Teaching Video Game History: A Challenging Reality
Imagine being a student and one of your classes is on video game history; reading material includes interviews with developers, or perhaps analyzing old games mags, and the homework assignments are to play specific classic games. Oh, and the school has a library of 200 highly acclaimed examples, freely accessible. Sounds like a dream, right? Or an indulgent fantasy from a Saturday morning cartoon you might have watched in the early 1990s. But it is, in fact, reality!
The Purpose of Research and Education
With all our recent coverage of the History of Games 2024 conference, comprising over 60 distinct talks, you might be asking yourself why? What is the point of all this research? Why organize a complicated array of overlapping panels over three days? The conference can’t have been for you, retro enthusiasts and mainstream readers, because, as we’ve shown, the rest of the press didn’t give a damn. But equally, it wasn’t meant to be an enclosed bubble, either.
Connecting History with the Industry
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of teaching students about game history, we need to establish that the pursuit of all this enlightenment is – ultimately – intended to benefit the wider world, including the modern games industry. “One of the things I’m involved in is the Historical Games Network,” elaborates Dr. Webber, adding:
Challenges in Educating Students
Understanding how creativity arises makes sense, right? According to GamesIndustry.biz, “Video games to pass 0bn revenue, 3.8 billion players by 2030.” The cost to develop and the value of the market has grown to the point where we need to have solid foundational knowledge of methods and practices, and also the history, evolution, and genealogy of various games, genres, and stylistic choices.
Engaging Students with Game History
Basically, games are expensive, so you need to know what works, what fails, why it fails, and how games are uniquely special – they are capable of more than any previous human creative endeavor. Games are interactive and can incorporate visual art, sound, music, writing, acting, architecture, physics, economics, cooperation, competitiveness, sports, marksmanship, history, fantasy, folklore, abstract surrealism, exploration, geography, weather, mathematics, theology, politics, sociology…
Challenges Faced by Teachers
Teachers today face an impossible scenario, almost unimaginable to those of us who grew up in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. AI and ChatGPT have destroyed the value of essays as a form of evaluation since anyone can now generate bodies of text. Young people are so bombarded with media distractions that video games, to them, do not have the same meaning they once had for us.
