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Game Over

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By Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister

Old Ben, a cribbage buddy of ours with a Texas-sized Texas drawl and eyebrows to match, likes to say that "if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." Apparently, the same holds true for scholars in the nascent field of game studies: As we've discovered in our joint search for tenure-track appointments on the same campus, hiring committees seem to think that only a fool (or a foolish department) would lie down with us.

The job-hunting season is now over, and like so many of our colleagues and students, we too have been left at the proverbial altar. Despite the surprising (even remarkable) response to our dual search that we chronicled in our last column, we weren't hired. Sure, we were brought out for campus interviews, wined and dined, given all sorts of tours, and of course worked to death, but none of the universities we visited ended up offering us both jobs.

It's hard not to feel a little let down by the whole process, though admittedly the very idea of a joint search in the humanities is pretty out there. Folks just seem to have a difficult time wrapping their minds around why two nonromantically involved people would actually want to go on the job market as a dual hire and work together at the same institution.

Our story developed a small, suspicious following on the Web. "The cryptic references to marriage [in their article] have me wondering if their isnt [sic] something else going on there," writes drkaren on New Kid in the Hallway's "Is It Just Me..." blog.

"It's clearly a joke," she continues, "but still . . . am always suspicious of covert romantic activity!"

"I think they're a couple, or they're about to be," responded another poster authoritatively: "Notice that she [sic] writes about 'the fact that we're not really even a couple in the romantic sense of the term.' A tenured professor of English wouldn't use so many weasel words to say 'we're not a couple.' Like Dr. Karen said, the jokes about marriage are another clue. Then again, their names are both male. Maybe they worried about homophobia. I also think this is seriously weird, and I work in a field where collaboration is expected."

"Cryptic references"? "Covert romantic activity"? "Seriously weird"? Wow. We had no idea that face-to-face collaboration was so transgressive, or that writing about it was even more so.

You know you've hit the jackpot when peers start redirecting discussions of your ideas to things more acceptably taboo such as sex and psychosis. Is it wishful thinking to expect the networks to come calling about a reality TV show now that we've outed ourselves as an unrepentant scholarly team?

Anyway, our search failed for other reasons as well. For one thing, we overestimated academe's interest in the humanistic study of video games. True, colleges and universities across the country are rushing pell-mell to grab a piece of the game pie, but that rush seems to be more about pipelining students into industry jobs than helping them develop critical-thinking skills.

Ensuring that young people secure employment is a noble goal -- and in many ways the primary objective of contemporary higher education -- yet game-industry workers are among the most exploited high-tech laborers in the world. Call us crazy, but there's something disingenuous about channeling students into an industry without first teaching them to be critical of that industry's labor practices -- especially when those practices all too commonly include outsourcing game development and asset creation to cheap foreign markets, and exercising early-20th-century techniques of union-busting.

Ethics aside, academe's disinclination toward critical game studies was something of a revelation for us. After all, we've traveled all over the country and met scores of people studying a wide variety of game-related topics, including the way that ideologies are reproduced in interactive electronic entertainment, the concentration and consolidation of the game industry, the popular acceptance of game-rating systems and the governmentally produced manufacturing reports (both of which, incidentally, are heavily influenced behind the scenes by powerful corporate lobbyists).

If anything, our experience on the job market has shown us that academics of all stripes are keenly interested in understanding how games make and manage cultural and social meanings. Understanding video games is a big job. The medium and its industry are incredibly kinetic, with dramatic changes in technology, management styles, labor practices, distribution methods, marketing techniques, and consumer demographics happening almost yearly.

The way we see it, a new kind of scholarship is being born in the humanities, one that won't suffer the lone scholar. Game-studies practitioners may not necessarily need to know the intricacies of a "front-side bus" or how "programmable vertex processing" works, but they do need ready access to folks who do, folks who can help them figure out how such information impacts how stories get told, how history is remembered, and how human beings make their way through the emotional and psychological complexities of life. Game-studies scholars, in other words, must be ready, willing, and able to collaborate.

Despite an unsuccessful search, we're not all that discouraged. Hardly a day goes by in which we don't see newspaper articles, celebrity interviews, and concerned parents and teachers teasing out the cultural significance of games. Sooner or later we expect that institutions of higher learning will realize that teaching game-production skills needs to be complemented by the teaching of video games' relationships to history, psychology, political economy, world literature, public policy, language and media literacy, geography, religion, and so on.

When academe does come around, it will join a party that's already in full swing. Virtually every medium- and large-sized video-game developer maintains an impressive library filled with thousands of games, reference books, audio and video recordings, and periodicals from around the world. Commercial game developers know full well how important it is to understand the humanistic motivations underlying the development, distribution, and consumption of their products, and they work hard to turn those motivations into development strategies that improve profit margins.

In fact, the largest game developers -- sensing academe's predictable reluctance to proactively imagine how it might contribute in critical ways to an emerging but clearly steadfast new industry and artform -- have begun to step in directly, endowing faculty chairs, underwriting the creation of new tenure-track faculty lines, and spearheading industry/academy discussions at trade shows and academic conferences.

We've certainly learned a great deal this year, and unless some remarkable developments happen at our home institution, we'll put that knowledge to good use on the job market again in the fall.

We've seen enough to know that a dual hire is a real possibility. It's only a matter of time before administrators realize that while they may risk getting fleas by lying down with the likes of us, fleas are far more desirable than falling into a fearful decrepitude, alone but in a pristine bed.