Defining Digital Humanities (if you’re well versed in digital humanities, you can skip this. I’m not trying to provide anything new, just trying to bring others up to speed.)
Depending on where you’re perched on the academic landscape, you may have a very different definition of digital humanities. At a 2012 CW panel, 5 scholars presented their views of digital humanities. Mathew Gold argued, “Scholarly communication and middle-state publishing could be Rhet-Comp interventions into DH.” Bill Hart-Davidson discussed what writing scholars can bring to DH: “We in rhetoric and writing studies bring special knowledge to DH projects about making and using texts. Market pressure is mounting for us to stay on the “digital edge” of projects.” Liza Potts said DH can be used by job candidates: “Job candidates should know enough to be dangerous with DH skill.” Karl Stolley focused with DH and CMS and code: “DH offers an opportunity to become involved in source level development.” Kathie Gossett argued, “Rhetorical concepts and skills such as intervestion, arrangement, style, collaboration, and attention to process are valuable in DH tool building projects…”
Some define digital humanities not by what it is, but what rather by what it does. In the first issue of Journal of Digital Humanities, Lisa Spiro defines it as “not technology for the sake of technology. It can encompass a wide range of work, such as building digital collections, constructing geo-temporal visualizations, analyzing large collections of data, creating 3D models, re-imagining scholarly communication, facilitating participatory scholarship, developing theoretical approaches to the artifacts of digital culture, practicing innovative digital pedagogy, and more.” Tom Scheinfeldt argues, “DH arguments are encoded in code,” and Ryan Shaw adds, “If you can’t explain to me in words how your code works, you don’t really know how it works.”
In an archival project, Jim Ridolfo, William Hart-Davidson, and Mathew McLeod found that “The digital humanities provide a unique historical opportunity to engage and connect with cultural stakeholders, groups who were often dismissed or ignored in earlier archive projects. Re-centering cultural stakeholders as integral to the design process of digital archives is a potentially monumental opportunity.” [http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/754/757] I’d like to focus on this final definition, because it encompasses a notion that I think ties together views like Spiro’s that focus on making things, views like Stolley’s that focus on code, and other views that are concerned with what rhetoric can bring to DH and vice versa.
Silly Games
As an economic enterprise, games can’t be beat. They swallow up movies and television. As a planet, we spend over 3 billion hours per week playing games. Candy Crush Saga makes $633,000 PER DAY. COD: Black Ops grossed 1.5 billion dollars. So, I would imagine, without much dispute, we could agree that video games have an economic edge over many other forms of entertainment.
But are they culturally rich as well? Should they take the place next to the archives, movies, and electronic texts that digital humanists study? I think so. Perhaps the subject matter is silly. I mean, I played a game where a piñata worm has to do a love dance with another piñata worm to make new piñata worms. I get it; it sounds stupid. But around the world, kids spend an average of 55 hours per week in front of a screen, roughly a quarter of that being gaming. The average person accumulates over 10,000 hours of gaming by 21. Ok ok, you get it.
Games and DH
It’s shocking to me that video games aren’t more central to the studies we do, particularly when they deal with new media, technology, and culture. It brings together the code, visuals, the story, representation, skills, and the data. Oh the amount of data from video games that’s left untapped, unvisualized, and unanalyzed by academics. If we are going to talk cultural artifacts, I don’t think there are any more powerful than video games at this time. They are representative of the pinnacle of entertainment, immersion, and the virtual. I believe there is no other place where code comes to life, where it connects more directly with representations of reality, than games. People have chosen to spend their entire lives immersed in the various virtual worlds, but we still know so little about them—about how they construct, shape, and change reality, about how they allow us to change and form identity, about how we can be different people and still be ourselves.
So, to ask the question posed by my title—why should digital humanists care about video games? Depending on your definition of digital humanism, maybe you never will care. But if digital humanism is, as the definitions above suggest, about making things, about the interplay of the code and the human, about groups ignored and dismissed by traditional scholarship, and about gaining and using rhetorical skills, then video games are an ideal medium to carryout DH scholarship. They combine many of the components that digital humanists are interested in, while adding in other layers of complication (and we love complication, almost as much as we love things that are ‘problematic’). So let’s talk more about games!
