Media Studies 2.0 and Video Game Studies

William Merrin's piece, ‘Media Studies 2.0: upgrading and open-sourcing the discipline’ examines how media studies academics have to reacquaint themselves with what they are studying and how they teach it. The discussion on this struggle reminded me of a more specific element of media studies, video games. This discipline was remarkable in its early days for the general lack of video game skills that those writing about the medium had. It was a serious problem and one not overlooked by the academics themselves.  Like Merrin said, they knew something was going on but were not young enough to know exactly what it was. This is in large part remedied now due to continuing academic evolution within the field, and perhaps because those who grew up with video gaming as a relatively more mainstream activity are now old enough to be academics themselves, and those early trailblazers have had enough free time in the last 20 years to expand their GTA skills.

But unlike video games, one problem for media studies is that one can’t be born late enough to be native to all changes in media, as they are occurring so rapidly.  The leaps in gaming have been more straightforward, less major. Improvements in graphics don’t smash the fundamentals of the medium. But perhaps a more crucial problem, and what seems to be a major gripe of Merrin’s, is that media studies falls back on outdated concepts and categories, while continuing to ignore, to varying degrees, “the engineering or scientific principles of its media” and technology. Video games studies, on the other hand, do not have outdated concepts and categories to fall back on because none exist for the discipline, it has no history. And its academics have never ignored the technology that underlines games. In this way media studies could maybe learn something from the less constrained, conservative approach of video game studies.