Game Design Research & Two Cultures

Two days of a game design research symposium coming up, this time closer to home, at the ITU in Copenhagen.

I won’t exactly be live-blogging (which I still consider quite odd), but there should be some interesting talks to comment on.

The symposium should to some extent answer Chris Crawford’s recent Ivory tower column where he criticizes academic game research for not coming up with anything useful for game designers.
The first answer to his claim is that this symposium should prove him wrong. The second answer is that direct industry applicability just never is going to be the only stick by which academic game research can be measured. Some times we just will be going off on a limb, trying to answer basic philosophical questions that do not matter much in the actual design phase.
And then of course, when the philosophical questions and the game design issues go hand in hand, it’s music.

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Crawford also discusses C.P. Snow’s point about the two cultures, and painting with the big brush he claims that science and humanities get along better in Europe than in the U.S. (which I am not entirely convinced is true) and that European academics are less inclined to work with business (which is true).

Crawford is surely right about the two cultures, and the division just never seems to go away. Even at the IT University which is supposed to be strictly cross-disciplinary, I continue to meet computer science people who wouldn’t dream of learning anything about any kind of humanities field, and humanities people who would rather die laughing than spend a few minutes reading anything about science.
And even after all these years, the voice of my humanities training still tries to tell me that reading Scientific American, Edge or anything about CPU architecture is basically naughty.
The really odd aspect of the two cultures is that there is no particular reason why we would have that split?