‘How do we understand histories of technology? How do we understand the very process of making sense of cultural histories?’ These are just two of the many questions posed in the classroom by Raiford Guins, the professor of the Video/Computer Game History and the Video Games Culture courses at Stony Brook University.
‘Games are the newest form of popular culture that the university is now taking seriously,’ Guins said.’ Across the country, some of the most academically acclaimed universities, ‘such as N.Y.U., U.S.C. and Georgia Tech offer degrees in games, or interactive media’ and S.B.U., M.I.T. and the University Of Michigan all offer rigorous courses based on video games.
Stony Brook University has a new cutting edge of the study of the newest media forms. As Professor Guins said about Stony Brook’s video game classes, ‘We have five, we have the two taught by myself, we have two taught in computer science’hellip;there is also a games course in technology in society’hellip;it’s an important medium’hellip;I would anticipate more games courses in the future.’
Video games are their own art, and one can study them from a variety of different perspectives aside from just the historical one. Professor Guins rifled off the ‘narrative [perspective], the play, interactivity, reflections of societal issues, the sound and the design process’ without even thinking about the question.
Professor Guins addressed the legitimacy of studying video games academically.’ ‘Legitimization is always an issue with popular culture,’ he said.’
Guins elaborated on the tremendous surge in the study of film media over the last couple of decades. ‘there is a hierarchy’ and for a while television classes were not taken seriously, despite the legitimate film studies programs that provided them.
Video games are quickly earning the respect of the academic world. However, as the impact that games have had on popular culture and society cannot be denied, for they are seen everywhere (just look at what lies hidden in every cell phone’s memory).
This puts a level of importance on the study of the history of video games, as many of the original games, systems, computers and yes, even arcades, have become extinct within a few short decades. Preservation of video game artifacts seems to have been overlooked, and Professor Guins is one of many who are now scrambling to preserve whatever knowledge and physical history that can be salvaged, studied and taught.
Despite the relative newness of video gaming, the history course depicts ties that easily date back as far as claw machines in the 1800’s. Nearly every household in the United States has some form of video game device, or at least has had children that were raised in part by playing video games somewhere.
