The BYU College of Humanities is offering weekly video games for students to play and a lecture series to educate students about each game and their connections to the humanities.
Michael Call and Brian Croxall, professors within the College of Humanities, organized the Y Play Games lecture series and the game of the week. Croxall said the idea for the lecture series came about after considering the popularity of International Cinema.
“I started thinking, ‘What if there was something like that for video games?’” Croxall said.
Croxall believed BYU should have a space to have insightful conversations about video games and their impact on culture.
“A lot of our students spend a lot of time, money, and interest on video games, and here on campus, there just isn't a lot said about those,” Call said. “We talk a lot about film on campus. We talk a lot about music on campus. There was kind of this glaring gap where it's like, ‘Hey, here's something that's hugely important for our students, and we're not saying anything about it.’”
Croxall said one of the reasons why individuals may not perceive video games in the way they do films or novels in the humanities is because there typically isn’t an individual author to attribute games to. Video games are typically made by many members of a game production company, while films or novels are typically attributed to their individual directors or authors.
To counter this assumption, Croxall explained the history behind video game "Stardew Valley," which was the topic of the first Y Play Games lecture given by Croxall and Call. The game "Stardew Valley" was developed entirely by one single person, Eric Barone, who created the game to prove his programming skills and find a corporate job.
Croxall said the game’s narrative follows the player’s character as they work a dull corporate job until they find a letter from their grandfather gifting his farm to the player. The player then leaves their job and moves to the farm in Stardew Valley, working hard to manage the farm.
“There's sort of interesting tensions between Barone himself," Croxall said, "why he makes the game, the story he's telling in the game, how your character works in the game and how he himself worked for four years, 12 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Call said the list of games for this semester contains some widely known video games as well as those that are more artistic yet not as popular. Each game represents a different moment in video game history and is played on a variety of older and newer game consoles.
“Part of what we're hoping students get is this opening of the conversation,” Croxall said. “Getting a faculty member to come and talk about the things they think about and how they relate to the video games.”
For example, during her lecture on "Breath of the Wild" on Oct. 7, Comparative Arts and Letters professor Laura Hatch discussed the influence of German Romanticism and Shintoism on the landscape design of Hyrule, a kingdom within the Legend of Zelda game series, according to Croxall.
Roger Macfarlane, professor of classical studies, will teach a Y Play Games lecture on the video game "Hades" on Oct. 21. He said this game connects to characters within his field of classical mythology.
“I study adaptations — modern adaptations of classical myths,” Macfarlane said. “Hades was supposed to have an intriguing adaptation of the Eurydice myth.”
During his lecture, Macfarlane plans to discuss the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and their involvement in the narrative of the game.
“In this one video game, Hades, there's an extraordinarily sophisticated narrative that is well thought-out, worth pondering, and the only way to ponder it is to get into the game,” Macfarlane said. “I'm thinking it's not entirely dangerous to get hooked on this particular game. There's something worth investigating there. It's not just silliness.”
Stephen Tuttle, associate professor of English, taught a Y Play Games lecture on the puzzle video game "The Witness" on Oct. 14. While some professors will give lectures on video games that connect to their fields of study, Tuttle, who teaches classes on fiction and short story writing, said The Witness intentionally rejects narrative.
“It's a game that has no clock, no score, no enemies, no clear objectives,” Tuttle said. “It's a game that just invites you to be in this beautiful space and wander around and find these puzzles and solve them if you can, or if not, move on to something else.”
He said the game acts as an escape for him from the fighting and enemies often found in other games.
“The larger objective of the series is to talk about video games in a way that is serious and academic and thoughtful, turning our attention away from games as a pastime, or even a waste of time,” Tuttle said. “Recognize that it is doing something cognitively that is more complex than you originally thought.”
Macfarlane said this lecture series helps validate video game narratives as being worthy of intelligent discussion. Call said this also allows video games to enter the broader humanities conversation.
“These games have things that they're saying about important topics,” Call said, “just the same as films do or novels or paintings. To be able to include this new form of human communication, kind of bring it into the broader conversation, give it a seat at the table there with the more traditional art forms.”
Croxall said he and Call want to eventually feature video games that are older and less accessible for students to play.
“We've been buying retro game equipment,” Croxall said. “E.T., that Professor Call is going to talk about, is an Atari 2600 game. It's a game that's so bad it bankrupted Atari — literally. So, we've got an old Atari console.”
Students can attend 15-20-minute lectures on Mondays at 4 p.m. for each video game. The schedule for the Fall 2024 semester, according to the Y Play Games flyer, is listed below.
- "Hades" – Lecture on Oct. 21 by Roger Macfarlane
- "Rome: Total War" – Lecture on Oct. 28 by Chuck Oughton
- "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial" – Lecture on Nov. 4 by Michael Call
- "Limbo" – Lecture on Nov. 11 by Luke Drake
- "Tony Hawk Pro Skater" – Lecture on Nov. 18 by Rob Colson
- "Fortnite" – Lecture on Dec. 2 by Brian Croxall
The video games will be available to play for the rest of each week following the lecture in room 1141 of the Joseph F. Smith Building (the Humanities Learning Commons).