The Universality Of Play
Although the Avedon Museum is maintained by the department of Recreation and Leisure studies, and its parent department in Applied Health Sciences, study of its contents is carried out by a broad array of specialists in Anthropology, History, Psychology, Mathematics, Systems Engineering, Military Science, Languages and Literature, Rehabilitation, and Computer Science - and that's the short list.
One of the challenges inherent in either studying or developing games is their intensely cross-disciplinary nature. Combine this with their status as the pre-eminent new media of this century, and the most difficult thing about starting a new academic game studies program is keeping other departments out of it. Games have applications in and employ the disciplines of nearly every academic department; they are, as Dr. Avedon says, simulations of our perceptions of reality, and, to date, no other expressive art form has their breadth and complexity.
But the concept of "play" is as old as sentience itself, and our drive to comprehend our world through play is as fundamental. "Everybody's trying to find order in their lives," Dr. Avedon says, and adds that this desire has only increased in modern times. "Games allow you to step back from the chaos and recapitulate that sense of recreation."
In the late '80s, Dr. Avedon taught an evening course at Columbia University called Introduction to Recreation. It averaged over 300 attendees - despite the fact that there were nowhere near 300 students in the Recreation & Leisure Studies program altogether. The majority came from other disciplines. "I found it intriguing which fields latched onto games," he said. Economics students, engineering students, they all found applications for the human study of play. And the computer science department was so incensed by the number of their students taking the course that they stopped giving credit for it.
High And Low Art
The study of games, specifically in the sociological field of "recreation studies," is not common. When they do study electronic media, scholars in this field have frequently flocked around television as the growing new media concern of the past several decades. In addition to speaking with Dr. Avedon about the museum and sociological study of games, I spoke with Dr. Roger Mannell, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences.
"People who develop television programs for children have the same concerns [as game developers]," Dr. Mannell said. He once was a columnist for the Canadian magazine Psychology and Life, and says that the most response he ever received to one of his articles was a piece on "immunizing your children against television" - a full-engagement approach to addressing the television scare that now seems remarkably similar to methods recommended by modern organizations like Common Sense Media for games. Engage your children, psychologists and sociologists said, and give them a context with which to process what they experience. It's taken years and a storm of redundant media fervor, but the "new" conclusion on videogames is identical: Talk to your kids.
