Video games in the English Department!?

Perhaps it's just the result of taking this seminar, or perhaps it's because I respect video games as a large part of American and especially international culture, but the idea of video games migrating into the English department doesn't phase me all that much. It seems only natural that the issues and forces at work within video games can easily be studied in terms of narratology, thematic representation, etc. In my critical theory class the other day, the topic of video games came up, and someone mentioned that they had heard of a video games course (this one) being offered. The class began to go wild with theorectical "insights" into why it was positive or negative to have video games as a part of the English department at Loyola University. One person, rather angrily and with a tone of resentment blurted out that they would "love to study wrestling for the narration and plot that stands behind it". Well...
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_comparative_media_studies.php
eat your heart out! (Thanks for the link Dr. Jones)

But on a serious note, this is not anything new. We have talked about this debate in our class, and it even came up in my final project as a large part of what we talked about with Matt Kirschenbaum. I must admit, that I kept my mouth closed until the end because I was deeply interested in hearing just what it was that my fellow English majors thought constituted the pros and cons of this form of study. The problem that my classmates were interested in was similar to what we have addressed in class. One thing, was simply that they couldn't understand how it was that the study of video games pertained to anything within the English department. Some proponents of video game studies were quick to point out that video games for the most part comprise of largely narrated story lines, just like many novels and that they also offer their players a means by which to interact with the plot that they are immersed in. One classmate noted that playing some video games is very similar to reading one of those choose your own ending books. Another was quick to note that while that was true, video games offered a seemingly unending amount of interpretations of the narration of the plot itself simply by means of having some sort of agency in the form of the player holding the controller. It was an excellent discussion and I think in the end, most people were relatively open to the idea of video game studies as a form of study within some area of the college.

That was the other point that was made quite frequently. There seems to be a deep seated fear within the English major that it is being overtaken by cultural studies; that the emphasis is no longer on the literart canon per se, but rather on the way that literary works interact and involve culture. Harold Bloom is the author that we had read for the day and subsequently the cause of the discussion that ensued. Bloom embodies the fear of cultural studies in that he predicts that at some point, there will be English departments with close to no students, because they will all be sick and tired of the major because it will not have a defined canon to study. He says that the rate at which cultural studies and cultural criticism are moving into the field of English studies, they will overpopulate and force the canon out, "reduc[ing] the aesthetic to ideology, or at best metaphysics".

Terry Eagleton on the other hand argues a much different point concerning literature. He makes the interesting assertion that "value-judgements...seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what is not". His most interesting assertion is that he wonders if there won't be a time when we discover "a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences" and "recogniz[ing] that these concerns were utterly remote from our own..began to read the palys again in the light of this deepened knowledge". He asserts that upon doing so "one result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them on the light of our own preocupations".

This idea really hits home with me. I was wondering just what it is that makes video games so unattractive to the English major given this idea. When we think about what it is that video games mean to us, now, in our present time, I think that it becomes clear that they are not all that divorced from the meanings that we can derive from ancient Greek tragedies. Not to mention the myriad of paratextual documentation that comes with each form of study... I think that the evidence for the validity of studying a topic such as video games in the English department is found in the quick paralells that many people easily draw between the narratives and the agency, as well as the issues of authorship and paratextuality that we have brought up in class this semester.


I figure that since I quoted some authors, it's probably best to have a works cited page...so here goes:

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. Modern Literary Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Modern Literary Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh.