Welcome to The Game Professor

Hello, and welcome to The Game Professor! This is a community where we look at games as a meaningful artistic outlet and discuss them within that context. All my life I have been blown away by the power of all forms of media, whether books, film, television, music, or games, and I’ve always wanted to demonstrate that to those who don’t appreciate the meaningfulness of newer media forms, in this case games. I want to do this in both a broader social setting, but also at the academic level as well.

To tell you all a bit more about myself and how I came to this goal, I am Cole, The Game Professor, and I have studied traditional literature at the undergrad and graduate levels. My masters degree is in Children’s Literature, and that brings me to one of the first assumptions that brought me to wanting to take this deeper critical lens to games and gaming as a whole.

Because games inherently include the act of “play”, western society has categorized them primarily as a media form for children, and thereby hasn’t been given as much credence by academic powers that be. Much like Children’s Literature, games studies has had to establish itself over the past few decades. Within that there has been a general split in schools of thought as to the approaches toward studying games: Ludology, which looks at games as a wholly unique based medium where that integral interactivity creates meaning, and Literary, which looks at games as a new storytelling medium, and strives to utilize existing literary methodologies to find meaning. While I started in the camp of the latter, given my literature background, I’ve started to come to accept some perspectives from the former as well.

And that brings me back to this project. Through written posts here as well as gameplay and analysis videos on YouTube, I want to open up this discussion to a broader community. While I do hope to eventually take this in a primarily academic direction eventually, what has always drawn me to story-telling media is the impact that it has on the consumer. Given the divisive perspectives surrounding video games today, I am that much more driven to take my thoughts and build a community that might broaden the minds of the general public, including myself, when it comes to this medium. As the world becomes more and more digitized, healthy consumption of media is more important than ever. I want people to feel empowered to bring games into their and their families’ lives.

So again, I welcome you to this community! Please check out my YouTube channel where you can see me play through games and have a more informal discussion about the games and continue to come back here for more in depth analyses. Thank you for stopping by, and as always, feel free to comment below or come over to Discord (https://discord.gg/uy3cBc6) to enter the discussion.