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Confessions of a Thirty-Something English Professor and Gamer:
TEDx and the Importance of Video Games
The opportunity to present a talk for TED, whose mission is to spread
“Ideas worth sharing,” is a great honor. TED Talk organizers seek out speakers
from celebrities to entrepreneurs, educators, innovators, and more to share in
their goal of opening up audiences to new ideas and new ways of thinking about
the world. In a maximum of about eighteen minutes, TED speakers share their
own unique perspectives on the world, on topics ranging from cutting edge
technology, to education, to personal stories of triumph over adversity. TEDx
Talks, a series of independently produced TED Talks primarily centered on
university campuses around the world and sharing TED’s vision and message,
loomed before me as a profound professional opportunity, but one which would
find me, publicly, revealing something I feared might bring me scorn.B luntly,
I’m a gamer. I have played video games for nearly as long as I can remember.
My first game console was a Coleco Vision, that ancient dinosaur of a gaming
console, home to such titles as Mr. Do. From there. I’ve moved ever onward and
upward to where I stand now, with a Playstation 4 and a host of games whose
graphics are a marvel in which to be immersed. Gaming has been my one
consistent hobby over all these many years and something into which I can lose
myself, even today. I play what interests me, what is fun, what scares me, and
especially, what moves me. Many of my friends know that I am a gamer, but it
is not otherwise something that I had previously spoken of much in other arenas,
even as I knew that video games remained and remain an untapped resource for
narrative exploration and analysis. I kept gaming to myself for so long for one
simple reason: the fear of professional ridicule. But no more. Recent events have
led me to become a very public academic gamer.
When I saw the call for TEDxUNLV presentation proposals in late
2013, my immediate thought was to speak about what I had been doing, steadily
more and more, in my classroom: using video game narratives as a means to
help my students explore the themes they study in literature. Not only do I find
that this connects my students more strongly to the material we are covering, as
they see an immediate modem relevance to what they otherwise might discard
as stuff having been written by long ago dead folks, but students, then, also
become better consumers of digital media. Many video game titles, from small
independent work to AAA releases — an AAA title has the budget and
marketing oftentimes of a major studio film — are telling profound, deep, and
provocative stories, stories meriting academic focus and a place in the classroom
alongside other storytelling modes, from print to digital. They incorporate the
same sorts of thematic and symbolic elements of their other narrative
counterparts, but are frequently on the receiving end of mockery, ridicule, and
dismissal.
When I received word in January that I had been chosen as one of the
presenters at UNLV’s TEDx event in April of 2014, I was both thrilled and
nervous. A major part of my presentation is the personal element: my own