Video Game Studies

Dismissed, mocked, feared or loved for decades, video games have become a staple of contemporary media, art, and popular culture, studied alongside traditional print media and film. They eclipse the global yearly revenue of both film and music industries combined, leaving their financial significance undeniable. What remains understudied, however, is the political and cultural significance of the medium. The Working Group in Video Game Studies offers a collaborative space for the intellectual and playful exploration of video games as aesthetic, technological, cultural, and political objects.

Several questions animate the founding of this working group: Why do video games matter? How do players “perform” various identities in games, and how might they resist or subvert expected performances? What themes and ideas are revealed uniquely, effectively, inadequately through the medium of video games? What are the political implications for the ideologies present in a video game given the globalized position of the medium? How do video games exist as one part of a much broader media and technology ecosystem, including their imbrication in the (post-)Cold War military-industrial-entertainment complex?

We seek to explore these questions, and more, through a series of bi-weekly meetings. For each meeting, one member of the working group will select an object (a secondary reading in theory, an essayistic piece, a video game, etc.) that will be distributed to the group one week before the meeting. That member will then guide a discussion of the object during the meeting. They might do this by delivering a summary of their interest in the object, offering a set of guiding questions for the larger group discussion, or perhaps some other creative means of engaging with the object and its associated topics. Video games must be studied as both crucially important technological and cultural objects, and we hope that this working group will mark only the start of more sustained efforts to take video games seriously at Yale and beyond.