Au Revoir Cohort 8 of Video Game Law

“I have learned much from my teachers, more from my peers, but most from my students…”

Papers graded, marks in. It’s time to say don’t be a stranger. But more than that it’s time to thank  everyone in the eighth cohort of Video Game Law for your focus during class, your contributions between classes to the website, and the creative efforts represented by your research papers.

In my  “welcome” post on September 2, 2014 (http://videogame.law.ubc.ca/2014/09/02/welcome-to-the-8th-cohort-of-video-game-law-ubc/) I asked “So what will be this years emergent themes? Impossible to know sitting here the night before class starts. All we can know is that in a year where the new generation of consoles find their feet, where the demographics of gamers has changed forever thanks to mobile devices, and where Facebook pays $2 Billion U.S. to purchase Oculus Rift, somethings gotta give…”

Looking back over the semester three emergent themes stood out for me:

1. #Gamergate was huge of course. For some in the public debate there seemed to be much confusion, as if magic circle concepts that might protect certain aspects of gameplay in limited circumstances, might apply to prevent legal and ethical culpability for direct intimidation, bullying and threats against Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn (and others). Thanks to the impact of  first year law school, there seemed little doubt in anyones mind that we all live in one big world, of which the “virtual world” is but a part, and that the criminal law has jurisdiction over all of it. Of course at this point we don’t know the outcome of the ongoing criminal investigations – so that may provide fodder for next years class.

2. Introducing a post-structuralist analysis of video-games and finding that it fit rather well was the surprise of the semester. Most significantly having a coherent theory of how video-games really function in society has some practical benefits. It provided wonderful touchpoints with which to analyze whether the layers of legal and normative constraints applying to games makes sense or not. It was extremely gratifying to realize how many times these ideas showed up in posts, emails and even quite a few final papers. Trying to really understand the writings of Jacques Derrida remains for me an enigma wrapped in a riddle – making it all the more fun. There is indeed a lot of “play” in that system  (pretty pathetic when I’m trying to make post-structuralist inside jokes isn’t it?  😉

3. Our Oculus Rift class demonstrated that virtual reality has the potential to powerful and go far beyond games, and could have real uses in education. My thought going in was that the limitations of the technology would become obvious and we might  be reminded that oftentimes things are over-hyped. That was decidedly not the case in our classroom experiment. Once again games are the bleeding edge of technology that eventually moves to broader pastures. This has happened before. Think “voice over IP” as an example, though there are many others.

Now that this edition of the course is done there are a lot of games to go through before the 9th cohort arrives. The picture at the top of this post represents “research” to be done…

Thanks again for a truly great semester.

jon