TAG along
This article appeared in the fall 2012 issue of the Concordia University Magazine. To read the full issue, follow the link below.
Video games have come a long way since the introduction of Tennis for Two, created by physicist Willy Higinbotham in 1958. Who would have thought that what first started as an arcade and console game would become, over the years, an integral part of our popular culture?
Aside from their societal dimension, video games also have had a profound impact on individuals and have become the subject of psychological, sociological and anthropological analyses. These studies examine the importance of the current “technoculture,” that is, the way technology has played a critical role in reshaping how we act, communicate and interact with each other — and are the focus of Concordia’s Research Centre in Technoculture, Arts and Games (TAG).
Founded last year by the centre’s director, Bart Simon, and associate director, Lynn Hughes, TAG is a cross-faculty collaboration platform that gathers designers, artists, engineers, students and scholars from across all disciplines. Its home is in the Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex.
Simon, an associate professor of sociology, had been working on game cultures with anthropologists and sociologists for 10 years when he met Lynn Hughes, an associate professor in the studio arts, Concordia University Research Chair in Interactive Design and Games Innovation and associate dean of research and international relations in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Both shared an interest in exploring and building games; when they received seed funding from Concordia’s Office of Research in 2011, they initiated TAG.
TAG brings together faculty members and researchers from various backgrounds and disciplines who share a passion, interest and concern for 21st century gaming culture. As its website describes, they view digital games “as exemplary objects for cultural research, artistic creation, technical innovation and social mediation.”
TAG team
For many, such as TAG PhD student Adam van Sertima, (MA 11), its interdisciplinarity and openness make it a unique and particularly appealing place to conduct research. “By the contact of research methodologies, such as sociology, engineering, design and others, I was able to expand my thought beyond particular disciplinary boundaries,” he says. “Many people at TAG blog their work from its early stages, encouraging feedback from their colleagues and pretty much anyone interested.”
Simon adds that TAG’s success lies in the solidarity between the researchers who don’t hesitate to share their expertise with each other. “It’s about skills training, like ‘I know how to do this and you know how to do that.’ So it’s a help-each-other kind of a deal.” And in this process of learning from and with others, researchers and participants are strongly encouraged to share ideas and perspectives about a given topic. “The cool thing about games is that everybody knows what a game is,” Simon says. “This context is actually very productive for generating various kinds of discussions. Even if you fundamentally disagree, you don’t disagree about what it is that you’re disagreeing about.”
Therefore, in order to bring in a greater variety of perspectives, TAG has been actively recruiting individuals from a variety of Concordia departments, successfully bridging the Faculty of Arts and Science and Faculty of Fine Arts, as well as connecting design and programming students from computer science with creative writing students. “Sometimes they’re all working on the same project, sometimes they’re just working side by side,” says Simon.
TAG’s members aim to bridge the gap between traditional projects usually undertaken by researchers in humanities and social sciences, who try to understand players and interpret games, and modern research, which deals with creating new types of games. “Either they start to talk to each other and influence each other or they actually start working on projects together,” Simon adds.
And into that mix, TAG welcomes many who are either former students or real game developers from the community who deal with the political, economic and cultural realities of making games. “The conversations that take place at the centre are incredibly resourceful and productive,” says Simon. He wants to encourage this type of collaboration to make TAG “a part of the university that is slightly more edged into the community.”
Fun and Solidarity
One of TAG’s goals is to counter stereotypes. As the field of games research quickly grows, Simon underlines the importance of having centres like this to demystify what video games are. “There is a sort of public understanding about what a stereotypical game is and you find little of that here,” he says. “Some people talk about it more in terms of games as art. It’s even broader than that.”
Part of the stereotype is the idea that the world of gaming cannot be dissociated from the emergence and intensifying of a culture of violence. This idea is particularly dominant in the field of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, such as World of Warcraft, which has frequently been criticized for its addictiveness and blamed for being a potential training tool for spree killers. Research conducted at the centre illustrates that gaming culture does not necessarily have to be about violence; it can also and most certainly bring about amusement and solidarity among players.
Cases in point are studies at Concordia by Canada Research Chair for Game Studies and Design Mia Consalvo and her PhD students. They have focused on the positive socializing impact of Facebook games rather than on games’ so-called antisocial dimension. Another research project by Consalvo’s team explores how role-playing video games like Dragon Age handle ethical and moral dilemmas. Researchers found that in games where players must make decisions that will eventually affect the future of their virtual characters, about 80 per cent of the time they choose to play the game’s good person. “I’ve been really curious as to why that is,” Consalvo says. “The students are going to be doing more interviews to figure out what it is that’s pushing them because it’s going against that stereotype according to which people just like to kill things.”
Nonetheless, for Simon, concerns about violence in the gaming culture remain a reality. Yet he stresses that game research has grown to ask more fundamental questions about the importance of playing and the relationship between technology and play. It has also examined the influence of games on friendship and sociocultural values. “These are some questions you might already be asking about television, radio and film,” he says. “Now you will ask them about video games. The difference is that we’re young compared to the people who have been working on television, radio and films. So it’s a growing field around the world.”
Another popular perception of gamers is that they are couch potatoes, lazily sitting in front of their consoles all day. The projects undertaken at TAG on gestural games, connecting Wii and looking at what happens when the body becomes more implicated in playing games have already started to debunk this generalization. “It used to be that we sit in front of a screen; it’s really just your mind and your eyes that are engaging with the game,” Simon relates. “But the whole gestural revolution sees bodies moving around in spaces, and so we need new methods and new languages.”
That drove Simon and Hughes to create the game Propinquity. Each player attaches proximity sensors to his or her body and tries to get as close as possible to the opponent without touching. “One person is trying to get you and you’re trying to get the other person, so you’re kind of dancing and fighting at the same time,” Simon explains.
New roles
Through its research and practical applications, TAG transcends the traditional and occasionally negative image associated with the gaming culture. The goal is to provide the Concordia and greater community with the interactive, interdisciplinary and pedagogical dimension of video games. TAG highlights the idea that video games have truly become an inherent part of our lives. The studies grouped under the framework of its civic gaming project illustrate the critical role played by video games in citizens’ level of knowledge and interest in civic life. In another example, game users can time-travel back to the 19th century thanks to the Victorianator, an iPhone application created by Jason Camlot, (BA 90), associate professor and chair of the Department of English. The app links gestures to speech and poetry (see the Victorianator below).
The various TAG projects show that combining cross-faculty and complementary skills and knowledge can open a wide range of opportunities for the world of gaming, such as being a catalyst for social change. Visiting scholar Angelique Mannella is running a non-profit organization called Decode Global that seeks to bring people together to make technology applications for social change. She’s currently developing a game for an international non-profit organization. Now at the experimental stage, the game aims to raise awareness of the dangers related to wasting as well as the necessity to respect seas and oceans. “Games are a dominant form of storytelling and they can drive different behaviours,” Mannella says.
For Adam van Sertima, TAG’s success and future prosperity are mainly rooted in its openness to dynamic discussions, which he considers at the heart of any technological, cultural and artistic progress. “I have found here one of the most intellectual vibrant groups of people I have ever met,” he says. Its directors, faculty and students seem to be uniformly driven by a profound curiosity of what it means to play in a technologically advanced society. The generosity of spirit makes it a wonderful place to do academic work.”
Faculty and TAG member Peter Grogono, professor and acting chair of computer science and software engineering, emphasizes the centre has already succeeded in bringing Concordia to the forefront of Montreal’s prominent gaming culture: “I think that this centre is an excellent initiative — one of the things that make people notice Concordia.”
Victorianator
The Victorianator is an iPhone application designed to teach users to speak in Victorian English. It was developed in 2011 by Jason Camlot, TAG member and Concordia associate professor of English, and his LudicVoice research team of Concordia students. “We took specific gestures as they’re prescribed in Victorian elocution manuals and we put them at the core of our gameplay,” Camlot explains.
Users voice one of the three Victorian poems, in monotone, into the iPhone. The game’s steampunk-style robot shows how to gesture correctly along to the poem. “If you hit the gesture correctly, it triggers a ‘Victorian’ elocutionary effect on the monotone speech that you already recorded. Thus it ‘Victorianates’ your voice,” Camlot says. The app is available on iTunes.
Athena Tacet, (BA 09, GrDip Journalism 12) is a Montreal freelance writer.
Related links:
• Concordia University Magazine, fall 2012 issue
• TAG