0018-9162/06/$20.00 2006 IEEE June 2006 43P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y

C O V E R F E A T U R E

Largely taught by artists with MFAs and computerprogrammers with industry experience, Game pro-duction programs often include internships within themajor game studios, sometimes even substituting multi-semester work experience for class time. These close tieswith industry provide students with valuable opportu-nities for postgraduation employment and game com-panies with a source of new employees who areimmediately productive. But if the fit is too narrow andthe program too short-sighted in serving the immediatehiring needs, its graduates might find their skills losingvalue when the needs of the industry shift in responseto new technologies.

Game studies programs, on the other hand, fall intothe domain of academic researchers with PhDs in thehumanities and social sciences. Oriented away fromcommercial values, these offerings emphasize funda-mental questions of human experience and methodolo-gies that provide critical and historical perspective on current cultural trends. Like American studies, film studies, womens studies, and Afro-American studies, the name game studies provides an interdisciplinaryumbrella for an emerging field that emphasizes studyover the disciplinary approach.

Game studies provides a productive direction forresearch, but it can be a risky choice for students becausegraduates might lack both the skills that make thememployable by industry and the disciplinary legitimacythat would prepare them for academic careers in moretraditional departments. However, the increasing

Although many universities focus their digital media curricula on game production and

game studies, Georgia Tech defines a third approach that integrates technical and cultural

knowledge by emphasizing research into the expressive potential of games.

Janet Murray, Ian Bogost, Michael Mateas, and Michael NitscheGeorgia Tech

E lectronic games are growing rapidly as a culturalform, a set of media technologies, and a globalindustry. Humanists look at these games as a newexpressive genre like drama, opera, or movies;social scientists view them as a new form of col-lective behavior; computer scientists, engineers, andindustrial designers find them a new focus of invention.

New academic journals such as Game Studies andGames and Culture, conferences such as Serious Gamesand Living Game Worlds, organizations such as theDigital Games Research Association, and an active blogculture that includes GrandTextAuto.org and ludol-ogy.org have arisen to absorb and facilitate this ener-gized discourse.

The industry demands an increasing supply of gradu-ates trained not as generic programmers, artists, or pro-ducers, but as specialists in the particular technologiesand techniques that drive the latest best sellers.Universities have responded to this demand with pro-grams that fall into two categories: game production andgame studies. At Georgia Tech, we are defining a thirdcategory, one that integrates technical and culturalknowledge by emphasizing research into the expressivepotential of games.1

PRODUCTION VERSUS STUDIESGame production programs focus on feeding the indus-

try and necessarily reinforce its current practices. Indeed,the success of a game production program lies in howwell it understands and responds to the industrys needs.

Game Design Education:Integrating Computation and Culture

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demand for these courses will produce more universityslots in the long run.

GEORGIA TECHS APPROACHAt Georgia Tech, we seek to combine the strengths of

both approaches. We teach digital game developmentfrom the perspective of older cultural practices, criticalhumanistic discourse, and an understanding of compu-tation as expressive practice.

We have a growing academic unit that emphasizes theintegration of theory and practicehoused within theSchool of Literature, Communication, and Cultureand offers graduate degrees in digital media. We alsoparticipate in two interdisciplinary degrees, an MS inhuman-computer interaction jointly with computingand psychology, and a BS in computational media jointlywith computing.

Students from all these degree programs can special-ize in game design, but they do so in the context of awider range of digital expression. They have the oppor-tunity to do internships at places ranging from ElectronicArts to CNN to the Museum of Modern Art. Withboundaries always in flux between games, online com-munities, art installations, and other digital genres, the

range of experience offers a wider paletteto our game design students and causesgames to permeate other research areas.

Blazing trailsGeorgia Tech was among the first uni-

versities to offer academic rather than pre-professional degrees in digital media. Theuniversity began offering the MS in infor-mation design and technology in 1993 andthe PhD in digital media in 2004.

The graduate curriculum rests on fourrequired core courses that give students agrounding in the history and theory of dig-ital media and in a core skill set that includesobject-oriented programming, visual cultureand design, moving images and 3D envi-ronments, and interaction design and infor-mation architecture. Students do not rely ona single skill set, such as programming orgraphic design, for their project work.Everyone learns to express themselves bothprocedurally and visually.

Our aim is not to create narrowly spe-cialized team membersalthough most ofour students have specialty-level strengthsin one or more areasbut broadly skilledprofessionals capable of prototyping theirown ideas, initiating projects, and leadingdesign teams. We weave the critical andhistorical approach to media through allthese courses, with the New Media Reader

serving as an important core text. A key theme of the courses is the noninevitability of

technological change, including the social forces and cul-tural values that drive invention in one direction oranother. Other themes include the formal conventions thatlink media and the specific affordances of digital mediathat lead to new conventions and expressive possibilities.

Courses are project-based, with students given ampleleeway to shape their own responses to an assignment.As Figures 1 and 2 show, many students respond to alltheir core assignments by developing games, whetherthe problem is a Java-based screen saver or a database-driven mashup of Google maps.

We also offer multiple game-specific courses at theundergraduate and graduate level, including GamesDesign as a Cultural Practice, Game Programming,Game AI, and related courses in Expressive Spaces,Experimental Media, and Interactive Narrative.

Focusing on researchThe programs research focus is expressed in the

required graduate course Project Studio, which providesmasters degree students with the opportunity to workon well-shaped problems in small, faculty-directed

Figure 1. OrigIN. Roshan Menons prototype game aimed at helping usersunderstand and appreciate some of the all-time classic arcade, video, andcomputer games.

June 2006 45

groups. Project Studios, hosted within the ExperimentalGame Lab (EGL), include work on machinima, proce-durally generated game spaces, and game ontologies.The Mobile Technology Group hosts a project studiothat focuses on mobile games such as the one shown inFigure 3, and the Experimental Television Group fre-quently works on games as well. Graduate studentsexposure to long-term, faculty-led research questionsresults in more productive masters projects.

The graduate programs centerpiece, the masters pro-ject, draws on the engineering and humanistic traditions:Students work within established research areas but areencouraged to initiate projects that express their owncreativity and self-directed goals.

The masters project makes up about half of the sec-ond years work, including one or more courses in thefall semester that support writing the proposal and twothree-credit courses in the spring semester devoted tocreating and documenting the project. Students mustdefend their projects at a one-hour public defense.

We have found that this emphasis on individual pro-ject work, combined with the ample opportunities forcollaborative work in other courses, consolidates themultiple skill sets the program aims to teach.2

HUMANISTIC FRAMEWORKOur program views electronic games as an evolving

genre, connected to older traditions of culture and rep-resentation. Game development requires a great deal ofspecific expertise. Vocationally focused university pro-grams and trade schools have seized upon the opportu-nity to supply the next set of technically trained personnelfor the game industrybut we must still determine whowill supply the next set of visionaries and artists.

Practical value?Students often ask humanists how a given course will

help them in the real world, especially when they arestruggling to find enough reason and will to get throughThomas Mann or Marcel Proust. There is an effectiveresponse to the charge that the humanities are useless,

Figure 2. Game prototypes. Prototypes such as (a) SimGame Atlanta and (b) Live-Work-Play explore the possibilities of usinggames to influence ideas and opinions on issues such as land-use planning, traffic, and water.

(a) (b)

Figure 3. MobileMallet. Created by the Mobile TechnologiesGroup, this project uses data from an accelerometer to create amobile version of the Test Your Strength game found at carni-vals everywhere.

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however. Fields like business, medicine, and computerscience seem practical because they are predictably use-ful: We can know in advance how to reap immediategain from them. By contrast, the humanities are unpre-dictably useful: We cannot know in advance how theymight serve us.

As the name suggests, the humanities help us under-stand what it means to be human, no matter the contin-gencies of profession, economics, or current affairs. Thehumanities offer insights into human experience that weneed when industries, armed forces, governments, gameengines, middleware, and all else fails. This is the knowl-edge that helps us recover fromheartbreak, make sense of 9/11,and understand betrayal. It is thisunpredictable usefulness, this post-poned fungibility in the humanitiesthat people so often mistake foruselessness.

In large part, education for thegame industry is predictably useful.Studios need skilled workers whocan write C++ code, model 3D objects, configure mas-sive networks, and perform a host of other practicaltasks. The International Game Developers Associations(IGDA) curriculum initiative provides many suggestionsfor educational standards of this sort, meant to createtechnical competence.

The game industry needs technically competent devel-opers, artists, and designers fundamentally versed in therich subtleties of human experience. This is perhaps themost promising and valuable collaboration academiacould provide the game industry: potential developers,artists, designers, and marketers with a meaningfulunderstanding of the human condition and the abilityto express themselves through video games. This col-laboration is less about the actual than the possible. Assuch, it requires a leap of faith, more on the part ofindustry than academia.

Expanding the fieldWe need to encourage others besides gamers to

express themselves through video games, such as artistswho have something to say about the world and theircondition in it and who choose the medium of the videogame as their muse. Well-known game designer and fre-quent industry detractor Chris Crawford has spokenoften about how the game industry has resigned itselfto perpetuating a niche market of young males. Often weresearchers and developers bemoan the industrys almostimpenetrable risk aversion, lamenting that no one seemswilling to take even the most nominal chance on a title.

The only way to get the industry to take risks on gamesthat explore the missing themes of human experienceheartbreak, anticipation, jealousy, despair, eternal hope,grief, and so many othersis to nurture inspired stu-

dents who can in turn inspire others with their vision.French philosopher Maurice Blanchot argues that thework itself leads toward inspiration, rather than inspi-ration leading toward the work; it is a leap of faith andyet we must use the possibility of finding inspiration asan impetus for searching.3 If academics can help instillinspiration, the industry will find itself compelled by itsundeniable humanity to take risks on unpredictably use-ful projectssome of which could become massive com-mercial successes.3

On the downside, this is a long-term project.Academia cannot commit to a return-on-investment

proposition for inspiration, talent,or art. This isnt just about reap-ing convenient rewards from uni-versity-funded experimental pro-jects, getting cheap labor throughinternships, or plucking brilliantdesigners out of short-term certifi-cate programs. Its about takingBlanchots leap of inspiration andproducing to find that inspiration.

Given industrys fast-paced, nonstop demands, this isan endeavor those in the ivory tower must undertake ontheir own, without permission or research funding fromgame developers or publishers.4-6

PROCEDURAL EXPRESSIONThe inquiry described as procedural expression pro-

vides the program with a major research focus: identi-fying which architectures, representational techniques,and design methods enable creation of richly interac-tive, generative experiences. The game industry isapproaching a development crisis caused by the overuseof nonprocedural assets such as hard-coded scripts, leveldesigns, textures, models, sounds, and animations.Contemporary games such as Electronic Arts The Lordof the Rings franchise contain more asset files than linesof code. Even open-world games such as the GrandTheft Auto franchiselauded for its simulated, proce-dural worldsstill heavily depend on static assets.

At the recent Game Developers Conference, develop-ers voiced concerns that next-generation game consolehardware will only exacerbate this content crisis. Thedemand for increasingly detailed graphics that willentice consumers into purchasing next-generation con-soles means that static assets become more expensive toproduce, requiring ever larger teams and making gamesmore expensive. At the same time, consumers want moregame play, meaning larger games, thus requiring evenmore assets to be produced, including graphics, hard-coded levels and scripts, and so forth.

Solving the content crisisBecause it enables new genres of interactive art and

entertainment such as high-agency interactive story-

In large part,education for

the game industry is predictably useful.

telling, procedural content offers traditional games theonly way out of the content crisis. Intimately related toAI research, procedural content requires expressingin machine-manipulable formknowledge, structures,and processes that describe cultural artifacts such ascharacters, stories, rhetoric, and visual aesthetics.

Interactive drama, a holy grail of game design, letsplayers interact with rich autonomous characters andexperience a dynamically constructed story that dependson their actions. Building an interactive drama requiressolving several challenging research questions in the fol-lowing areas:

autonomous characters, story management and generation, natural-language processing in the context of dra-

matic worlds, and deconstructing and re-expressing particular authored

experiences within the multiple AI systems for char-acter, story, and language.

Figure 4 shows Faade (www.interactivestory.net), agame developed with Andrew Stern and released in July2005, which provides the first fully produced interac-tive drama to integrate all these capabilities into a down-loadable, playable experience. Technologies developedfor Faade now serve as the basis for continuing researchprojects at Georgia Tech. For example, Georgia Techresearchers used the custom reactive planning languageABLA Behavior Language, pronounced abletoauthor the characters in Faade. To support futureresearch in autonomous characters, researchers haveintegrated ABL with the Unreal Tournament gameengine, and they have written several character exam-ples in the ABL/UT infrastructure.

Developers organize ABL characters as collections ofreactive behaviors. These behaviors mix dynamicallyover time as a function of a characters environment,including its interactions with other characters andhuman players. Currently, a characters behavior libraryis static. The individual behaviors themselves do notadapt and change over time, requiring the characterauthor to explicitly specify the complete details for allpossible character behaviors.

Work is under way to relieve some of this authorialburden, while still supporting authorial control, byextending ABL to support dynamic behavior genera-tion and adaptation. Ultimately, programmers will usethe application to write complex ABL programs andeasily specify behaviors where adaptation should takeplace.7-10

Managing dramaDrama management offers another productive area

for AI-based game research. This most commonapproach for authoring interactive storiesstill the state

of the art in the commercial game industryrequiresspecifying the interactive story structure as a graph,where nodes correspond to story pieces such as scenes,beats, and plot points, while arcs correspond to playerchoices that move the story from one piece to another.The story author explicitly specifies all possible pathsthrough the story. Unfortunately, the combinatorialnature of story graphs prevents authors from creatingstories that are richly interactive at the global level,although there may be sophisticated local interactionwithin individual story nodes.

In practice, graph-based interactive stories neverexceed a few hundred nodes and a few thousand links,and even at this scale they only find use in hypertextworks where each node is effectively static and thusrequires minimum implementation effort. Further, story-graph approaches do not effectively express soft con-straints. Connections between story nodes have dynamicauthorial preferences and cannot simply be denied orallowed.

Drama management poses the general research prob-lem of replacing story graphs with a story policy. Thispolicy consists of a story piece library, a model of thedesired story structure, and a story piece selection pol-icywhich, given the history of the players interactionso far, plus the story model, selects which story piecewill happen next.

Within the EGL, weve been exploring alternativedrama management approaches. Established in 2003,the EGL serves as a home for interdisciplinary researchin video games. In this lab, computer scientists, design-ers, and artists work together to push the boundaries ofexisting genres and create new electronic game genres.To accomplish this mission, the EGL pursues three inter-woven strands:

June 2006 47

Figure 4. Faade interactive drama. By combiningautonomous, believable characters with dynamic plotconstruction, the game gives the player an opportunity to helpresolve the hosting couples marital difficultiesor make themworse.

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novel game designs that create new player experi-ences;

new technologies, particularly AI technologies, thatenable previously impossible designs; and

investigations of how games function as a medium,including social, cultural, and representational gameaspects.

The EGL houses game research for multiple faculty.Additionally, the game library and game playing equip-mentthe EGL has every majorcontemporary and historical gameconsoleserve as resources for ourgame classes. When representativesof game studios visit our campus,the EGL helps convince them thatGeorgia Tech is serious aboutgames.

In the context of the EGL, manystudent projects aim to create newmodels for procedural content:

Brian Hochhalters Triad is a generative turn-basedinteractive story that draws on anime conventionsto create an interactive high school romance.

Nolan Lichtys Swarm General is a real-time strategygame that seeks to solve the micromanagement prob-lem by providing players with a GUI interface for cre-ating condition-action rules for autonomous troops.

Lakshmi Jayapalans Wide Ruled is a GUI authoringframework intended for nonprogrammers to creategenerative interactive stories based on the Universestory-generation framework.

Kate Comptons Infinite Challenge is a procedural-level generator for platform games that uses heuristicsfor modulating game play challenge.

The Game Ontology Project is developing an ontol-ogy for game design. This ontology will serve as aconceptual aid for game analysis and design, andgame generators could use formalized versions of it.11

Generating gamesResearch in game generation seeks to build AI systems

that make design decisions with respect to a games rules,physical layout, and visual representation. The smallamount of prior work in this area tends to be limited tochesslike and tile-based games on the academic side, andto relatively shallow-level generators that randomlycombine large-scale human-authored pieces on the com-mercial side. The goal of game-generation research isnot to replace human designers, but rather to

move human design up the abstraction hierarchy,and thus get a content multiplier by enabling authors

to specify processes that generate concrete content; facilitate formal game analysis by computationally

operationalizing game rules, mechanics, and repre-sentations; and

enable new game mechanics and game genres wherethe game dynamically morphs and changes as a func-tion of player interaction.

Current work focuses on a game-generation project inthe area of serious games, specifically political games that

function as political speech. Bycombining earlier work on com-putational models of ideologicallybiased reasoning in the context ofstory generation with current workin political games, these efforts aredirected at creating a case-basedreasoning framework in which thesystem dynamically generates aseries of minigames that take theplayer on a tour through the ideo-

logical space associated with a political issue. The specificgames generated are a function of how the player hasplayed previous minigames in the sequence.

Students who have participated in EGLs research pro-jects have gone on to careers in the game industry. Wehope they are equipped with more than the skills thatwill make them immediately useful to their employers.Having worked on games that push the boundaries ofthe form will, we believe, give them an approach todesign innovation that will not merely launch theircareers but last them throughout their professional life.

DIVERSE APPROACHES Faculty in the Georgia Tech Digital Media program

actively participate in many research communities, fromgame studies to electronic arts to IEEE and ACM inter-est groups. Even within a single research agenda, suchas that promoted by the Digital Games ResearchAssociation (DiGRA), developers are clearly tacklingthe field of game studies and research from several dif-ferent approaches and, by and large, all offer somethinginteresting. No single theory describes video games intheir totality. Instead of narrowing the field by definingit, games research has only made clear that the phe-nomenon of digital gaming is spreading across a rangeof areas.

Teaching diversityLacking a single perspective on games, our teaching

must mirror that diversity. In principle, Georgia Techbalances teaching and research time, and the facultymaintains different but complementary approaches andresearch foci. This provides a constant reminder thatsomeones approach is not the only orthodox alterna-tive. This diversity also infuses new ideas into our work

Students who participate in EGLsresearch projects are equipped

with more than the skills that will make them immediately

useful to their employers.

and teaching, challenging us to explain ourselves betterto our shared students and to one another.

Instead of providing a one-track pipeline optimizedfor a single approach to games, the Georgia Tech pro-gram offers a range of perspectives, emphasizing con-nections with poetry, art installations, human-computerinteraction, interactive television, film studies, sciencestudies, information design, and computer science.What we praise as todays cutting-edge game studiesmight be just a fading snapshot of a developing community.

For Georgia Tech to make goodon its claim to educate tomorrowsinnovators, teaching todays toolsand methods can be only part ofthat education. Academia must beprepared to step beyond the statusquo. Applying, adjusting, andreshaping these tools to newexpressive possibilities demandsgreat flexibility from the facultyand the institution.

Making machinimaMachinimawhose producers use the images ren-

dered by real-time 3D engines such as computer gamesto create cinematic pieces of instant computer anima-tionserves as one example. These results can vary inform and function from a live performance, to eventspresented in-game, to traditional video clips and othermix forms. Usually, the game engine effectively operateslike a virtual film studio, providing access to virtual light-ing, staging, and camera work.

Direct access and low costs make machinima a flexi-ble and accessible technology. Filled with promise andrapidly developing, this technique is driven by technicaladvancements that make production easier and morestable while spreading the practice to a wider range ofless technologically versed producers.

The results of widespread machinima productionshow how the computer is maturing as an expressivemedium. Machinima pieces have touched on obviousgame-related issues in their own way, dealt withintensely personal experiences, and addressed widerpolitical topics.

Although it is one of several evolving cultural prac-tices, closely connected to games but breaking existingboundaries and adding something new, machinima hasnot yet consolidated itself on a technical or conceptuallevel. Its brief history is made up of artistic milestones inthe form of landmark productions and technical inno-vations such as the release of essential coding tools, edi-tors, new 3D engines, or new games. Even machinimasdefinition is temporary and incomplete.12 Machinima isinventing itself, and the resulting flexibility of its formposes a teaching challenge.

There are exceptionally few machinima academicpublications to build on. Further, the technology changesyearly with the release of tools such as the Unreal 3engine and landmark titles such as Half-Life 2 and TheMovies.

Work on machinima at Georgia Tech involves severaldifferent approaches to absorbing this new material. Weteach machinima in required courses within the cur-riculum, as well as in special topic electives and semi-nars. Joint courses between the College of Computing

and the School of Literature,Communication and Culture(LCC) also teach it.

From within LCC, we contextu-alize machinima in the widerframework of film theory and his-tory, but the conceptual work isdone in parallel with practical pro-totyping and production. As inmost of our courses, we presentmachinima in the context of criti-

cal analysis and experimental practice. The changingtechnology, developing aesthetics, and design issues ofmachinima call for courses that can shift easily betweencoding, 3D modeling, and theory.

Balancing teaching and researchThe Georgia Tech experience underscores that teach-

ing and research must remain balanced to allow for acurriculum that can accommodate innovation. Topicslike machinima can only be kept fresh if their teachersremain involved in the research and connected to emerg-ing communities of practice. A topic like this is too flex-ible to be cast into one definitive curriculumextrudingthe core topics for game studies is difficult enough.

As IGDAs sample curriculum states: There is no silver bullet approach (www.igda.org/academia/curriculum_framework.php)bullets are flying every-where. Thus, faculty and curricula must remain on themove to foster future changes. Keeping them heavilyinvolved in research facilitates this and helps pull stu-dents into faculty members research projects. GeorgiaTechs relatively short-term exposure to machinimaresearch indicates that such student involvement neednot stop at the PhD or masters level but can effectivelyextend to undergraduate students.

Research in machinima has found a home within theEGL and has been the subject of individual masters pro-jects as well as the focus of both group research projectsand creative work at the undergraduate and graduatelevel. That the entertainment industry should see this asa new way of generating content is not surprising, andwe are pleased that Turner Broadcasting has fundedsome of our research.

In addition, our experience reinforces our belief thatgame studies constitutes an expanding research category.

June 2006 49

The game engine effectively operates like a virtual film studio, providing access to

virtual lighting, staging,and camera work.

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We must look beyond the state of the art in games. Whatlooks to industry like the bleeding edge might be onlya threshold for further exploration when seen from acad-emias longer historical viewpoint and inquisitively exper-imental perspective. Exploration cannot be limited bythe commercial roots of the traditional game industrybut must follow the less restricted experimental form.

In machinimas case, the legal issues of engine licens-ing and commercial use of its arti-facts present a major drawback forfurther commercial development.Although some changes and differ-ent marketing models have beenintroduced, intellectual propertyrights remain an obstacle. Aca-demia operates largely outside suchcommercial restrictions and offersa free arena for exploration.

Whatever machinimas trajectory is as a media for-mat, it remains closely connected to game studies, notonly in terms of technology but also as a developingexpressive practice in need of further improvement. Italso presents one example of the challenges posed by thedynamic nature of game studies and game curricula.

G ame studies, as a humanistic discipline, has nodefined limits to its coverage, no single methodol-ogy, and no clear historical boundary. Games dateto before the dawn of written history and connect us,through play behaviors, with our prehuman ancestorsand our fellow animals of almost every species. The studyof play, only about 50 years old, has generated a merehandful of books that offer a theoretical approach toplaying and games. Indeed, one of the key texts is LudwigWittgensteins famous pronouncement that the categoryof games contained so many disparate items, from chessto Ring Round Rosy, that it was meaningless.13,14

We can argue that games play a formative role in thedevelopment of human intelligence and human commu-nity at the evolutionary and the individual level15,16 andthat electronic games make us smarter.14 But electronicgames are more popularly understood to reinforce anti-social behaviors and induce addiction. Combating thisperception is another area in which the games industryhas enlisted the help of academics, with mixed results.

It seems likely that scholarly and preprofessional inter-est in games will rise with the continued growth of thegame industry, the increase in games aimed at adults,the spread of game patterns into education, the growthof multiplayer online games, and the increasing combi-nation of television with online gaming. For themoment, game developers and academics share morelines of open communication than filmmakers and filmschools do. There are conferences and symposia thatdraw people from both cultures, although the Game

Developers Conference is priced too high for academicsto participate in great numbers.

Game researchers share a common sense of the needto define a critical language for talking about games anda common focus on expanding the practice.17 Gamedevelopers and academics also share a common distastefor the values of corporate management, widely agree-ing that the industrys emphasis on higher-resolution

graphics and more expensive tech-nologies in the service of clichdand derivative contentoftendrawn from other genresfre-quently results in unenjoyablegame play.

In short, the creation of a cur-riculum around games is an emerg-ing practice in which research andeducation, theory and practice, art

and commerce, and existing disciplinary boundaries allcontinue changing in challenging and unpredictable ways.For us at Georgia Tech, our commitment to humanisticframeworks that connect this emerging environment tolonger traditions of human culture provides our steady-ing orientation. We participate in all these arenas fromthe perspective of theorists and practitioners eager toadvance digital games not as an industry or theoreticalfocus, but as an expressive practice in our own hands, inthe hands of our students, and as a collective humanisticpractice.

References1. I. Bogost, Licensed Aesthetics: Implications of FPS Game

Engining, Doom: The First-Person Reader, M. Bittanti andS. Morris, eds., Costa & Nolan, 2005.

2. J. Murray, Humanistic Approaches for Digital-Media Stud-ies, Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 June 2005; http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=vakqaf53cpmq7l5eyitrmxitv06pl5k.

3. M. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated by A.Smock, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989.

4. I. Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Crit-icism, MIT Press, 2006.

5. I. Bogost, Comparative Videogame Studies, Games andCulture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 41-46.

6. I. Bogost et al., Asking What Is Possible: The Georgia TechApproach to Games Research and Education, Intl DigitalMedia and Arts Association J., vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 59-68.

7. M. Nelson et al., Declarative Optimization-Based DramaManagement in the Interactive Fiction Anchorhead, IEEEComputer Graphics and Applications, vol. 26, no. 3, 2006;www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/CGA06.pdf.

8. M. Mateas and A. Stern, Structuring Content in the FaadeInteractive Drama Architecture, Proc. Artificial Intelligenceand Interactive Digital Entertainment, AAAI Press, 2005; www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasSternAIIDE05.pdf.

Our experience reinforces our belief that game studies

constitute an expanding research category.

9. M. Mateas and A. Stern, Natural Language Understanding inFaade: Surface-Text Processing, Proc. Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE),2004; www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasSternTIDSE04.pdf.

10. M. Mateas and A. Stern, A Behavior Language: Joint Actionand Behavioral Idioms; www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasSternLifelikeBook04.pdf.

11. J. Zagal et al., Towards an Ontological Language for GameAnalysis, Changing Views: Worlds in Play, Digital Interac-tive Games Research Assoc.; www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/OntologyDIGRA2005.pdf.

12. P. Marino, 3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machin-ima, Paraglyph, 2004.

13. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The EnglishText of the Third Edition, Prentice Hall, 1958.

14. J.P. Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learn-ing and Literacy, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003.

15. J. Murray, Games as Joint Attentional Scenes, Worlds in Play,Peter Lang Press, 2006.

16. J. Murray, Toward a Cultural Theory of Gaming: DigitalGames and the Co-Evolution of Media, Mind, and Culture,Popular Comm., 2006.

17. J.H. Murray, The More We Talk the Smarter We Get: Con-versation between Game Designers and Researchers, IGDAJ., 2003; www.igda.org/columns/ivorytower/ivory_June03.php.

Janet Murray is a professor and the director of graduatestudies in the School of Literature, Communication, and

Culture at Georgia Tech. In addition to games, her researchinterests include interactive narrative, interactive television,and information design. She received a PhD in English fromHarvard University. Contact her at janet.murray@lcc.gatech.edu.

Ian Bogost is an assistant professor in the School of Liter-ature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. He isinterested in videogame criticism, videogame rhetoric (theuses of games for persuasion and expression), games aboutpolitical and social issues, and experimental game design.Bogost received a PhD in comparative literature fromUCLA. Contact him at ibogost@gatech.edu.

Michael Mateas is an assistant professor jointly appointedin the School of Literature, Communication, and Cultureand the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. His researchinterests are in AI-based art and entertainment, includinginteractive drama, story generation, autonomous characters,and game AI. He received a PhD in computer science fromCarnegie Mellon University. Contact him at michaelm@cc.gatech.edu.

Michael Nitsche is an assistant professor in the School ofLiterature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech.He works in the field of machinima, cinematic and theatri-cal aspects of games, and spatiality of 3D virtual environ-ments. Nitsche received a PhD in architecture from theUniversity of Cambridge. Contact him at michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu.

June 2006 51

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