It’s that time of year for academics. The time when we are frantically trying to finish our course planning for fall classes (done!) and do something…anything to make ourselves feel like we’ve made adequate progress on our research projects over the summer. Did we read enough articles or books, did we write enough words, are our interviews transcribed….and for some of us, did we play enough games?. Now that last part is a bit more non-traditional, but for game scholars it’s par for the course and often the hardest part of our research to get done.
That particular part of our research isn’t hard to get done because we’re bad gamers or because we don’t like the games that we are playing, but (for many of us) because we still find it hard to justify playing games as a part of our research. The notion of play as work is even harder for people (even people who do games scholarship) to wrap your head around than playing to learn can be. But work it is and amazingly it can feel more like work than other kinds of more traditional academic research at times. While I can read through and take notes on a theoretical book in 10 hours or less (hard to know for sure because books don’t have built in code that track hours read), researching a game requires that I play the game through fully once (if not twice) and for many games we are looking at 20-30 hours of gameplay/gamework (per playthrough) easily.
Every morning this week I have dropped my daughter off at school, come home, made coffee, settled into any overstuffed chair close to my tv/pvr/computer set up and fired up Uncharted 4. And then I sit there…listening to the music, staring at the start screen, checking social media, messaging game scholar friends on Slack about how real the struggle is…for at least an hour. And then when I realize (accept, acknowledge) the fact that I have just wasted the time that I could have spent playing through a chapter or two of Nathan Drake’s cliff jumping, witty quips, and ongoing battle with Nadine Ross, I start the game and start recording so that I can speak my field notes (yep, field notes like a “real researcher” or Nathan Drake) while I play the game without breaking momentum by pausing every few minutes to write down some interesting bit from the game or some connection that I’ve noticed to another game or an idea that I read somewhere.
All week I have forced myself to sit in that chair and ignore notifications that friends are playing other games that I would much rather be playing. Not because Uncharted 4 isn’t fun, but because Uncharted 4 is work.
*Ding* LuckyFriend#1 is playing No Man’s Sky.
Fuck! I bought No Man’s Sky days ago and I haven’t even had a chance to download it yet….maybe just a few…Nope, gotta get this playthrough done.
*Ding* LuckyFriend#2 is playing Grand Theft Auto 5.
Man! I love the music in GTA games. I suck at driving and I curse the whole time I have any stupid driving missions, but at least I get to listen to some kick ass music on the car stereo.
And then I realize something, we are right in the middle of traditional work hours on a weekday. LuckyFriend#1 and LuckyFriend#2 are also game scholars/critics/journalists and they’re probably sitting in their comfy chairs with a cup of coffee taking field notes and worrying about getting this last playthrough done before the semester starts again and envying their LuckyFriend who is chilling out and searching for treasure in Madagascar while playing Uncharted 4. At least until they realize that their lucky friend is probably not feeling so very lucky at all.
