Lenses in game design and curriculum design

Yesterday, my game design students completed an assignment that had three optional paths. One path involved reading Richard Bartle's excellent summary of the Hero's Journey (1, 2), which includes not just an overview of the concept but also helpful pointers about what students often get wrong. During the class meeting yesterday, a student gave a masterful presentation showing how the The Last of Us maps to the Hero's Journey. Before his presentation, I gave a short lecture about what I've learned about lenses. My point here was to get out in front of issues around the masculine and feminine roles of the Hero's Journey, and I think students got my point.

One of the examples I like to give in this kind of discussion is the ludology vs. narratology wars in game design, which were dying down right around the time I joined the games scholarship community. As I understand it, scholars like Henry Jenkins applied a literary analysis lens to games and, from there, concluded that games are stories. My criticism is that if you hold up any lens, the thing you look at looks like the lens. Using the lens of literary analysis to look at games will always make them look like stories, in the same way that using a Marxist lens to analyze games makes them look like class struggle, or a systems analysis lens makes them look like systems. I made a little joke here and pointed out that we need lenses—if I take mine off, the students turn blurry—but we have to recognize their strengths and weaknesses.

Knowing that my class is mostly Computer Science students, I pointed out that Computer Science curricula still suffer from the fact that many of the discipline's founders were mathematicians. They looked at this new idea through the lens of mathematics and determined that, of course, Computer Science is basically mathematics, and that mathematics is the way to understand this thing that we called "Computer Science." Why, I asked, do we require calculus—which we almost never use in practice—and not philosophy or psychology, which we use multiple times a day?

In truth, I meant it as more of a good-natured jab, but that observation has been haunting me the last 24 hours. The lens of mathematics has undoubtedly done good things for the discipline, as lenses can often do, but it also makes the subject look like the lens. My own department is in the "natural sciences" division of the College of Sciences and Humanities, and that forces the administration to look at us from a particular lens as well.

The old joke goes like this: Ask five Computer Scientists to define "Computer Science" and you get seven different answers. I see the rise of interest in both computer science and in programming for K-12 education, but there's also infighting between the two camps. I heard at a conference the other day, "Logic is the science of Computer Science!" Meanwhile, adults who go to coding bootcamps are taking the jobs that my graduates would otherwise go for: why hire someone green and immature when you can get someone hungry for a challenge and capable of "adulting"? Why, when I try to push the old lenses out of the way, do my colleagues desperately reach out and pull it back like a comfortable blanket on a cold day?