Scott: I’m mainly involved in co-ordinating two classes that support the design classes, even though one of them has elements of design in it – and that’s the class that I’m teaching this semester called Game Form Style and Narrative. And what that is an investigation into game aesthetics and game history.

The class is limited to three aspects; the first section is on game history. We start right at the very beginning in the 1940’s during the early computer experiments that were conducted with games like Tennis for Two – pre pong days – and then Pong being the first commercial game, then move through console generation. So over 4 weeks we get pretty deep into the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of game history, not just simply 1976 Space Invaders – but also what was happening in the 1970’s what was happening culturally and economically that brought about games like this. So we look at these periods within games history and the types of games that were produces. The main focus is aesthetics, the idea of the juxtaposition of images and sounds in an animation framework.

Scott: I think for any person who wants to get into the creative aspects of game development or game design, it’s vitally important to understand the progression of the art form. How it came about originally, and how one idea builds upon another, and that it doesn’t just come out of nowhere – there is a long legacy of styles, approaches, animation, mechanics, story structure – and that’s really important for any art form.

Scott surrounded by gaming history

Scott: That’s right, things that have succeeded or failed, and why have they succeeded or failed? It’s important that the students know of these legacy games, which is easy these days with things like the virtual consol.

This class is very much a focus on games as text, so to try and understand that there are all sorts of games and it’s much more difficult than understanding the structure of films. We still haven’t got that sense of it because there’s such a vast difference between something like Portal and Guitar Hero.

Scott: Well that’s right, and that’s one of the other 3 aspects of the class, the idea of genre and cross fertilisation of genre, where it can succeed or where it’s not so effective. Those 3 elements – history, aesthetics, and genre – all come together. And story is part of the idea of narrative, which is one of the key debates: How to games implement story, and how they have implemented story over the course of games history.

Scott: You can definitely argue that, again you need to go back and say ‘what is a story, what is a narrative?’ Say for example you’re playing Space Invaders, and on the cabinet it describes some sort of intergalactic war ... so does that mean the game has a narrative? It’s given a narrative frame and you as a player accepts that, but when you’re playing the game itself the narrative has no bearing on that, versus something like Grand Theft Auto IV where the narrative is incredibly important.

So that’s one course that I teach, which takes up about half of my brain space, and the other one is Game Culture, which is everything outside of the game essentially.

So I’m lucky to have these two main areas, alongside with Jeff handling the Industry, but mine is more from a cultural studies angle. How people interact with game culture.

Scott: That’s part of it, the idea of games as a popular medium. Obviously there’s a big focus on MMORPG’s and the complexity of that, so we spend probably about a third of the class on MMO’s, but there are other ways too. The idea of Xbox Live Arcade, the social and cultural elements of going to conventions, cosplay, independent game design, modding ... all of these aspects outside of the game, are covered in this class.