‘Game’ Changer: IYA Alum Turned PhD Student Explores the Influence of Video Games
July 5, 2023
From the bygone era of Pong and Atari to Grand Theft Auto and The Sims, video games have captivated players of all ages all over the world for decades. The growing gaming industry represents a collective phenomenon that, according to 2020 data, has surpassed the profit of movies and music combined. If over 2 billion individuals across the globe are regular gamers, what influence does that have on peoples’ minds and society overall? Amanda Curtis is driven to uncover these effects. A USC Iovine and Young Academy alumnus currently earning her Doctor of Philosophy at University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, her research concentrates on gaming’s imprint, from the way we think to how we make meaning in our lives.
“It’s no longer a niche thing. We’re doing this as part of our daily lives,” Curtis says of gaming. “What impact does that have on how we see the world and how we interpret and sort of think about ourselves and the people around us?”
Curtis explores these questions from practice-based sociological, psychological, and educational perspectives. At the Internet Institute, she works as a qualitative researcher, frequently interviewing people about how they interact with video games.
A lifelong gamer herself, she sees the beauty, imagination, and even the bonding potential in the player experience. With a background in user experience research, Curtis perceives games as becoming more important in our existence as time goes on, and ultimately hopes her findings will benefit their design and functionality. The more we understand about how humans are shaped as players, the better we can innovate with them in mind.
“How can we think about when we’re making games, what do we want to be enabling players to do?” she asks. “I’m hoping as a result of the PhD to also create design guidelines, in whatever shape that might take, to be able to liaise with industry professionals.”
Curtis has always enjoyed video games, but it wasn’t until IYA that she realized that analyzing the space’s significance was an academic road she could ride until the graduate level and beyond. Her science-centered high school instilled a love for research and extracting information, but she wanted a degree program that would support her goal of committing her curiosity to a greater purpose.
“IYA was interesting to me because it was that blend of the practice-based making of things, whether that’s designing or programming or actually making something with your hands, but there’s this central interest in information and knowledge and having some sort of impact on our society. I thought it would give me the space to explore myself, and it really did,” she shares.
After tinkering and taking on new interests like programming her freshman and sophomore year, Curtis utilized IYA’s academic plasticity to dive deeper into the human-centered gaming inquest she felt compelled to pursue. She traveled to Japan to scratch her investigative itch, conducting research through the University of Tokyo that examined how Japanese female players' gaming experiences differed from their male colleagues. This, alongside her research-based Garage Experience project and an eye-opening communications course, solidified a gaming fascination that bleeds into today.
“This is something I really valued about my education. It gave me the flexibility to try new things and to push myself in a way that I don’t think I would have been able to in a more linear structured program. It was that encouragement that I got from everyone around me, both my peers and the different faculty members to really try new things,” she adds.
As Curtis builds data collection to support her PhD, she continues to try new things and methodologies to comprehend her subjects. She even employs research approaches that put her directly alongside players as they’re in their electronic elements. Recently operating a study through the new Animal Crossing game, she had 80 different users give her tours of personalized islands they had designed within the game. What she discovered shed light on how individuals relate to their identities (both present and future), their hopes and dreams, and how they can literally play with their own lives by existing as an avatar.
“I was sort of following them around, and they were explaining how they make things in the game and how they play, in order to understand their creativity and their sense of identity and how they’re thinking about the real world through this game environment,” Curtis explains.
“There’s some sort of relationship to how they view themselves and their world and they’re experimenting with that through game play, sort of figuring themselves out,” she adds.
Curtis is an empathic researcher when it comes to interpreting video game effects because she fully grasps what it means to be a player. She observes the normalization of gamers becoming more prevalent and she’s happy to be the one to give the community a voice. She points out that she has no shortage of willing study participants eager to expound on their lifestyle, and “being there for people” is a motivating factor.
As a young girl Curtis found herself playing single-player games that didn’t involve other people, but she’s slashing the stereotype that gaming is purely an isolating event. In fact, the connection it foments is what drew her in in the first place.
“The more I do these things, the more I reflect on why I started gaming. It’s really been because of my dad … I grew up with a dad who loved games, and he loved gaming with me … I remember Saturday morning playing Legend of Zelda, we finally beat the final boss, and it was such a euphoric moment for me,” she gushes. “We’re both playing the brand new Zelda game that came out and we live thousands of miles apart but we’re texting all the time, like, ‘Whoa did you go here? Did you do that?’”
With an intimate affinity for gaming that holds a special place in her heart, Curtis is at the cutting edge of a field of study that is poised to unlock new knowledge and humanistic insight, within an industry that can only get bigger from here. Next time you settle in with your Xbox or fire up your Switch, maybe you’ll consider how the action reconfigures your way of feeling and thinking. Or not. Either way, Curtis is happy to be the one to dig deep so future players might have the most meaningful gaming experiences possible.