[Jason Thompson speaking]: First I try to disabuse them of the idea that … like I give this advice to graduate students who are applying to PhD programs. Are you going to be a different person if you get accepted here? Is global warming going to go away? Like, you are going to be the same messed-up person you are the day you start your PhD program. So if your letter is all about how it’s already reformed you into the vision of your true self that you always hoped you would be, you’re doing it really for the wrong reasons. 

And I feel, and I could be wrong, that students who want to get into gaming want, like my actor friends in undergraduate, a very particular type of acting, a very particular type of gaming. I have business students who all wanted to be buyers for Nordstrom. So, do you want to study business or do you want to be a buyer for Nordstrom? Because I don’t know how many buyers there are at Nordstrom, but it seems kind of a glamourous, insider part of that world that maybe you wouldn’t start at. You know? Like it’s kind of the difference between what you want and the difference between … and what you say you want. 

So I find that once students … we start analyzing video games, we first have to find some kind of methodological theory. That’s how I approach it, anyway. You could do different things. And though students will have a kind of new appreciation for the theory and the given artifact, that’s being used, there’s this kind of romanticism about games. Games seem to still occupy the … it’s like the middle finger to your parents job you could have. You know, beer taster. It’s kind of a … It’s not a real job but somehow it would prolong your American arrested … your prolonged adolescence into infinity. 

But when we’re actually talking about how to study them, that’s a whole different thing. And so, if you want to study games, I advise students to obviously play a lot of games. But get familiar with some studies. I mean, there’s Aristotle and Adorno and Horkheimer and there’s Ken. There’s semiotics. What are you going to use to illuminate that object or what are you going to contribute, right, of your own? If students want to make games—I looked this up last year; there’s almost 400 programs in the country now—to make games, to be a game developer and that explains the worthless degree tag we saw at the last session. Like the MFA program, the MFA degree, there is no way anyone who participates in that economy can’t come to the realization that they are churning out far more than positions. So that disequilibrium suggests something is amiss. 

You’re either harnessing in a cynical way misguided dreams of youth or you are .. you firmly believe there’s a chance for everyone to realize their dreams or whatever that kind of language is. You can … I agree with that premise; I have students make games in my rhetoric class with all freeware on university machines that are old and if they are uncomfortable with coding or off the shelf stuff, which is very easy, they can make paper-based games; they can make an ARG. They are many options. I once made a game through Excel. It was chess Excel. I figured out … this was a way that my friend at Neiman Marcus could play chess with me and I was at a different insurance company in New York because we were exchanging Excel spreadsheets to get through firewalls and all it did was drop chess into an Excel spreadsheet, which was amazing.

Where is all this going? Studying games as cultural artifacts is very hard because it almost always involves theory. I don’t see how it can’t. That’s how I understand it. And that’s not the investigation of the games as an industry. Although it shouldn’t be. So I think every student should start with Aristotle and Huizinga and Callois and the Frankfurt School and Adorno and Horkheimer and [unintelligible] and then whatever contemporary person they really like. They should study media, film, they should study narrative, they should know all of it, and they should play games. But that’s a whole lot to ask of anybody. I don’t know that a twenty-year-old could make a commitment. I don’t know that I would have at twenty. I doubt I would have.