Game Studies funding

Now that I’ve covered the arguments for and against the public funding of video games research, should we actually publicly fund more games research? While researching the topic I have found that hey, it already is a thing in the humanities called ludology, the study of(-ology) games(ludo), in the humanities. This doesn’t really change the question and only really puts the study of it under the humanities. Well, as much as I love games and what they can do for people, I don’t think funding games is the best use of public money. There’s three major points to why I don’t think it’s a good idea fund games research with new public funds: the cost of producing research, existing research into games from various other fields, and it’s breadth of application is limited. So let’s dig into each of these points of why I don’t think ludology funding is required.

Ludology is a young field of study for a young medium, but should we divert money to grow something new? We’ve got to decide on what we as a society value, and how much we spend on research and staffing is a good indicator of what we care about. Ludology being in the branch of Humanities is definitely low on people’s priorities, with my lack of knowledge on it until recently being a good example. Humanities got about four hundred million in a year for grants and $85000 could be awarded per project, how much would we need as a society? Take 10 million dollars for a little over 117 projects, that would be 2.5% of all humanities funding which is an unlikely chunk to be transferred from different parts of humanities departments, and it’s unlikely to get funded from a new tax or budget cut from some other part of the government from how unpopular humanities are.

Not just the cost of research itself, but we also have to take into account the opportunity cost that goes into implementing this. Say we did raise 10 million dollars a year, why not use that money to more directly help people by hiring about 170 new teachers at the national average of $56,000 a year since our education system is in desperate need of them? Games can be a boon for education as it’s been shown to act as a multiplier effect for learning and retaining material but they don’t help without the guidance of a teacher, only improving by about .1%. I believe direct means of intervention and help are better than a roundabout way which is why I am against something like the government giving money to banks to give student loans to people is ridiculous when they could give loans directly to students(the US government eventually did exactly that with the Federal Direct Student Loan Program in 2010); It would be no different trying to help students by trying to roll out an interactive curriculum to school systems, it might improve the results of some students but the teachers are what reaches the students directly. I also don’t believe that there is no room for private companies to help fund research such as the work by Filament Games to bring games to classrooms and curriculum.

We don’t need to funnel public funding into games research when we already have research into what games can do from various fields like psychology and the humanities. There is the formal study of games and though I do agree that they it doesn’t get that much funding, there is still research that involves games or interactive systems of some sort always being published usually in psychology or sociology papers. The findings from these varied fields just need to be brought together under the umbrella of ludology. Whether game mechanics and interactive systems are good, bad, or ugly, people are definitely studying them already, though they might not be the most visible.

We could get research and develop new mechanics to be used in games or find better ways to convince people, but is that really worth it? Games are a great way to get people invested into a topic, many people devote hours of their free time every week to it, but would it lead to anything useful if we found a way to make interactive systems better? Unlike the story of Faraday showing electromagnetism to the president, game systems aren’t a utility so it’s uses are quite limited. If we perfect interactive systems and we know exactly how it affects the human psychology then we have made one of the best tools for propaganda. It’s been used before, and China is making a gamified system of a social network which is just insidious. We’ve probably interacted with systems that were meant to swing our thoughts one way or another such as push polling. On the other side of the coin, if we create perfect interactive systems we would also make our entertainment incredibly engaging and immersive. There would be more things like The Stanley Parable or Spec Ops: the Line that drive player introspection and do it better. While I do love the medium of video games and what they can offer, the application is limited to entertainment and means of persuasion from what I can see, which is not enough to merit active funding.