full interview_treaandrea russworm_3.mp4
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:00:00] I'm TreaAndrea Russworm and I'm a professor of interactive media and games here at USC.
Speaker 2 [00:00:07] Non-fun version of that.
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:00:10] You can get really colorful with the rest of it.
Speaker 2 [00:00:14] So, let's just sort of set a baseline for video games. What would you say, it's probably a too big question, but what would you say is the sort of state of video games today in our culture?
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:00:29] The state of video games today is that it's a larger industry than television, film, and music, those industries combined. So on a scale from a sense of just how big is the reach, the global reach of video game, it's significant. It's the most dominant medium of our time. And then in a cultural sense, it is really diffuse. There are all types of video-games. I think the public is well aware. Of certain mainstream video game titles like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, maybe Minecraft. These are games that people probably have heard of at least at some point. But the video game industry has so many other types of games. Small games, little games, thoughtful games, games that make you think intentionally about the world around us. And so I would say that the video games industry is much more complex and diverse than we imagine.
Speaker 2 [00:01:29] I mean, how did we get from Pong to this, or maybe the better question is why?
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:01:36] Well, I think what the late 1960s and early 1970s and then going into the 80s taught us about the industry was that it was the wide land of opportunity. You had a game like Pong, which was notoriously played in arcades, for example. People would actually stop their other bar activities and go over in the corner and play this game that basically was tennis, you know, and they would go and play this very... A simplistic version of tennis on this digital cabinet, this digital machine. And so how do we get from Pong to something like God of War, which is this massive storytelling vehicle that rivals, I would say, film in its composition and everything that it's trying to do. How do we from there to here? Well, a lot of things. I mean, we have artistic improvements and technological developments. But I would say more than anything, we had an avid and consistent and changing over time audience for this medium. And notoriously, we also have people who played games from, I don't necessarily need to say notoriously because I'm going to implicate myself in this, from the late 70s and 80s until now. So this is one of those mediums where it also matures and grows with its audience even as it widens. And... Brings in, ushers in younger audiences too. So I think in that way, games are really complex because at the surface people think of them, video games as for children. But what I'm saying now is that we know that it's not only children, they're huge avid adult audiences, the demographics of your average game player is somewhere from 18 to 34, that that's sort of the mark. And we would think that no, it's six or seven, maybe 11. Teenage boys play video games. But the reality is that people who are playing games in the 70s and 80s are still playing games, and it's a medium that has grown and matured with that audience.
Speaker 2 [00:03:42] So you're looking at our culture through the lens of video games, what do video games tell you about us?
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:03:52] I think video games are a microcosm of everything going on in any given moment. And so when you look at now, I think there are the dystopian qualities and aspects of daily life that games draw our attention to. There's a reason why the majority of new video games, sort of new IPs, new properties are dystopias. If we look at the stories themselves, the context that they take place in. There is a sort of depressive aspect to this of stories, of people trying to grapple with this boom and technological advancement. So you think of a game like Detroit Become Human where the androids are fighting for rights. The androides are sentient beings fighting for their rights. You also see this futuristic and impoverished Detroit. So there are ways in which the culture of video games very much replicates some of the challenges and anxieties of now when you think of things like our engagement with technology, our environmental challenges, games absorb and represent a lot of that. So that's sort of the dystopian view of what games are able to do. And even in that I think there's something hopeful and something interesting because games give us a way, give us a space of trying to work out how we feel about that and maybe what will happen. You know, the big what-if questions is, if this is happening now, what will happen in the next 20 years? And what type of agency do we have as people to change some of this? So that's the sort of one take, but also there's a good deal of hope. And so I think that even in a dystopian game, I always say there is usually an element of hope, there's band of survivors, there are people trying to figure this out, there are are people who are fighting for something else. So this is happened within the story worlds of games. And I think it also speaks to our lived realities, the things that we're facing now.
Speaker 2 [00:05:51] Are there games that you have played that mean something personal that sort of along your journey really stand out as a core memory for you or something that you saw as deeply artistic?
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:06:08] Oh, there's so many games. But I have to say that the franchise The Sims is my all-time favorite, most meaningful game franchise. And so The Sims, Will Wright, the creator of The Sims famously called it a virtual dollhouse. So this game is unlike a lot of games in that it doesn't necessarily have a story. You create these characters. You You live out their lives, you play out their life, you get them jobs, you do really mundane things, you know, get promoted at work, create a garden, these are things that on the surface wouldn't seem fun at all. But The Sims is really meaningful to me because it was the first time, my first playthrough of The Sims, this was in 2000, taught me something that I thought I'd been playing games my entire life, but that moment coincided with the sort of development of my academic career. I was on my journey to becoming a professor, and at nights I would play The Sims. You know, the day I'd study, I'd write, I go to class, and at night I would sort of unwind playing The Sims, and eventually those two practices of reading, writing, and thinking started to converge with my playtime of The Sims when I wondered, can I actually write about this game? Can I talk about it in an academic context? Is there enough here to study this in any way, shape, or form? The answer was yes. And I went to my first academic conference and I talked about player communities, I talked what people did with the Sims, the kinds of stories they told, many of them cathartic, some people working through trauma, some people sort of restaging moments of loss. I remember very vividly someone losing their grandmother and creating their grandmother in the Sims and actually using that as an opportunity to kind of say goodbye and kind of experience. Some some final meaningful moments with a replica of their grandmother in their own terms And so I think that that moment of playing The Sims You know when it was The Sims 1 before it became what it is now Which is even more sophisticated in some ways Taught me that there was a lot there in terms of how people respond to games So the personal stories and engagement with games and then my own too, you know What was so what was so appealing about this franchise for me? One of the things I liked was trying out. You know, different personas, trying out different types of people and playing them over time and eventually playing them for generations and generations and generation. And now I'm writing a book about The Sims where I talk about this archive of usually really personal stories and engagements that people revisit and revisit time and time again through their gameplay with The Sims. And so even in times of protests and collective mourning, people have turned to this vehicle, of this game. To simulate some of that, to simulate social protests, for example, in The Sims, and then to organize outside of the game, but around their love of this particular franchise. So I'd say over time, The Sims is a game that I come back to again and again. And even though it's, again, very simple, it seems like it doesn't have a story. One of the things I like about it is you provide the story, right? You're telling a story about the lives of these characters that you create. And you decide where they go. You have to bring some imaginative power to that play space.
Speaker 2 [00:09:31] I think you really circled the core of the misconception about video games, which is that they are designed to be a life away from your life. That they are some other box that you play in, and then you go back to reality. And I think that you just highlighted probably more the truth that I'd like you to talk about. First of all, talk about the misconceptions that you can see about video game. But as tied to that, they are actually... Fortifying your life, teaching you something or helping you in some way consider your real life, right?
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:10:06] Yeah, there's a misconception that games are something we do over here. It's just a mechanism of escape. It has no bearing on the real world. And it's fantasy. It's a sort of grand fantasy that has no association to reality. Well, we know that not to be true. We know that no matter the type of play, when you talk about childhood and play, for example, and the land of make-believe. We know that in many ways that's a dress rehearsal in some cases, not for literally what you're going to do, but you're playing with things like agency. You're doing problem solving. You're trying to figure out, how do I get from here to there? You're thinking in a very non-literal way, but it also is a way that still reflects on who you are and who you're becoming and who want to be. So that is true for digital games. That's true for video games as well. And I like to think about games as a subset of play. And so to take a step back for a moment and think about, yes, you have the video game. You have the controller. You have that experience. But fundamentally, games are a subset of play. And play is this really important productive category. What we do when we're at play as people, as I said, is all about trying to work out who we really are, what we value, what society is like. And people talk about the play space, the game, in this case. As a way of being able to creatively and safely explore those dimensions of ourself and of culture. And that happens a lot of times by analogy, right? You don't even realize that's happening. But a lot times it also is happening quite literally, too.
Speaker 2 [00:11:47] So then the question becomes, from playing devil's advocate, from all the...
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:11:51] Yes, I knew I was going to talk about that.
Speaker 2 [00:11:52] So you have the violent video game, so if they're affecting us in this way, what are games doing to us, and is that a real something to be considered, that violent aspect? We don't want to talk about the violence specifically, but if they really cause us to change in that way.
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:12:12] Well, you know, when I said that games are a way for us to explore who we are, this happens in sometimes very literal ways and sometimes just metaphorical ways. So the violence that is a part of the public conversations around games, because this is something that really does, you now, first person shooters, this is undoubtedly something that really does define a part of the medium. That violence, what happens to it? Everyone wants to know, does playing that game make you a violent person in real life? And I think that there have been a number of studies from an anthropological, from a sociological standpoint that have largely been inconclusive, right? We know that there are scores, millions of people who've played these games and there is no direct path. There is no a direct association. I've played my fair share of shooters, which I'm terrible at, by the way. But I've played my fair share of them, and I've been in simulated violent circumstances in video games. And that has not affected me in that literal of a way. But there are things that are going on about maybe problem solving, about tactical awareness. There are games like Counter-Strike, which require you to kind of coordinate some effort. And, you know, there are other skills that I think are going on there that are transferable. But ultimately, you have the sort of social context and the social norms outside of the game that I think ultimately provides a checks and balances for that fear or that fear that there will be a direct transfer from the violence in video games to society. There were similar fears about film. There were similarly fears about comic books in the 50s, the sort moral panic around comics and children. And what's happening in this content, and is this something that is gonna negatively impact people. What I like to say is that games are obviously of culture. They're a part of a larger cultural landscape. And so even when there's no direct relationship between what you do in a game and what you outside of the game, there may not be a direct relationship. It's still a part a culture, right? So even though you may not become a violent person from playing games. There's still a way in which that's a part of the culture in which we live. So if anything else, I think games indict that culture in some really important ways. When it comes to violence, when it comes messages of intolerance, when it come to things like racial representation and politics, there's no way that the medium is gonna be separate from those things. More often than not, it's gonna reflect those things and I think it reflects those things in ways that give people. Ideally, a safe space to kind of work through that, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:15:02] I want to get back onto the thread of sort of art and science, which is sort of the core of our show, you know, from a cultural and historical perspective. Our thesis is essentially that the siloing of these things is a recent invention, but for a lot of human history, art and the science endeavors have been commingled in a way that's indiscernible. What do you think about culturally? Our need to separate these things and how games kind of necessitate that they be together.
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:15:43] In a lot of ways, video games are a utopian space. They're a utopian space because they're a convergence of a lot really cool ideals, of a really big structures. On the one hand, you have art, so you have visual literacies and creativity, you have things like storytelling, so you narrative proficiencies and literacies, and then you have a technical component. And then you have all these other things, the social, the cultural, the anthropological that goes into making sort of the vehicle of whatever a video game is. So it's utopian because it's a perfect way of looking at the necessity for these things to belong together, right? That our approach in society and education from K through 12, even through university education, our approach, in the last decades, has been to, in some cases, keep these things separate, right? That if you're in math class, you're in math, class if you are in English class, you're an English class. Over there, we do computer science, right, that there has been that pressure in the educational system and desire to really sort of clarify what you're good at. And you have to be able to explain what you are good at and, you know, 50 words or less or else people just may run the risk of not understanding you. And so I think not allowing for that nuance and not allowing the fact that we live really, well I would say interdisciplinary lives, but we live fluid lives that require us to think and to be and to problem solve in a variety of ways. And in the best case scenarios, we want to see that fusion. We want to that the creative, passionate artists can also... Balance a checkbook and can also think computationally when the time calls for it and that what we need as a society going forward to solve some of our most complex problems, our big problems in the world is going to be that convergence, that confluence of skills as opposed to you be an expert over there, you be an extra over there. That's not to say that expertise is not important. Expertise is. We also need fluid experts that can move between spaces.
Speaker 2 [00:18:09] Is there any sort of technological achievements you can think of that punctuate gaming history and really took it to a new level? And I'm curious also in particular about the now of that question.
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:18:23] Mm-hmm, mm-hm, technological achievements. While there've been so many, you know, from Pong to God of War, or from Pung to The Sims 4, you know there are any number of computational technological achievements, I think sort of are, you now, one of the best arguments that I can think of is that video games technologically are always pushing our hardware. That they're really at the forefront of what we expect and what we demand from our technology. The fact that you can have an iPad that can play pretty sophisticated games now speaks to the hardware needs of that device that are always constantly being pushed forward. And when it comes to video graphics, when it come to graphical fidelity, having the ability to do that in your cheapest, one of your cheapest most affordable computers We'll always have a baseline set of specs. And part of that is because of the expectations that the medium of games has set. So I think that that's something that I think about a lot. And when you think about artificial intelligence and being able to program procedurally to have our characters, but also just our AI, be able to respond in a variety of different situations, again, games are right there in asking for more and sort of pushing the envelope. Technologically in a cultural sense, so I think that that also speaks to me to the centrality and importance of the medium.
Speaker 2 [00:19:58] Can you talk about that? I want to ask you about the human aspect of that question. The cultural push toward, I gotta have the next, I gotta do more, you know, because technology, and this is an old story that we're covering, you once they put paint in tubes, you were able to go outside and impressionism was born. Everything begets a new sequence in the continuum of art. But what is that? Why are we never satisfied?
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:20:24] Right, right, right. Well, in some ways, that's a good thing. To never be satisfied, to never be complacent, to always wanna move forward. I mean, this is a narrative of human progress, or the progress of humanity. So there's that, but there also are downsides to it. There are also some real downsides, and even when we go back and we say, hey, the games from the 80s, where are they? Can we play them, right? There's an ephemeral nature to our art and our culture. When we're constantly moving forward technologically and not looking back, right? Are things always backwards compatible? No, you know, I know that I have a whole archive of media, you now, hardware, media that I'll never be able to access again, eventually, right, so there are losses that go along with that. There can be a way in which it sharpens us when it's done in sort of, I think, a mindful and sort of critical. Context when we're always sort of critiquing, you know, the update culture, right, that now that the next iPhone is out I have to get it, right, without really kind of questioning that I think there are downsides to wanting to move forward all the time technologically and I think that again my answer to that is there can be a lot of good with that but we also don't want to forget the past and we also want to have a sort of sophisticated and and aware engagement with what's come before. And we always want to be able to access and archive that material as well. Otherwise, we never learn from and we never have a chance to really appreciate the art in terms of games from the 70s, from the 80s. And we automatically think that today's works are better. They're better in a technical sense in some ways, for sure. They may even be better in an experiential sense. But it's not a guarantee that they're better. And there are many, many works from that time period, from the history of. Of video games that I would say do stand the test of time if you can play them, if you can find them.
Speaker 2 [00:22:27] Do you have a thought about the use of AI? You talked about AI, I agree with you.
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:22:30] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 [00:22:31] The, you know, this is the thing we're all talking about now, with Dali and ChatGPT, and where this balance of power is going to land going forward. You know, video games need AI, right? That's always been sort of a creative part of the, or part of the creativity of it. So we're, we're just curious if you have a thought about this sort of aghast notion we have, but you know where video games have always needed this
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:23:01] Video games have always needed AI and video games have always needed people. And I think that that's true for where we are now. And I hope that that is true for we'll be. We have a lot in our cultural apparatus that warns us of the dangers and an over-reliance on the tech, including AI. We only need to re-watch the Terminator series to figure out it doesn't end well for us. And so I think that... You need a balance of those things, ideally. You need the technology to continue to move forward and as much as it helps you solve problems. And then you need the people, and the people who are sort of ethically minded and who are trained in a way to kind of make the most use of that technology, but also create a checks and balances for it. So that the tech does not get ahead of the people in certain ways, in key ways. So I think that, yeah, you need AI. Games as an industry has needed it and will continue to push the envelope, I think, in this regard. But you need people who are surrounding that technology and also kind of keeping it honest from an ethical sense, from a civic sense, from a larger cultural sense. And our tech chat GPT cannot do that on its own. And there's some nuances of creating art that I think, you know, most of us think. That technology is never going to be able to do alone. And that's a good thing. That's a Good thing.
Speaker 2 [00:24:34] So what do you suppose creativity is?
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:24:38] That's a great question, this is a great philosophical question. I think creativity is a way from getting from point A to point B that is unimaginable. And it's coming up with an unimaginative path to whatever your goal is.
Speaker 2 [00:25:01] And solving a problem.
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:25:02] Solving a problem, yeah, solving a problem. But also identifying problems that you didn't even know you had, right? Being able to think in a way that is not predictable, not trackable, arguably not programmatic either.
Speaker 2 [00:25:22] I'm sorry, I just want to make sure we don't get bombarded by students in a second. I only have a couple of thoughts. Do you guys have anything you want to... Yeah, yeah, sure.
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:25:34] Me that games have meaning in people's lives that is therapeutic in a personal aspect. But where's the art? What makes this art? What makes games art? Games are art because they are an expressive medium. They are a medium where you're able to express big ideas in an abstract sense or in a literal sense. And you're to do that in a way that is comparable but also different to other forms of visual art, like film, for example. And so if we are now at a place in time where we can see the artistry of film as a medium. Of a great classic film, like maybe Hitchcock's Rope, or I don't know, a newer film, you know, for example, Moonlight, for example. Beautifully shot film. If we're able to see the artistry in a variety of different mediums, those things are also there. And I think that games as an expressive medium, as a medium that can express emotions and ideas. I wouldn't rank them, I wouldn't rank games above film, I wouldn't rank games about poetry, but I also wouldn't rank poetry above games. I think that now we're in a place where each of these things is art in its own right, and each of this things should be studied and engaged widely, right? You should read poetry, you should read novels, and you should play video games.
Speaker 2 [00:27:15] Very well said. Louis is a litmus tester. No I'm not. Any other thoughts guys? I have a couple other, just one more thing. We're talking to a company called Akili that has developed the first FDA approved video game. And we have a bunch of stories that are kind of all about the healing aspect of art. And I'm just curious, your take on arts ability to heal as being taken a bit more seriously today than it used to and video games as a part of that.
TreaAndrea Russworm [00:27:50] Video games, like all art, have the potential to heal. They have the potentially to create cathartic and healing moments, I would say. The work is done within the individual. The work done within a kind of cultural or collective context. But games can be a tool for sure in that healing process, in that revelatory process of what resides deep within you. You're walking through this barren landscape in Fallout 4, for example, and you have this sort of meditative, reflective moment about something that doesn't even show up in the game, something that comes up for you because of how that process impacted you in that moment. And so in that way, games as art has a pipeline, has a direct key to the unconscious, right? It has a way of bringing up things. That you might not have known were there. And it can be a safe space, right? The way that when you're going to look at a photograph in a museum and you're standing before it and you are reflecting, you can't predict how that's gonna touch you, you can predict what that's going to bring up for you, and the same is true for when you are playing a game. Sometimes the content, sometimes the surface text, we would say, is right on point with something you need to experience. But a lot of times, it's unpredictable. And so games, again, as an expressive medium, can also be a cathartic and healing space, not in and of itself, because that is a dialectic. That's something that happens between the individual and the work of art. But I like that it's completely unpredictable.
