How video games helped me make sense of academic life

With¹ apologies to…

In March, I was passed over for a prestigious fellowship². Upon failing to unlock this platinum trophy, which only 1% of academics obtain, I reflected upon what had led me to this point – overlooking for a moment that it was a mission given to me by an old man marked out by a green exclamation mark on the map – and decided to share my thoughts with you, the NPCs that inhabit my life, in a clumsily enacted cut scene.

From the very first moment I saw a computer, I’ve been a gamer. From that first encounter with an arcade full of cabinets, electronic noises and bright pixel-art, already designed to overload the sensory apparatus of a susceptible seven year old, to not completing Baldur’s Gate 3 over a period of 160 hours as a forty-seven-year old, I have been hooked. It turns out that this bears striking similarities to another thing I have found inescapable: academia. Academia is a lot like an open-world RPG: a role playing game in which you wander a world that initially seems full of endless possibility, but ultimately devolves into repeating the same actions over and over again for diminishing returns slowly consuming your days, evenings, and weekends.

The life of an academic, like that of the hero in a video game, has a neatly defined arc. One starts at the bottom, capable perhaps of waving a knife, or casting a few basic spells, the game-world equivalent of a degree in an academic subject. From there, a predefined path and skill tree await, patiently followed till one reaches the goal via a series of escalating successes.

In theory.

In the old days, the games were considerably shorter and the quests simpler. Sure the graphics were basic, but with a bit of skill and practice, one could comfortably finish a game in a single sitting³. A newly minted PhD could postdoc for a short while and then count on becoming a lecturer – paid enough to buy a nice house somewhere leafy, with occasional conferences in relatively exotic locations, an office, and a measure of social respectability. In contrast the role of the modern gamer has changed. In the old days, games were written by the kind of weird nerds who played games for other weird nerds who played games. It didn’t last long. Such things don’t when there’s a whiff of money. While the weird nerds are still writing papers, the whole thing has been captured by a multi-billion-dollar industry that treats the people who do anything worthwhile in it like a human resource to be used up, pumped dry of any economic value, and then dumped in a convenient river. The ruthless metrici-sation of publication – h-indices, impact factors, and the all the other nonsense – has dragged the whole shebang very far from its original purpose. Things are more complex now. Sure, there’s the main quest, but monetisation has skewed the whole thing, prolonged it, stretched it out to pointless length with dubious incentives: battle passes, loot boxes, the engagement-extending grind and endgame.

As with anything that attracts people, money and influence, both gaming and research are political. They become just another venue for whatever proxy war is current between opposed political factions. If you have the temerity to complain some will patronisingly will show you what games used to be like and ask, do you really, want to go back to this? And you must admit that while the world then might have seemed simpler, it was also complex and broken in many ways – misogynistic, racist, toxic – and you have to accept that progress happens on many fronts and sometimes you have to accept all the crud to move meaningfully forwards where it’s important⁴.

As with any modern RPG, there are hundreds of quests that an academic can undertake. Some of these are side quests, tangential to the main story line that sees your unlikely rise from kitchen-boy to saviour of the world⁵. It’s easy to get bogged down by side quests, agreeing to help every single peasant whose house has been demolished by a wayward dragon, or the lady of the manor whose children have merrily leapt into a haunted well. Similarly, as an academic, it’s difficult to say no and thus fill your time with committee meetings, task forces, taking minutes, and organising niche meetings. While these may sound objectively less exciting than the dragon thing, the majority of side quests in games involve going somewhere, talking to a lot of people who don’t really know what’s going on, and then coming back. The only substantive difference is that in a game a positive outcome is usually guaranteed even if it is only a pouch of herbs. In the early stages of one’s career – as academic, or assassin in training – side quests provide much needed experience⁶. However, as time goes on, it starts to become a habit and one can easily lose track of the main quest. The endless proliferation of side-quests and make-work becomes unmanageable and what started as a game starts to feel like a chore.

You can always start another game of course. The temptation is always strong. You look at the seventy open tasks in the menu, and yearn for the early, complication-free days at the start of the game. There’s something new out there, promising a fresh start, whole new strange worlds to explore. Other people are having fun while you are busy searching inexplicably for twenty seven lost cows⁷. You think, I’ll just try this new thing for a few hours and then I’ll come back here, refreshed, and finish everything off – submit the paper, save the realm, do my expenses, round up the cows. Eventually – several hundred hours later, all inertia spent in the new place – you look back at all the open projects and wonder why you never finished them off. It’s just a small thing, you think, so you boot up the old code, open that old word document and soon realise why you stopped.

Inventory management is an issue that I’ve struggled with both as a gamer and an academic. Things accumulate even with the best of intentions. The adventurer’s pouch soon fills up with magic potions, books with at most two pages of legible text, and unused weapons. Those academics lucky enough to have an office can accumulate some really rather exotic things given enough time. Even those in open plan can pile their desks with their ill gotten gains – conference swag, text books, odd mementos, the jealously guarded poster tube, the bric-a-brac that builds up, personal mementos. However, over time, it can become an encumbrance making it difficult to move from place to place or to find what you actually need. Even in the dematerialised modern world, where everything is stored electronically and desks are kept impersonally free of detritus, the gigabytes accumulate rapidly into unmanageable terabytes and more. Both the gamer and academic in me know that the important thing here is careful inventory/data management, but that’s something to deal with later, so I’ll just dump it all in the stash. Right?

When starting out in a new game, there’s a phase when the unnecessarily complicated controls are explained in a series of simple tutorial missions. These subtleties are forgotten within five minutes and you spend the rest of the game spamming the same three button combo skill over and over again. There’s almost no task that can’t be completed this way. Sure it might take half an hour when the optimal method takes five seconds, but that would mean thinking. Occasionally, grudgingly, a particular task will require you to google the instructions for beating a particular boss. It will turn out to be something trivial and you will briefly remember what the R3 button does. Likewise, a young academic will learn a very wide range of things during their PhD, often explained to them by a grizzled veteran⁸. Most of these will be forgotten quickly leading the mid-to-late career researcher to deal with every single research problem using linear-regression, EOF analysis and a piece of code they inherited fifteen years earlier that implements a neat clustering algorithm they never really understood⁹.

As with games, some researchers will insist on trying to do the thing that makes sense, or seems right, not realising that this is all a game. The only things that matter are the rules of the game. While it might make sense that hitting the giant with the large axe would kill it, it’s far easier to hide in a particular corner the giant can’t reach and repeatedly pick up and drop a small rock. It makes no sense. It’s not fun, but it is effective. At the very extremity of this behaviour, one finds the speedrunners¹⁰ who have learned to take advantage of every quirk of the game engine and can complete in five minutes a game that takes mere mortals dozens of hours. Similarly, there are those whose meteoric rise through the academic ladder is hard to fathom in any terms other than those of the game¹¹.

The only group of people that complains about trivialities more than academics is gamers. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Sometimes, it seems that every single gamer is reviewer two. YouTube will offer you a hundred videos telling you the 50 Things That Are Wrong With Game X and exactly zero saying that Game X is actually really good and currently being played happily by half a million people at any on time. The 50 things that are wrong with the game will culminate in the presenter having a breakdown and setting fire to his gaming rig because the particular brand of bubblegum preferred by the protagonist was first released in 1992 and the game is set in 1991. At the same time, our angry reviewer did pay £70 to purchase and play the game. This is quite a lot of money, but ones sympathy is blunted by the off-putting and completely unnecessary belligerence and the vague bafflement that someone does something with their time that they really don’t enjoy. Then you remember that the promise was that they would. And it all makes sense.

-fin-

1. Upfront, I’m going to say that the kind of article I’m reacting to here really bothers me. As a genre they bother me on many levels. I’ve been silly about this subject before – how climbing made me science better – but it’s easy to misinterpret the silliness as something unserious. First, I dislike the idea that we should view the things we love and enjoy, things which give meaning to our lives, purely through the lens of their utility to our day jobs. Second, both gaming and academia are mess. They’re not unique in this respect, but offering up a sanitised version of both for comparison is fundamentally dishonest, particularly in a “career column” offering advice to the readers of Natureorscience. Third, its a kind of game playing with something serious. Academia is almost wholly frivolous, but the playing of games is important. Like job interviews, promotion panels, grant proposals, reviews and so on, we’re asked to play a game with words. It’s important of course to be able to explain and articulate what you do, but its the substitution of something simple (an interview) for something difficult (deciding which person will best perform a job) and thereby rewarding people who are good at the simpler thing, particularly where familiarity with the form is so important. ↩︎
2. Probably the only thing in this post that’s not even a tiny bit true. I never even applied for one. ↩︎
3. Without losing feeling in your legs. ↩︎
4. Of course, there are games – a whole thriving scene – that are good and original and weird and wild and exciting. But no one has ever heard of them*. ↩︎
5. In the game, though some academics occasionally betray such delusions of grandeur. ↩︎
6. Here games have the advantage. An experience point system ensures that no activity goes unrewarded. ↩︎
7. Each cow is lost in a different, albeit clever way and you can’t decide if it is wonderful, or harrowingly bleak, that out there is someone with the ingenuity to hide nearly thirty cows in interestingly diverse ways for a side quest that only 1% of players will bother finishing. ↩︎
8. One who is desperately trying to remember what the grizzled veteran told them when they were a freshly minted character. ↩︎
9. The same mechanism means that everyone you meet seems like a stats wizard. They just memorised a slightly different subset of techniques. ↩︎
10. Seriously, if you’ve ever wondered what magic would look like in the real world, go and watch something about glitch exploits in speed runs. If magic is a thing, it probably doesn’t involve cod-latin, fireballs and ESP. It probably involves standing in a corner at a very specific angle holding a mushroom and switching to your secondary weapon while jumping up and down till you are catapulted half way across the world. ↩︎
11. An old colleague who had a very specific knowledge of bureaucratic rules – which form to use to claim back costs incurred by bribing officials, for example, or the parts number for a fully assembled harrier jump-jet – hopped jobs a few times and, despite no clear achievements in any of them, was next seen chatting seriously to one of the directors. Nice guy. Interesting, successful, but at the same time, and in a different, perhaps more important sense, almost wholly useless. ↩︎

* Which is to say that lots of people have heard of them and enjoy them very much but not the right people, or enough people, or…