By Bri Brands 

For Logan Brown, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies, games aren't simply entertainment or even objects to be studied. To him, they reflect culture and history and have significant implications for daily life.  

Brown began thinking differently about games as they moved onto the devices people carry everywhere. Mobile games could be downloaded for free, yet were increasingly designed to hold players' attention and keep them returning. He became less interested in proving that games deserved to be taken seriously as art and more interested in what their growing presence could reveal about everyday digital life. 

"That really started to clue me in on this shadow realm of games, this place where games are not just ‘fun and games’," he said. "They become serious. They start to have implications for law and policy, for child rearing, and for our own day-to-day mental health."  

Finding possibility in the past

When researching his book, Mobilizing Play: How Games Helped Cell Phones Conquer America (forthcoming), Brown made a shocking discovery: early mobile developers were not sure who their games were going to be for.  

While mobile games are now associated with casual play, this was not always the case. There was originally a "corporate civil war" over whether mobile games should continue targeting established gaming audiences or reach an entirely new group of players. That uncertainty is what makes history valuable to Brown, he said.  

“It’s those kinds of moments, where you see a counterfactual history happening and how it diverged from what actually happened, that are fascinating,” he said. 

Those same moments of uncertainty help Brown understand the technologies shaping the present and inform his research on the history of computing. For example, current discourses around artificial intelligence are the same discourses that have surrounded computers for half a century.  

"All of these concerns about the sanctity of human life and human creation in the face of synthetic creation are the questions that the earliest cybernetic theorists in the 1960s were thinking about," Brown said. "Being able to point to the history is an amazing way of undoing those pernicious myths around technology." 

New ways to study games at Iowa

When it comes to the classroom, Brown must navigate the divide between hardcore gaming enthusiasts and students who have never played a game. Rather than adhering to either extreme, Brown hews to the middle, giving students a toolbox of concepts they can apply to case studies that reflect their own interests and level of experience. 

"The more you can make it about them and their lives, the more into it they will be," Brown said.  

Brown has found that same openness to exploration at Iowa, where the flexibility of the Department of Communication Studies has given him room to experiment with how games and media can be studied and taught. 

"Here at Iowa, there's a very open-minded attitude that I like. As long as you can give rationale, you get to go ahead and do it," he said. "Every time I toss out an idea, everyone is very enthusiastic—anything I would want to teach would be viable." 

Looking forward, Brown hopes to develop new courses, finish his book, and explore new areas of research within game studies.