Video Games
Computer games constitute a possible area of inquiry in future digital humanities scholarship. James Coltrain and Stephen Ramsay, both of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, define a video game “as an interactive digital work designed to impart a particular experience or set of experiences that are dependent on the player’s interactions”. Computer games are also a form of virtual reality simulating aspects of reality or imagined reality. There is significant overlap between the objects and concepts studied by humanists and the complex processes that are expressed by these games. Examples include the social interactions of simulation games, such as The Sims by Maxis/Electronic Arts, or the large, complex systems of Sid Meier’s Civilization multiplayer strategy game. Coltrain and Ramsey use the term scholarly game to denote games whose simulation and interactive aspects suggest humanistic lines of inquiry (Coltrain & Ramsay, 2019).
Although these scholarly games include traditional game challenges, they are also “serious games”, as their purpose is not only to provide entertainment, but also to express and exemplify both the satisfying and unsatisfying aspects of the real-world.
Humanities scholars can employ game-like simulations by creating their own experimental spaces that reflect their own theories, and then allowing users to experiment with and interact with those environments. Coltrain and Ramsay describe the example of the indie game Kerbal Space Program or Besieged, which challenges players to accomplish a specified goal given a set of tools with which to solve a problem. The designers can then analyze the solutions devised by the players, some of which may not have been conceived by the designers themselves. Because interactivity is one of the most defining characteristics of computer games, these games allow the player to choose among many options and to explore a variety of interpretations crafted by the game designer. In this way, computer games are “explorable environments”, encouraging players to take their own approaches to solving problems, with the outcomes of this exploration depending on the decisions and actions taken by the player. Such exploration would depend on the player’s own decisions. In the words of Coltrain and Ramsay, these exploration-based games provide “compelling examples of intentionally designed user agency”.
The simulation and interactivity of games themselves suggest new lines of scholarly inquiry. For instance, the researcher and players could assess the theory of the game proposed by the researcher, and based upon the results of the game, the simulation itself can be critiqued, especially if the game is too easy or the results are unusually good. As another example, players may more fully appreciate the inventiveness of ancient civilizations if, in a game, they must build a pyramid using only tools available to those civilizations. The experiences of these players in achieving the goal may per se evoke a novel topic for scholarly humanistic research. As Coltrain and Ramsay state: “…games could provide a vehicle for modeling humanistic theories in a way that more closely resembles the diverse variety of subjective human experiences”. Because of their interactivity, unique ability to present a compelling sense of space and time, and through sensory stimuli and queues, such as sound, colour, graphics, and (sometimes) tactile feedback, “games can add vibrant and dynamic context to interpretations that would be difficult to express on the page” (Coltrain & Ramsay, 2019).
Furthermore, game media provide historical perspective and promote new lines of inquiry. For instance, Matthew Kirschenbaum, a leading digital humanities scholar and Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, used digital tools to investigate the code of a game found on a floppy disk – a predecessor to CD-ROM storage – and found that the disk contained code that was “deleted”. In digital media, data are not technically deleted, but the parts of the physical media on which the old data reside are marked by the operating system to be overwritten. In other words, if the “deleted” data is not overwritten by new data, it is still readable with specialized digital tools. After some forensic research, Kirschenbaum discovered that the game on the disk was a modification of another game originally stored on that disk. That is, the new game was created from a copy of an older game. Consequently, games themselves, and the media on which they are stored, provide fertile areas of research for digital humanists (Owens & Padilla, 2021).