you mention that CS programs tend to be have a “Lack of interest in all artistic, literary, cultural, and social aspects.”

No, I didn’t say that. My three bullet points about CS are about the disciplinary approach, not the programs and certainly not the people in the departments.

Hanna, computational linguistics is, of course, an interdiscipline, and its linguistic concerns are not part of the approach of computer science per se. HCI is also an interdiscipline, as the mission statement on the CMU HCI Institute page explains. I think to the extent they don’t fit my three properties of CS, it is due to the involvement of other disciplines.

In computer graphics, you may have projects to do a variety of things, and sometimes the goal may be vague from a formal perspective: “make things look more realistic.” This is still optimization measured by some vague function, and there is no approach from computer science that tells us what realism is.

Algorithms and PL have desiderata (e.g., convergence, type safety) which are not subject to any sort of sociological critique, and efforts are made to mathematically demonstrate those desiderata. This process is just optimization over a discrete space. In some cases we are concerned with the analysis of the properties of existing systems rather than improving those systems – e.g., prove type safety for some model of Java. These may be the efforts that are closest to literary analysis in some ways. But when we are done proving what the properties of those systems are, you can be sure that we’re going to turn around and try to develop another system that improves on that one.

You mention systems and architecture, but of course in the area we work in, machine learning, the involvement of computer science very much deals with maximizing objective functions.

I should make it clear that I don’t mean these statements as any sort of criticism of CS in general, only as a comment on the applicability of that disciplinary approach to new media. Mathematics is ahistorical, too, for instance; so what.

Laurie, to get back to your comments: I was pleased to note the involvement of CS in some of these programs, but it seems like none of them are actually situated within a computer science department – am I wrong?

The MIT Media Lab (where I did a Masters) is within the School of Architecture, and has no institutional relationship to CS. The Art Institute of San Francisco does not even have a computer science department – in fact, the phrase “computer science” does not occur anywhere on their site. ITU’s Center for Computer Games Research is part of the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication, and is not under CS.

The two others on the list show some CS involvement. UCI’s Game Culture & Technology Lab has lots of faculty participation from CS, but it is directed by someone from studio art, and doesn’t seem to rest within a CS program. UF has a multi-department Digital Media Design program (as we do here at Penn) which is a production-oriented undergraduate program with CS as one player. (The last link in the list is to the multi-department institute that houses that program.) If you broaden “game studies” to include this, there’s some CS presence and sharing of the administration of the program. I see the motivation for programs like that, but I’d certainly like to see the involvement of CS also going to build something like Espen’s Center for Computer Games Research, somewhere.

UC Irvine’s Game Culture and Tech Lab

UCF’s Digital Media Design Program

MIT’s Media Lab

Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen

The Art Institute of California – San Francisco

UF’s Worlds Institute (a combination of CS and Fine Arts)

and others.

Also, you mention that CS programs tend to be have a “Lack of interest in all artistic, literary, cultural, and social aspects.” I think I’m conflating computing work/culture and CS departments because when I think of CS, I think of Open Source (the writings on which seem to be very historicized and aware of social implications); and Perl (also very aware of literary, cultural, and social connections with Perl poetry, leet culture in terms of elegant and concise code, and much more); and even training handbooks like The UNIX System Administrators Handbook (which is very aware of UNIX history, evolution of technology, and includes images and jokes; the naming conventions alone on most programs and servers seem to embed this sort of historization/culture with Kerberos and majordomo). I don’t really know what CS departments do, so I imagine them as doing work like Don Norman’s, Espen Aarseth’s, and Tim O’Reilly’s (even though he’s not in academia).

I don’t believe the computer science particularly focuses on maximising objective functions. While I agree that there is considerable focus on objectivity — much more so than in the humanities — I think that think it’s misleading to refer to this as a focus on objective functions. Granted, there are sub-disciplines of computer science that are very concerned with making things faster, smaller etc. (namely, systems and architecture), but a much of computer science research does not share this focus. For example, in computer graphics, researchers (at least presently) are concerned with realism. A typical graphics project might be “how can we make the movement of skirts more realistic in computer games,” which, in my view, is no more of an objective function than “how does narratology inform video game research.” Objective functions (and optimization problems) are about finding the “best” solution to some problem — I don’t see that there can be one “best” solution when considering simulation realism, any more than there can be one best solution when asking questions like “are games art?” Considering more traditional areas of computer science also, we might look at programming languages research, where there is study of the formal properties and design of new programming languages, but again, I’m not sure what the objective function would be. Finally, in algorithms — one of the most traditional computer science disciplines — the majority of research is concerned with proving the properties of algorithms and making formal statements about these properties, not about optimizing them.

Secondly, I disagree with your assertion of a “lack of interest in all artistic, literary, cultural, and social aspects” in computer science. Again, looking to graphics, I don’t believe that a field so concerned with human perception, interpretation and realism be considered to be disinterested in artistic, cultural and social aspects. Similarly, human-computer interaction is by definition focused on cultural and social concerns. And, of course, computational linguistics — while being rather dry at times — is very much concerned with variances in language usage, which often occur for social and cultural reasons.

I agree that “computer science … seems to focus more heavily on how to make things” than do the humanities. But the full story on this involves why computer science researchers make things. Economists and physicists also write a lot of computer programs, but I think it’s very misleading to characterize either of those disciplines, or computer science, as being about making computer programs. In all three disciplines, researchers make computer programs in order to gain fundamental insights and get research results. It’s really the same basic reason that humanists “make” narratological models or, for that matter, develop text-encoding standards – as a means to doing inquiry and understanding more. I agree that the means of conducting research varies between CS and the humanities – as it does within the humanities – but I think there is a common focus, which is inquiry.

Now, you may be right that computer science, when it is involved in game studies or game design education, is production-oriented to a fault. However, computer science is hardly involved at all, as far as I can tell. (I do want those examples – anyone, please!) And you could level the same criticisms at many art school programs and humanities-based programs, if you were going to look only at how these disciplines or traditions engaged video games in existing curricula.

Although I wouldn’t list a tendency to make things as a negative for computer science, I certainly can think of ways in which CS is less suitable than the humanities for a deep understanding of video games and other new media works:

• - Ahistorical, unless you consider occasional engineering anecdotes to be history
• - Focus on maximizing objective functions
• - Lack of interest in all artistic, literary, cultural, and social aspects

But these things are only really a problem inasmuch as they inhibit collaborations and limit the scope of what computer scientists will study. They don’t keep the disciplinary approach of CS from helping us out as we try to learn about new media, any more than narratology prevents me from understanding the prosody (as well as the narrative qualities) of a long poem, because narratology is a theory that is silent about prosody. And when every other discipline has “does not yet account for how computer programs work” listed as a negative, I think it’s particularly important to bring CS into the mix.

The idea of collaborating with children’s literature people has appealled to me, but no one I know will touch it with a barge pole, partially because I think that they see the study of children’s literature as ‘shoring up’ a practice that is endangered by childrens use of new media. In this respect I’m glad that other have created, and are ebcouraging, networks which will allow this collaboration to be explored.

One interesting point about the confusion is that Nick’s comments seem to defend computer science (with the note that computer science won’t swallow game studies) in light of our column seeming to attack computer science. It often seems like there are fears of game studies being swallowed by one particular field or another. By aligning children’s literature and game studies, we were trying to argue that game studies has a place in, and needs many, fields. We certainly weren’t trying to state that one approach was better, only that multiple approaches are needed.

For connections between children’s literature and game studies, there’s no single method for approaching children’s literature, but most of the methods used for children’s literature study the text or the context of the text’s production. While children’s literature is a young field and it’s rapidly growing, relatively little work has been done on the physical form of children’s literature texts (like the textures of the children’s books or the paratexts that include dolls in much the same way that Nintendo included the robot), and the culture of readers (although more studies are being done, especially in regards to Harry Potter Fan Fiction). Each of these aspects also parallels other fields, like general literary and film studies, but children’s literature is still a relatively young field, and it still has an odd place because it sometimes exists within English departments, Folklore Departments, and sometimes within Education departments. Game studies, in which we include game design classes, normally doesn’t have a single dedicated department, but exists in multiple fields. By including game design in game studies, game studies seems to have a stronger relationship to computer science and game design programs than humanities programs.

To clarify some points that were clearly confusing in our column, by our statement:

“Education departments most often house children’s literature studies, and game studies rests more comfortably in computer science programs. In both cases, the primary fields of education and computer science focus more heavily on applied research and production (either the production of games or teaching as production) rather than theoretical and analytical research found more strongly in humanities programs.”

We were trying to draw a parallel between the fact that computer science (from what we’ve seen, and we certainly could be wrong) seems to focus more heavily on how to make things–making games, making games better, making games do certain things–and education tends to focus more on how to teach children’s books–which ones are best for what ages, to get children to learn about certain topics. This type of work requires analytical and theoretical research, but it’s generally (although not always) a different type of work than that done in humanities programs. We certainly didn’t mean that computer science and education aren’t theoretical or analytical (they have to be), but simply that their focus is different from that of humanities programs.

Also, by including game design as part of game studies, computer science programs often include game design and in many game design programs that work more heavily with computer science (and often fine arts) than with the humanities in general. Our column was aimed at encouraging the humanities in game studies, especially in terms of ways that benefit other areas like children’s literature studies.