Ever since they were children, Steve Choi, Ethan Levy and Elaine Chan have been told by people who never met them that the great passion of their lives, the thing that captivated and moved them, was the enemy of intellect, emotionally damaging and quite possibly the end of civilization as we know it.
Choi, Levy and Chan are gamers. That is, they play video games with serious devotion and intensity. They are also students at the University of Southern California -- Choi and Levy, both 22, are entering their senior year, and Chan, 21, is working on her PhD. But far from merely overcoming their digital predilections to succeed in college, these three and others like them are using their knowledge of games like Mortal Kombat and the Sims to further their education. As members of USC's Computer Games project, they are the local vanguard of a new academic discipline: video game scholarship.
Choi recalls that his mother gave him a computer when he was 8 because she felt computer science was the career path of the future; she was, however, less then thrilled when her son began spending much of his on-screen time playing games.
"All our lives we've heard how terrible it is," Choi says. "I wanted to offer the other side of the question."
Created through the Annenberg School for Communication, the Annenberg Studies on Computer Games is a multidisciplinary, multigenerational, multilingual research group dedicated to the study of computer games. The year-old group is one of several game-related projects springing up at universities around the country. MIT, Stanford, the University of Michigan and Northwestern University have various projects researching different aspects of interactive media. But USC's computer games project is probably the largest and most diverse collection of professors and students studying the vast yet mysterious world of video games. The research at USC focuses on the gamer rather than game design or development, and much of what they are doing is groundbreaking.
The project is the creation of Peter Vorderer, who heads the school's entertainment studies program, and Ute Ritterfeld, a German research associate professor with a background in health sciences and psychology. "We are trying to find out not only what is bad but what is good," Ritterfeld says. "Every new technology is met with fear and criticism. When picture books first came out, people said they would ruin children's imaginations; with radio it was the same; movies, television the same. We are trying to find out what is real and what is just fear."
