Spotlight on video games at Dorigny
In August 2021, Yannick Rochat has been appointed by UNIL to teach and conduct research on video games. With a doctorate in mathematics applied to the humanities and social sciences, he has been exploring this field for almost 10 years, and is particularly interested in programming languages – the languages that games are and Swiss production. With three other researchers, he founded the GameLaba video game study group bringing together researchers from UNIL and EPFL. In this interview, the researcher introduces us to this emerging discipline.
Why is it so important to study video games at university?
Video games are a popular cultural practice, with different definitions and uses for different groups, from children to senior citizens. For example, teenagers play a great deal, and video games are important places for them to exchange ideas. Video games have also become widely democratized via free-to-play games and smartphones, sometimes thanks to digitized classic games such as scrabble and jass.
Video games can also be educational. For 50 years now, people have been playing, alone or with others, at home or in the classroom, and even at university – where the game was born. How many geographers have discovered their vocation through Sim City? To understand these practices is to understand people a little better.
Finally, video games can also be a means of expression. Over the past fifteen years, the creation of games has become increasingly democratic. As such, the medium has become a channel for thematic, sometimes political and above all artistic expression.
For these reasons, it is entirely legitimate to take an academic interest in it. It’s a field in transition, studied by a growing community, which has moved over to the “legitimate” side of research. A process that other disciplines – such as cinema, for example – have gone through before.
What areas will you be exploring in your teaching at UNIL?
I teach a course called “Maths for fun”. The course is given in the first propaedeutic year and serves as a refresher in mathematics. Students study the mathematical properties of a wide range of games, notably through the study of game design (designing the mechanics of a game) and the balancing of game mechanics. For example, the game of Goose provides an introduction to probability, the Trans Europa board game to graph theory, and Monopoly to Markov chains. The course also highlights the presence of board and video games in the Faculty of Arts. Matthew Lane’s Power-up is ideal for illustrating this field. In it, a series of mathematical concepts are addressed through situations taken from video games, providing a clear understanding of the important link between mathematics and game systems. In interviews, many developers remark that they should have paid more attention during math lessons. This topic is relatively little addressed in the scientific literature on game science or game studies.
Then I’m teaching a course called “Video games in Switzerland: history and archives”. The aim is to train students in archival methods based on complex objects such as video games, with an emphasis on Switzerland’s video game heritage. These issues are not self-evident, and require the preservation of the reading tools themselves: it’s hard to read a game without the console for which it was created. Emphasizing the Swiss milieu helps to shed light on scenes that are little-known because they are in the shadow of the dominant American and Japanese history. For this course, I’m using a book called Debugging game history: a critical lexicon by Raiford Guins and Henry Lowood. It’s a collective work, and this choice is not insignificant. As there are too many special cases, there is no single method, and therefore not necessarily a manual, for archiving video games. This book presents a number of case studies on the subject. The course takes a similar structure: a seminar in which several games and their preservation options are analyzed in a collective reflection.
Finally, a course has been taught every spring semester since 2018-2019 on the theme of “gamification” (here, representing topics in a playful form). This course is taught jointly with Selim Krichane from EPFL. The aim is to integrate the transmission codes of games through game design. By creating a game based on a particular theme, we work on elements that might otherwise have seemed secondary: questions of narrative or balancing, for example. When you want to make a game, bringing out a theme through mechanics can be important. That’s where game design comes into its own, and we’re delighted to be able to teach it. The aim is also to improve analytical skills to better understand video games. In this context, Robert Zubek’s Elements of game design is an excellent work by a researcher who is also a game designer. He has proposed a brilliant model for analyzing video games. It’s a book that goes in the direction of research through practice.
Finally, what are the ideal books to introduce you to video game research?
The leading French-language reference work is Mathieu Triclot’s Philosophie des jeux vidéo. The book focuses on the history of the medium, in particular its birth in academia and the importance of this origin for its further development. It looks at various key moments and analyzes the significance of these objects over time, as well as their impact. A book that’s easy to access, fun and very intelligent – in short, elegant.
A second tip would be Une histoire du jeu vidéo en France by Alexis Blanchet and Guillaume Montagnon. Written recently, this is a remarkable work of research on the arrival of video games in France: the circuits, their form, their medium, etc. The work is the fruit of 7 years of research and focuses on the beginnings of video game development in France. The first games appear to have been created in universities, and from there the researchers trace the history of their creation. The book is based on numerous interviews and sheds light on little-known aspects of video game history. In my opinion, there is a before and an after to this book in video game research in the French-speaking world.
As far as I’m concerned, if I have to share a favorite, it’s Nathan Altice’s I AM ERROR. The title is a replica of a character from the game Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, released in 1987 on the NES, which is considered a translation error. The book attempts to understand the origins of this replica, and to do so, goes through the history of the NES. This history touches on a number of constraints on video game production at the time, and looks back at the operation, possibilities and limitations of the NES console itself. The book looks beyond the console’s operating cycle, from design to the uses to which it is still put today, notably emulation and speedrunning.
To support this new teaching program and the activities of the GameLab, the BCU Lausanne-site Unithèque is making available to its users a collection of books collection.
Photo: Lorenzo Herrera
