The Study of Play
The Study of Play
The Study of Play
By Meghan Kita
March 22, 2020
Summary
Even before the pandemic, the average person spent more time playing video games than at the movie theater.
Students in Chien's Play and Interactive Media class react as they play a game during the course's lab component in Fall 2019.
Chien became interested in studying video games after her younger brother, who was away at college, became so deeply immersed in the online role-playing game Dark Age of Camelot that he fell out of touch with his family.
In martial arts games, it's not about how many weapons a player can collect but how skillfully the player can move the character on the screen.
Chien's focus on dance and martial arts games in her research dovetails with how she teaches her classes, which entails "Pushing back against this association of video games with a type of masculinity that is heavily policed and that keeps women, people of color and queer people out," she says.
In 2014, Dalton built a mobile video game lab-a cart that can now be used to play games designed for 16 different systems-and established a video game library that has accumulated nearly 100 donated titles.
The two hope to find a prominent place in Walson Hall to display the lab and library, Chien says, "In the hopes that it both makes the media-comm space more welcoming, because play is always an important way to enter into learning, and reminds us to take video games seriously as a mode through which we experience the world and a central part of media & communication studies."
Reference
Kita, M. (2021, March 22). Latest news. Retrieved July 02, 2021, from https://www.muhlenberg.edu/news/2021/thestudyofplay.html