grants
32
finnish cultural foundation
annual report 2013–2014
I
n 2010, Rovio’s Angry Birds was the
very latest thing, and no one had yet
ever heard of Hill Climb Racing put out
by the Fingersoft games company. Without
knowing it,
Veli-Matti Karhulahti
hit on
a very topical subject for his research.
Finnish games have since become ubiq-
uitous on trains and buses the world over.
Karhulahti hopes to gain a PhD next spring
from the University of Turku Department
of Media Studies. His dissertation is about
the ontology of video games, i.e. their
nature and essence.
“It begins by saying that a video game
is not a game,” he says with a laugh.
At the time of the interview his thesis
was at the assessment stage. One of the
assessors is Norwegian
Espen Aarseth
,
who lay the foundations for game research
in the 1990s and launched the magazine
Game Studies in 2001.
Karhulahti is flattered and nervous.
His work, he says, attacks the game
researchers’ pet philosopher, LudwigWitt-
genstein. The concept of language game
was created by Wittgenstein. Language
ties in with action: in English, for example,
anything from a violin to the children’s
game of tag can be played.
“The answer is usually ‘who cares what
a video game is –Wittgenstein proved half
a century ago that games defy definition’.”
An adventure game is
like a book
Karhulahti claims that a video game is a
species, Artefactum ludus ludus, a bit like
modernman is Homo sapiens sapiens. The
classic games are often social and physi-
cally active. The subgenres of the video
game differ, according to Karhulahti, from
these to a varying degree. An online game
community such asWorld of Warcraft may,
because of its social dimension, be very
game-like, but a classic adventure game
will proceed at the player’s own pace, like
turning the pages of a book.
The no-game era
Veli-Matti Karhulahti forecasts that video games will soon
be replaced by new games species. Even the present
video games are not, according to him, really games.
“The classic adventure game isn’t a
game anyway. Or it’s least of all a game,
and far closer to a book or a strip cartoon.”
In a book, the reader encounters prob-
lems, mysteries and themes. To under-
stand them he needs, Karhulahti explains,
the same mental processes as he would in
playing a classic adventure game. One of
his sources of inspiration was, he says, the
Grim Fandango game in 1998. Its world is
a highly-honed mixture of film noir style
and Aztec legends.
The video game, says Karhulahti, is in
the process of cultural evolution.
“The contemporary video game is a
thriving species that will probably soon
die off to make way for new types.”
As an example, he mentions interac-
tive movies. Ten years from now we’ll be
seeing something quite different.
“The marketing guys want to call them
games because games sell, but they don’t
have an awful lot in common with playing
in the traditional sense.”
Watching is not enough
Veli-Matti Karhulahti’s doctoral disser-
tation finally took shape while he was
working under an exchange scheme at
the Centre for Computer Games Research
at the IT University of Copenhagen. For
two years he was able to concentrate on
research there thanks to a grant from the
Finnish Cultural Foundation. He had previ-
ously financed his research by doing free-
lance work such as writing film reviews for
a newspaper and a filmmagazine. His MA
thesis was also about art criticism.
“People in Copenhagen were a bit
scared by my film background,” he grins.
“Comparing games to films immediately
makes the hard-core game researcher’s
hackles rise.”
Indeed, many of the misconceptions
about video games are, Karhulahti says,
caused by loosely associating games with
films.
“In the media, too, problems arise
because the people who talk about games
have only watched them; they haven’t
personally played them.”
The researcher’s work is a game
Until summer 2015 Veli-Matti Karhulahti
will continue working for his doctorate
at the University of Turku, researching
popular culture. In between, he has been
working on an online IGDB.comgame data-
base with an international programming
