The blogosphere is atwitter regarding the new course approved for British students on the history of video gaming. Games-Digest.com (“The UK and Europe’s premiere site for news, reviews, and opinion on games”) says:
Why did I have to bore myself senseless reading accounts of the political instability of early twentieth century Europe and trying to understand Albert Camus’s existentialist philosophies when I could have been sitting down to a feverish study session of early LucasArts adventure games.
Luke Plunkett over at Kotaku says, “Expect enrolments to be somewhat popular.”
My take: this is merely a continuation of the trend in taking various aspects of video games seriously as academic endeavors. In the D/FW area, when SMU offered a master’s degree in video game development, it was big news. The imprimatur of a major university bestowed upon a graduate degree involving video games? It just goes to show that most all things eventually are deemed worthy of study in academia. Even video games.
References
Ingham, T. (July 26, 2007). Government to introduce ‘video games GCSE’. [Online]. Available: http://www.mcvuk.com/news/27874/
Government-to-introduce-video-games-GCSE
July 27, 2007 at 9:08 am |
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