Impractical Research - How Academia Can Make Better Games - Extra Credits

over the last few years James has been a part of so many panels discussion groups and email chains about how to better integrate academia into the industry but all of them boil down to the same thing people saying wouldn't it be great if we had more psychologists to better understand player behavior or wouldn't it be nice to have more trained statisticians to help us look through our metrics but maybe this is the wrong way of looking at things maybe the best way to integrate academia into the game industry is actually to look for less practical research right now one of the biggest barriers to getting these two worlds to work together is that they move at very different paces in the few cases where the game industry does actually reach out to academia to help solve a problem the response is often great give us all your data and we'll get back to you in three years with our results this does not exactly work in the world of modern entertainment at

least not for practical problems if I need to balance an MMO economy understand some outlying player behavior or make sense of the reams of data a modern game pulls in every day that longer academic timetable does not help me but more than that these questions really aren't all that important with the exception of solving issues like player toxicity almost everything I have ever seen the industry try to reach out to academia for where things that would make a company a few more dollars maybe or perhaps make one game slightly better and that's great but that's not where we should be focusing our academic questions sometimes we're so heads down and making our games that we only see the tree in front of us and miss the forest entirely we keep trying to integrate academia for help with maths and Sciences because they're the obvious go twos for practical problems but what we really need help with are the impractical problems the problems with bigger issues the questions of morality

and art nobody's ever really done a great sweeping study on how story structure is composed in games we don't have the flocks of doctoral candidates doing scene-by-scene analyses of games like you do with film or literature heck see even calling it scene by scene analysis is using phrasing that does not work with this medium I don't even have the language to write this episode and that is something academia can help with just the idea of a scene by scene analysis of a game story is ridiculous story is built into all of the voice tabs and the mechanics the staffs and the powers the lore on the gear and the clues buried in the level design to understand characterization you got to dig into all of that to really understand how the narratives being told in a game we need people figuring out that structure we need people giving us methodologies for how to do that sort of analysis and giving us the language to speak about it when academia started doing this for film film got better when this really

started happening for literature we opened up a whole range of what was even considered possible with the literary form and yeah these studies probably aren't gonna be the kind of thing the layman reads they're not gonna be consumer facing stuff but they will be the things that game creators at least those dedicated to their craft will read and test and put into practice we are all gonna benefit from that and you know if that type of study takes half a decade that's ok that information will still be useful to us in five years but besides even that there are all sorts of moral questions that come up for James as a designer that he would love to see debated by people who have the training and the time to really think them through like when if ever our Skinner box is okay which Duty am i more obligated to as a game designer to make my product the most engaging it can possibly be or to try to create entertainment that can do absolutely no harm

how should I try to keep my biases and my worldview out of the art I helped to create should I try to do that is building my worldview into an interactive experience fundamentally different than building it into a static one where I'm just expressing my opinions at the audience I may disagree with some of the academic conclusions and in the end we are always going to come to our own answers on these things but it would be genuinely helpful to get a discussion going around them and to not simply take these questions as they come making gut decisions about them in the span of a day or a few hours and it would actually help us as a business to like we just did a whole long series on loot boxes if academia had already assembled a series of best practices for making ethical loot boxes and if EA had listened to them they probably wouldn't have just lost billions of dollars trying to simply grind money out of their audience for all that it would help to have people who are experts in a wide range

of academic fields maybe we've been looking at things wrong maybe we shouldn't be starting with the fields we consider the most practical the most pragmatic maybe we shouldn't start with the ones that we think might help us with our lowest level business concerns because academia is not really built for that and it's kind of a waste of the type of thinking academia is built for if we can embrace with open arms critical analysis of our work deep dives into the fundamental principles of how we tell stories how we evoke emotions or even just how we engage the human brain with this medium we're gonna make better games will make more kinds of games and will create games about things we didn't even realize we could opening up new markets and creating exciting possibilities for our existing audience and if we can answer moral questions with greater thought moral questions that may well become legal questions in the future we're not only gonna act better and be a more wholesome industry but we will also save ourselves from the

billion-dollar PR disasters we continuously get ourselves into by behaving poorly or by taking our customers for granted academia can be a great boon to this industry if we learn how to use it see you next week [Music]