounted tickets for school field trips; they talked at educational conferences. They courted the schools as a major market for their films once their commercial run was over. These are the kinds of things that the games industry should be doing as well - to help people to recognize the pedagogical value of the games they are already producing. So far, with the exception of the work Firaxis has done around its Civilization franchise, I see very little effort by game companies to support the pedagogical uses of their titles. Surely this is an important first step towards getting greater social recognition of the value of game play. |
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