Chris Patterson: I tell students that games are the most important unseen or outright dismissed form of politicized and influential media today, comparing it to the ways that, only in retrospect, we can see the colonial and racializing effects of British Literature during the British empire, and the forms of imperial/militarized violences in Hollywood movies during the American empire that are still in full force today. This is also what I say plainly on the first page of Open World Empire.

A more recent way I've come to describe games is as a kind of "dark world" (ala The Legend of Zelda) or an "upside down" world (ala Stranger Things) when we compare it to the world of social and other news media. In social media, we are meant to be transparently ourselves, to bandy about subtweets that establish our social capital while attempting to navigate the perpetrator/victim binaries of our highly surveilled virtual lives. Video games, in comparison, are a kind of shadow realm. People become anonymous, untethered to profile pictures, names, and for many games, any accountability for what they say or how they say it. It is easier to hide from this other/ed world, or to dismiss it all as “play,” but we have to remember that political strategies and cultures are often practiced and refined in games before they make their marks on our “light world.” Though Twitter dominates political newsfeeds, there are only 300 million people on twitter within a month, which is less than half that of people on Dota 2 (over 700 million) or Player’s Unknown Battlegrounds (over one billion). As with social media, to play these games is to enter a highly charged political landscape, whether it is in the gameplay itself, the arguments in chat and voice, or in viewing the esports players and Twitch streamers who appeal to mass audiences on multiple platforms.

Tare Fickle (TF): Since there is such a profusion of genres and platforms of games out there, I find it most interesting to discuss games in the context of specific cultural function: for example how, in America particularly, we view games. While some social stigma about video game violence and anti-social behavior lingers from the 1990s, over the last decade, especially since the pandemic began, we find games increasingly being praised—as powerful sources of social connection between separated friends and family; as educational resources for children; as crucial forms of escape and relief from the stress and horror of contemporary life. So I would describe video games as a simultaneous source of great pleasure and great anxiety, the latter of which tend to reflect our society’s particular values and concerns at a given moment: for example, concerns about privacy, about children’s use of technology, about media representations and the work environment of entertainment industries. Video games are complex art forms and pieces of software, and big, big business—and from any of these viewpoints, they can be used to better understand the society from which they come.

Alenda Chang (AC): Although I don’t think everyone needs to play games or love them, I spend a lot of my time telling people that it’s worthwhile to pay attention to them (in my case, as a kind of cultural barometer of environmental attitudes and crisis). Of course, I could nitpick, and say I don’t need to explain games to the uninitiated, because we all know at some level about games and play. Rather, it’s video games that have arguably erected certain barriers to entry, from fiddly controllers to masculinist, geek culture. At any rate, as someone originally trained in literature and film, I do take issue with a certain cavalier disregard for video games that somehow enables people to proudly say things like “Oh, I don’t play games” or “I’ve never played a game in my life,” because if you substitute “books” or “movies” for games (“I don’t read books” or “I’ve never read a book in my life”) it’s readily apparent that a stigma still lingers around games (as Tara said).

Gregory P. Grieve (GG): By the uninitiated I take it you don’t mean that they don’t know what play is. All higher mammals play. In fact, as I write this my two dogs wrestle at my feet. Also, I assume you don’t mean that the uninitiated don’t know what games are. The archeological evidence shows people have been playing games (ruled play) for at least 5,000 years (and it is hard to imagine that people haven’t been playing games as long as people have had language and culture). Finally, I don’t think you mean videogaming per se. For, by this point in time, I cannot imagine anyone who does not at least think they know what gaming is. Around 3 billion people around the globe game, and gaming narratives, gaming logics, and gaming aesthetics, are now rooted deep into the bedrock of our current media landscape.

I take the uninitiated to mean those often skeptical, sometimes openly hostile, humanistic scholars who see videogaming as a stigmatized media practice not worthy of study in the ivory tower. By humanism I mean the qualitative study of what it means to be a person. By stigmatized knowledge I mean forms of communication not accepted by those institutions we rely upon for truth validation. To these uninitiated classical humanists, I would describe video games as the single best method of understanding what it means to be human at this time. Why? Digital media are no longer supplemental to print, but are the dominant form of communication which structures thought, culture, and society. Videogaming’s procedural and simulating elements epitomize digital media and place them at the forefront of this transformation. In other words, the winds of digital change that swept across the globe since the 1990’s have finally breezed their way into the academy and are blowing the dust off the often unexamined foundational concepts of what constitutes ideal humanistic pedagogy and research, and in so doing have made evident the importance of the study of videogaming for both the academic and non-academic worlds.

CP: I'm captivated by what Tara said about games being “a simultaneous source of great pleasure and great anxiety,” and how Alenda and Gregory talked about its stigma. It helped me illuminate why, in Open World Empire, I gravitated toward erotics and sexuality not as a metaphorical comparison to games, but as a way of understanding how we already see and play with games. As interactive objects, games are often played as erotic objects that allow certain forms of pleasure and sexuality to emerge.

More recently, though, I’ve been thinking about other forms of erotics that Open World Empire doesn’t take into account, which are less about pleasure/anxiety and more about how we dwell comfortably and intimately with the games we play—what happens after the initial erotic shocks that are often uncomfortable. My take on erotics in Open World Empire reflected what was happening in my life at the time: falling in love with someone, having intense emotions of shock, pleasure, anxiety, uncertainty, and realizing how much of these emotions were present in the games I played. Now, perhaps because I am five years into a marriage, I am thinking more of the ways erotics remains within dwelling, familiarity, dependency, where touch isn’t so much about discovery and tantalization but about warmth, comfort, and memory. This too is erotic, this too can be queer, but it is a level of sexuality we don’t often talk about as sexual per se, something attributed to boredom, banality, and domesticity. Yet, if covid-19 and the repeated rise of racist rhetorics and actions across the globe has taught us in game studies anything, it’s how games so often function as intimate comfort-objects that we want to dwell within. Such ways of erotic playing may not “spark joy,” but they do remind us who we are even in times of immense change. This is a form of intimacy we too see and seek in video games.

TF: Chris, I love the idea of thinking of how games fit (or not) into the “Kondo-ification” of domestic life-spaces.

As my co-writers point out, the study of games is centrally also about the study of people’s relationship to what they think “gaming” is. This is something that is obvious when you consider something like gambling -- a form of gaming often artificially cordoned off from video game studies, despite the obvious overlaps -- as an index of what’s considered a “normative” relationship to money and chance, and between different modes of accruing wealth. But, as Alenda said, current video game culture encourages a kind of cavalier stance or gatekeeping that actually obscures the “seriousness” (in the same sense that gambling is considered a “serious” enterprise as well as a “serious” problem) of video games.

AC: I’m glad Gregory brought up the long history of games and play and, at least in some ways, the utter lack of distinctiveness of human play. I’m with the animal studies people on this one, in favor of breaking down the various barriers that regularly get erected between humans and nonhumans around language, tool use, empathy and grief, and so on. I actually have a piece coming out in a Routledge volume (Uncanny Histories) that tried to argue that media studies (and before that, arguably, literature, philosophy, and more) has always in some ways been game studies. I don’t think everyone will buy that, but to me it seems clear that play as a critical, design, or existential approach and studies of more structured and rule-based forms of play (aka games) have spurred a lot of scholarly thought. For me, it kind of became a (not too important but fun to ponder) chicken-and-egg question of which came first–game studies or media studies?