The Computer Games Journal | 2019
Broadening the Scope and Application for Computer Games Scholarship
Abstract
As I write, the winners of the British Academy (BAFTA) Games Awards have just been announced to an expectant audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, England. Many years have passed since I attended the first ceremony in London. The winners then included Grand Theft Auto, Legend of Zelda, Call of Duty, Eye Toy, FIFA Football and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Most of these would be as familiar to today’s gamers as Come Dancing, Dr Who, Friends and the Big Bang Theory are to an ageing audience of television-watchers. To retrogress further, in the early 1990’s a call went out for proposals for a future forum hosted by the eminent Computer Science department at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The aim was to find a way forward for what was being perceived by many as a subject field, although founded just fifty years earlier, that was now showing signs of premature ageing. In particular the scope and depth of CS research was seen to be ossifying into purely code-related issues. Many academics submitted papers from across the United Kingdom, and I was fortunate to be one chosen to present. The topic was Computing as a Social Science and the gist was that there was a significant area of future scholarship in considering the societal effects of information technology. This was voted second at the close of proceedings. The best idea was from Portsmouth University, England for complete simulations of the sub-200-neuron brains of invertebrates in order to model completely the natural intelligence apparatus of an entire observable organism. Looking around today at the core CS curricula, there is little evidence for purposeful diversity in teaching beyond the long-established central subject field. The Computing Science BSc of today is not dissimilar to undergraduate studies in the 1970’s—except for the languages and platforms. This is clearly not bad per se, but the lack of relevance of much scholarly research in the field has proceeded much as was prophesied and feared by the twentieth-century organisers of the Edinburgh future forum. Almost all purposeful research and development in CS now takes