The ESA's study said 54 were added since 2008, a 27 percent rise in the number of video game-related degree programs in the U.S. Among states, California quite expectedly offers the most video game-related degrees, at 46 institutions, with the University of California-Irvine recently establishing a center for games and virtual worlds research. New York, Texas and Florida are the other leading states, in that order.

The utility of these programs extends beyond game creation; the ESA also said a poll found that 70 percent of "major employers" use some form of interactive software, including games, in employee training. Of those, three-fourths expect to expand their usage of such methods in the next three to five years.

Like any popular and growing field, graduates can certainly expect to find a competitive jobs environment. But the growth and the mainstreaming of programs built specifically for game design show the industry's deepening acceptance by and impact to big business in America.

More Colleges than Ever Offering Gaming Degrees [CNET]

The mission of the Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds, according to a university statement, will be to "expand campuswide research activities that draw upon UCI's strengths spanning the social and technological aspects of games and virtual worlds." It will likely be the site of national and international research workshops, and will host visiting research scholars on the subject.

The statement also points out that UC-Irvine was one of the first major research universities to establish teaching and research programs for computer game culture and technology. Its Game Culture & Technology Lab has pulled in nearly $5 million in external funding since its establishment in 2001.

The Center for Computer Games is a part of Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences; it's led by the school's associate dean, Magda El Zarki, and senior research scientist Walt Scacchi, of the UCI Institute for Software Research.

"We now realize that scientific and cultural achievements go beyond the current concepts of what games and virtual worlds are good for, or how they may be developed or applied," Scacchi said. "The center will support our research in demonstrating the sustained ability to invent and reinvent the future of computer games and virtual worlds."

The statement adds that: "UCI has a growing number of game-related research projects, including game-based virtual worlds where students 'play to learn' via interactive simulations, open community-based development of games and synthetic worlds, and gamelike synthetic worlds where autonomous characters display emotional responses and emergent behaviors."

UC Irvine establishes Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds [UC-Irvine Today, thanks Elizabeth L.]

The grant to the universities - N.C. State and Georgia Tech - is part of the federal stimulus package and will span four years of research. Phase one of this study will seek to identify the qualities a game must have to improve cognition - memory, problem-solving, critical thinking and the like."

"We want to determine the components an effective game should have," said Dr. Anne McLaughlin, an assistant professor of psychology at N.C. State, and the study's principal investigator.

After determining which game qualities deliver the greatest improvement in cognitive function, phase two will seek to develop guidelines for "a new class of video game for older adults," and also develop a prototype game that follows those guidelines. State seems to be supplying the analysis, with Tech coming in to create the game. The study will last from September this year to August 2013.

Boom Blox was chosen as the study game because its "novelty, attentional demand and social interaction may be manipulated by the researchers."

I think it's significant for a number of reasons: They're moving the Wii-as-therapy fad beyond the examination of physical benefits. They're starting with a reasonably current and commercially successful title. And they're trying to spur games development. (And I went to N.C. State, but no one should really care about that.)

Study to See if Video Games Can Boost Thinking Skills in Elderly [Eurekalert.org thanks Jason]

The feature, Dramatic Play, analyzes the intersection of interactive media, drama and games as well as the classic tenants of play and storytelling that make or break a video game. Dinehart says that Aristotle's original notion of dramatic play — that's interactive drama where you experience a story instead of just hearing about it — has bled into games like World of Warcraft, Dead Space and his own Company of Heroes.

These games seek to immerse the player in a dramatic role play, whereby they assume the role of character in a different time and place, and whose actions and presence having meaning in the world as designed.

Dramatic play is the new niche these games expound upon, a paradigm that is the focus of interactive narrative design, a craft that meets at the apex of ludology and narratology and conjoins the theories into functional video game development methodologies.

Heavy stuff, but very interesting — the kind of thing that would make an awesome dissertation topic in a Rhetoric Department at some research university. I mean if we're all on the same page that games are interesting and important and worthy of respect, we have got to get more academics on the case. That, or clone people like Ian Bogost.

Dramatic Play [Gamasutra]

Racing the Beam sets up the Atari Video Computer System (later 2600) as a console that profoundly shaped game design because its limitations forced programmers to come up with new efficiencies and tricks to deliver more complex games. The book also points out that it was an unusually long-lived platform - going into 1992 - despite its lightweight computing power.

The VCS' big setback, according to the book, is that the console had a tiny 128 bytes (yes bytes) of RAM, which could not accommodate a frame buffer - in other words the portion of RAM that stores the image data for each successive screen displayed by the game. So VCS programmers had to generate graphics purely in real time. For those who complain about how difficult it is to program for the PlayStation 3, this is the equivalent of "In my day, I walked six miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways."

By "racing the beam," programmers came up with a few tricks. The information space inside three blank spots that the electron gun didn't have to render was rededicated to things like joystick inputs, scoring and other processes. In some cases they shrank the playing screen more to give themselves more programming space. Pitfall!, one of the deepest games of its generation, made use of this.

Further, the VCS could only display two sprites on the screen at any given moment. How they compensated for that is a technical challenge that I can't intelligently describe. But suffice to say, in Pac-Man - a disappointing port partially blamed for the early 1980s video game crash - every time you ate a dot, the game redrew the screen. This manic redrawing accounted for the ghosts' flicker, which, of course, was justified because THEY GHOSTS after all.

The book's authors, Nick Monfort and Ian Bogost, say that arcade ports to the 2600 lay the foundation for future practices in bringing arcade games home. Says Bogost:

"The porting of arcade games to home systems was first really worked through on the VCS. It was because of this VCS development that developers were able to figure out what to try to carry over and what to leave behind, and how to adapt the arcade experience for more limited consoles that would be played at home."

The authors say Racing the Beam is the first in a series of "platform studies" that will probe how gaming platforms affect how games are created.

Racing the Beam: How Atari 2600's Crazy Hardware Changed Game Design [Wired]

I'm putting the finishing touches on my proposal for FDG '09 and kind of wish the timing worked out better for this conference, too (damn quarter system). Last year sounded like a pretty good time — and it's even bigger this year. So if you've got a paper or presentation up your sleeve, you've got until February 16th to submit it. The full CFP is below:

Games+Learning+Society 5.0: Learning Through Interaction
http://glsconference.org
June 10-12, 2009 Madison, WI
CALL FOR PAPERS

Back by demand and now expanded to accommodate last year’s waiting list, the GLS conference this year will features substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames –- commercial games and otherwise -– can enhance learning, culture, and education. This year’s theme of “Learning through Interaction” highlights the expansive nature of our definition of games & game culture to include research and design in areas including popular culture and fandom, interactive design more generally, and digital/visual cultures. This three-day conference will be held at the UW’s historic Memorial Union, overlooking downtown Madison's beautiful Lake Mendota.

Conference highlights also include keynotes by leaders in both academics and industry, interactive workshops on game design and games research, both individual and symposia presentation sessions, “chat n’ frags” in the arcade for hands-on gameplay, an evening poster session over cocktails & hors d'oeuvres, an evening machinima festival in the playhouse theatre, and fireside chats that enable thorough, cozy conversations among speakers and attendees. We encourage the submission of traditional paper sessions as well as innovative talk formats which focus on game design, game culture, and games' potential for learning and society more broadly.

Confirmed Speakers include: James Paul Gee, Idit Caperton, Alex Chisholm, Doug Church, Mia Consalvo, Elonka Dunin, Drew Davidson, Lisa Nakamura, Bonnie Nardi, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler, Steve Thorne, Eric Zimmerman.

Submissions are due online by February 16, 2009. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site at http://glsconference.org.

The Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference is sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Academic ADL Co-Lab. For information on how to sponsor this event, contact the conference coordinator at gls(at)seanmichaeldargan(dot)com.

[via Terra Nova]

Q: Is the program available to students from all countries?
A: Yes, students from all countries are welcome to apply, though applications must be in English. The language of the conference is English.

Q: Are there restrictions on the kind of degree program?
A: Yes, undergraduate students must be enrolled in a 4-year degree program (or equivalent, or better, such as a 5 year dual degree or 5 year BS/MS). If you have questions about whether your degree program is acceptable, please contact the Student Scholarships Chair.

Q: Do I have to be a current student?
A: Yes, you must currently be enrolled as a student to apply.

Q: When will you contact the faculty member reference?
A: We plan on only contacting faculty references for those students who are in our semi-finalist pool. Once contacted, we will only ask for a few paragraphs of information. For the faculty member, the entire process should take less than 20 minutes.

Q: Who should I choose as a faculty member reference?
A: Ideally a faculty member who can discuss your game project in detail, and who understands your overall academic progress.

Q: Should applicants have a valid passport?
A: Yes, applicants should already have a valid passport, as there may not be time to get one between announcement of winners and the cruise. Applicants should be aware that, should they win, they will need to be able to travel to the United States and to the Bahamas.

Q: How many students will be selected?
A: We anticipate 10-15 students will participate in this program.

Q: If I am selected, what will it cost to attend the conference?
A: Students selected for scholarships will have reasonable airfare (coach on lowest cost airline), hotel the night before (and after, if necessary), and reasonable incidental travel costs (airport shuttle or parking, dinner the night before the conference, etc. The conference reserves the right to not reimburse expenses that are viewed as excessive.

Travis and Young hope the Initiative will bring together scholars and students in the humanities, the social sciences, education, computer science, and business to consider “the place and extraordinary potential of video games in our culture,” provide a (virtual) place for scholarly research into the relation of video games to values, and offer online courses taught by fellows from various different disciplines.

“We believe that video games’ greatest innovations in education, business, the social sciences, the humanities, and most of all in games themselves will arise from a deeper understanding of games’ connections among all these disciplines,” says Travis.

“When scholars and students alike understand these connections better, they will be better prepared to advance the state of gaming as it relates to their own fields.”

Will the idea take off or fizzle? Only time will tell; it's certainly a nice idea. I'll be keeping a watchful eye on the developments.

Courses examine videogaming as artistic medium, cultural pursuit [UConn Advance]

While it wasn't clear whether the IGDA's Education SIG would take up the issue, DigiPen's Comair says that a policy change is not out of the question. "Students come to DIT to learn and get the most out of their education, not to ship a game they created at school for profit," he says.

"We are a school, not a production house, and therefore our goal is for the students to gain the knowledge and experience they need to be successful in the field. We may lose students based on our IP policy, but this is not as important to me as is maintaining the quality of the education.

"I am not saying that we will not change in the future," he adds. "But, in order to do that, we need to talk to the industry to see what they feel would be best. Our program advisory committee is made up of the best of the best companies in the world. So far," he says, "they are very happy with our policy."

The commercial aspect adds some special challenges, but there's something that rubs me the wrong way about schools retaining the IP of student work. The idea that students shouldn't have control over their own work because 'it was a homework assignment' really strikes me the wrong way, probably because plenty of my fellow graduate students have and will publish work that was a 'homework assignment' (a very, very big homework assignment). As long as the policies are clearly spelled out, no one has much room to complain for current projects, but it seems like something that deserves to have a second look.

Controversy In The Classroom: Whose IP Is It Anyway? [Gamasutra]

Call for Papers

As fear is the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind (Lovecraft), human beings have always taken a malicious pleasure in frightening themselves. If literature and cinema were and still represent good means for the expression of horror, nowadays, the experience of fear is as intense in video games.

While academia has been studying horrific literature and films for a few decades, such an interest for the videoludic side of horror has not, until now, showed up. Yet, since the cinematic staging of fear in Alone in the Dark in 1992, the "Survival Horror" has become a prolific genre offering a wide selection of significant games such as the Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame series. Because it is at the crossroads of diverse cultural heritages and the latest technological developments, and because it exhibits the ins and outs of the matrix that governs all but a few games (spatial navigation and survival), horror video games require a deeper study.

This international conference wishes to study horror video games (not necessarily labeled survival horror) from an eclectic range of critical and theoretical perspectives. It aims to fill a gap in game studies between general theory and analysis of particular genres and games.

Possible Topics

Here are some examples of relevant themes we wish to explore in this conference:

Historical approach

Origins and history of horror video games
Impact of the technological evolution on horror video games
Theoretical approach

Simulation of horror, fear, terror

Narratives and themes of horror video games
Interpretation of individual works and series
Transmedial approach

Transmedial study of horror video games (game/film/literature)

Remediation in films, literature and video games
Socio-cultural approach

Transnational analysis of horror video games (United States/Japan)

Social and cultural meanings of horror video games
Horror video games and censorship
Analytical approach

Aesthetics of horror video games (lighting, sound, editing, 1st/3rd person perspective)

Study of specific games or series (Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, etc.)

The organizing committee remains open to proposals that respect the general spirit of this call for papers.

Please submit your proposals before January 15, 2009 via email to the following address: thinking.after.dark@ca.inter.net.

Your proposal must include:

1. The title of your paper and an abstract (no more that 500 words).
2. Your academic status, your institutional affiliation, your department and your contact information (mailing address, telephone number, fax number and e-mail address).
3. A short biography underlining your work related to the themes of the conference (no more than 250 words).

A selection of papers will be published in a special issue of Loading…, the journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA).

———-

Looking forward to meeting you in Montréal next April,

The organizing committee.

What we're really talking about is pretending. Make-believe. "Role-playing" may bless the activity with a marginally more acceptable moniker, but when we play RPGs we summon our most primitive urges - the ones we've had since we were children - and we tap into something about the human psyche that inclines toward empathy.

We love pretending because we possess an innate desire to understand (to know and to feel) what it would be like to be *this* man or *that* woman. To mold a character through our own choices and to walk in his shoes, with as many in-world consequences and as few real-world consequences as possible, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

We know all this, and we've known it for a long time...but sometimes it pays to stop and take a another look. Sometimes we're jolted into knowing something in a better way than we knew it before.

It's an interesting look at (a) an interesting pedagogical tool (I am so hoping I can teach seminars on RPGs one day) and (b) a reminder of why (some of us) love RPGs.

The glory of the amorphous hero [Brainy Gamer]

Now others at [Denver University] seem to be paying attention. "Can you imagine if we really succeed, if we get twenty students into this laboratory to do physics experiments?" says Hill excitedly. "Putting them into a nuclear control room and letting them do things and destroy things and not letting them get hurt? Think of what this means. Imagine how powerful this can be for education."

But not everyone was thrilled when the story hit the online newspaper Inside Higher Ed last year. "Second Life isn't stable enough to test something that important," one commenter wrote. "Why not make a program that will actually simulate that properly? Second Life doesn't even stand up to normal 'game' quality. It can't even properly simulate a car."

Zing! The accessibility of Second Life is cited as a reason institutions are having 'notable' results with their virtual counterparts, but I'd be curious to know how 'notable' is being defined.

With help from the feds, a Denver scientist helps Second Life go nuclear [Denver Westword News via TerraNova]

The Power of Tangential Learning [Edge]

“(The) Chinese have invented some interesting ways to play with the in-game economy (not the real world economy). Ways that I have not observed here in two years of studying ‘World of Warcraft.’

“Chinese players are more attuned to the aesthetics of the game. At least they mention them more in interviews. They talked more about color schemes, animations, architecture, and so on more than American players.

She notes that Chinese players are less likely to play with add-ons and modifications because they like the 'challenging' version of the game better. Well, whatever works. Nardi will be completing her research along with a doctoral student; hopefully her final paper will shed more light on little-studied areas and not just broad generalizations of the obvious.

UCI tackles ‘World of Warcraft’ mystery [OC Register]

Are these findings representative of all virtual worlds, or all MMOs, or all fantasy titles? I have my own speculations (pretty solid for fantasy diku games), and I welcome yours. Of course, until other developers open their doors in a similar fashion, it'll all remain speculation.

What can you expect from future reports? Our subsequent papers will involve research on gender differences, role players, economic modeling, social networks, group success and failure, raiding, detailed player behavior metrics, trust and community, and many others currently in the hopper. As we develop more and more metrics from the player behavior data, we will be merging these with the psychological, demographic, and attitude data from the survey. In other words, for the first time we will know who they are, what they think, and what they do on a truly systematic level.

The article itself is a quick read, and the data is condensed in charts if you're too lazy to read the full article. I'm looking forward to 'future installments' — what other oddball stats will crop up?

"Who plays, how much, and why? A player census of a virtual world" [Wiley InterScience via Terra Nova]

There’s always a ‘but.’ The thing that struck me most about Anne Allison’s otherwise interesting essay was for me –- a “gamer” and someone who writes about games –- was that she clearly had little experience with games themselves. As it turned out, she was apparently inspired to look into the Pokémon phenomenon after her children started playing; beyond purchasing and observing, she herself had no experience with gaming. My criticisms weren’t aimed at her thinking or writing or research, per se – no, my quibble was with nit-picky details that didn’t quite ring true.

On the Inside Looking Out

One of the fascinating bits of being an academic is that we can attain “expert” status while being “outsiders.” For some of us, our outsider status is almost a given. It’s impossible for me to be an “insider” when writing about the late nineteenth century or the 1930s or even the 1980s. And really, that’s OK. Generations of social scientists and academics in the humanities have built careers and a sizeable body of work and solid conclusions while being outsiders. The dissonance comes when dealing with topics where “insider” status is a necessary for “expert” status. In the gaming world, outsiders don’t generally become experts –- writers don’t get picked up just because they can write well on any subject. A certain hands-on familiarity with our subject is demanded of us. It is almost a given that gaming is part of our daily life, independent of writing – something that is impossible to replicate when I’m looking at, say, 1930s advertisements.

Allison, a fine anthropologist who has a fascinating body of work on Japan, was clearly an outsider. And it occurred to me that as people (academics) get more and more interested in gaming of various forms, virtual worlds, and the like, the more of this sort of scholarship we’re going to see. At this point in time, I think many people are still a little too lost when it comes to, say, MMOs to write an article tackling the issue – I chatted with one of my advisors, who is a technophobe in his daily life but reasonably enthusiastic regarding subjects that aren’t widely studied yet (in his case, film, and most recently underground and independent film in China), about my plans to do a more current look at the Chinese gaming milieu. To my great surprise, he thought it was a fabulous idea, and added that plenty of academics would like to look at such issues in China and Korea, but don’t know where to start.

But what about when people do start realizing where those starting points are? Do we have whole books to look forward to that just “don’t get it”? And really, who am I to say another academic just doesn’t “get it,” when their scholarship is otherwise unimpeachable? Am I privileging the fan voice? Am I engaging in the same sort of behavior that privileges the ‘native’ voice –- the idea that, say, my Chinese friends are simply more capable of being good Chinese historians than I? It’s not so much an issue of privileging as a difference on opinion as to what constitutes ‘expert’ status. Anne Allison –- as fine an anthropologist as she is -– wouldn’t stand a chance of attaining ‘expert’ status with her writing about the game industry. It’s clear from her writing that she is an ‘outsider.’ But where oh where are those insiders? How is it that I study at a school that houses people like Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto, and I still get the curious stare when delineating my weekend responsibilities?

Inside Out, Outside In

Part of my problem when grappling with this issue is that I simply cannot break away from my disciplinary boundaries. Oh, sure, an article here or there is one thing, but the idea of writing my dissertation or staking my career on gaming? Even if I could convince my advisors — a dubious proposition at best — I just couldn’t bring myself to make the leap. I’m sure I’m not the only person facing such a dilemma. While game studies provides a safe haven for many people, it never would’ve occurred to me to go to graduate school for it — I’m not sure I’d even been particularly happy. I like what I study, but I also like branching out — and I have a suspicion that means I’m going to be sandwiched in between two fields that don’t really want my work, at least as it relates to gaming.

Systemic change is difficult to affect in academia. Critiques of the ‘traditional’ academic structure abound, and there are plenty of people trying to think ‘outside the box.’ Unfortunately, even the “outside of the boxers” frequently wind up reinforcing the box — it’s difficult to get outside the structure totally. Our studies and careers are predicated on being able to fit into some category or another. Specialization is the name of the game, and once something gets really entrenched, it frequently becomes a means to an end.

The Afterlives of Game Studies?

I admit I harbor some suspicion for ‘_______ studies’ programs, be it ‘Asian studies’ or ‘American studies’ or ‘game studies.’ This stems partly from the fact that area studies (of which East Asian 'studies' is an honored part) is the granddaddy of all those other studies programs — which means we’ve had considerably more time to ruminate on the meaning of our ‘field’ and the benefits and limitations of the (in theory) multidisciplinary approach to a particular area. We also have a collection of books with frightening (for a youngster at the beginning of his or her career) titles such as Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, with even more terrifying essays contained within. The great cynics of area studies make scientists’ doom and gloom predictions about global warming sound positively cheery in comparison.

One of the greatest critiques is that despite the best intentions of most of these sorts of programs, they frequently wind up becoming an end unto themselves — not a space for a variety of disciplines to gather, but a discipline in and of itself. I have the utmost respect for many of the ‘game studies’ academics I’ve had the pleasure of having exchanges with, but I have to wonder where the field is going to be in 20 or 30 years — will we be seeing a volume entitled Playing Games: The Afterlives of Game Studies? One would hope not, but surveying the scene from the area studies corner of the Academy leaves me with a slightly sour taste in my mouth. While I don’t think Ian Bogost et al. need to worry about being put in service to the 21st century equivalent of the Cold War, I’d be surprised if some of the same things that have tripped up area studies don’t wind up being obstacles for our much younger disciplinary cousin.

Blundering Towards Enlightenment

At the Kotaku pre-E3 party, an MA student introduced himself to me and queried me regarding my academic path. He expressed some surprise when I said I was an historian — ‘Oh, but I thought you were in game studies?’. He looked mildly disappointed when I said no, just a boring modern Chinese historian here. It got me thinking — will ‘game studies’ become an exclusive club, like many other ‘studies’ are? What boxes on the CV are we going to have to mark to be considered valid and serious researchers of games? How is the discipline hierarchy going to shake out?

There are clearly a lot of interesting and creative people currently working on gaming in an academic context, and I sincerely hope that ‘game studies’ continues to be a place where academics from a variety of disciplines (but common research theme) have space to share. I hope that even the older and stodgier disciplines like my own will begin to come around to the idea that games and gaming are legitimate fields of inquiry, and valid sources to draw from. This, perhaps, is the greatest challenge: academics are frequently cranky and highly defensive of their respective disciplines. Many of us do cross boundaries with ease, but it can be a tough row to hoe when it comes to breaking new paths, especially when it comes to what constitutes an appropriate source base. It took quite some time for film to develop into an accepted source for historical study, for example, and students of material culture still find themselves up against a brick wall when talking to certain colleagues.

I’ll admit that I won’t be upsetting the apple cart in history any time soon — I wouldn’t be allowed to write my dissertation on such a ‘new’ topic as gaming or virtual worlds in China, even if I wanted to, and it would probably be academic suicide (at least as far as traditional history departments are concerned). That doesn’t mean I’m not going to throw my hat into the ring, of course — but trailblazing visionary/rebel I am not, at least not when it comes to arguing for games. I already have a little notebook with references, citations, and impressions for my not-so-far-away article, but the constraints of working within a reasonably stuffy discipline mean that until I have tenure, it’s a sideline. An interesting and productive sideline, but a sideline nonetheless. I do hope that there will be room for my future students to maneuver between the rigid, traditional structure and the ‘upstart’ fields like game studies.

Game studies, like any discipline, will be going through growing pains — we’ve been writing histories for thousands of years and it seems that every year brings some new problem that needs to be hashed out. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer addressed some of these issues in a recent interview that appeared on GameSetWatch:

… there is already a field called game studies, and some of us aren't comfortable with where that's going or don't feel we quite fit in there. Game studies is taking a fairly traditional academic approach to research and scholarship, and as a professor who has done my share of papers and conferences, I'm trying to go another way. I want to write about games at the place where they are being discussed most vigorously, online and amongst gamers. I greatly respect what game studies is doing - and I've benefited from this work - but I've reached the point in my career where I'm not terribly interested in traditional academic research anymore.

In many respects, we’re coming from the same position and, at the same time, pretty far apart. It’s not that I’m not interested in traditional academic research regarding games, I’m simply interested in it on my own terms – and in my own field. I wonder, though, if that leaves me on the outside looking in and the inside looking out. It’s an odd gap to straddle — I just hope it's not an impossibly wide gap to bridge.

But it is possible to shift the paradigm, so why don't older institutions follow suit?

For one thing, they don't consider games "academically respectable," Bartle asserts. For another, computer games staff don't get included in research assessment submissions, because there are no first-class journals specific to the medium — and, of course, major universities just don't see any money in it, he says.

Bartle, who is currently a Principal Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems at Essex University, explained ruefully: "None of this would matter if it were without consequences. Unfortunately, there are consequences."

Modern universities focus on training in the way that vocational schools do, says Bartle, while older ones have a tradition of education.

My first reaction is 'Well, duh.' Academia is built on tradition and regularity (there is a reason 'disciplines' have that name), so trailblazing a new path is not the easiest of tasks. Even a move to shift perceptions of 'standard' disciplines is likely to be met with suspicion and skepticism. On the other hand, many of those older or less progressive institutions are sloooowly coming around. But the process isn't going to happen overnight, and I wouldn't expect to see 'training in the way that vocational schools do' at an Ivy League institution near you any time soon. I'm also not convinced that's necessarily a bad thing - just as students flock to particular institutions to study under renowned experts in well-established fields, why wouldn't we expect the same out of people wishing to study gaming?

MUD Co-Creator Bartle Criticizes Gaming And Academia Divide [GameSetWatch]

There's not much yet, but if Ryan can stick to the book-a-week premise, I think there will be a nice and very accessible collection of reviews and thoughts on a wide variety of books. It's one of those things I've added to my feeds and just hope it doesn't peter out.

The Secret Books of Game Design [Words on Play via Grand Text Auto]

I’d like to conduct in-depth interviews with all types of people involved in the creation process, from programmers and testers to visual artists and music composers, as well as game developers, producers and visionaries ....

Another part of my research is to collect oral histories from gamers and game developers regarding their experiences playing games, specifically during "epochal" moments, like when Lord British was assassinated in Ultima Online. Some people also happened to record those moments, and it would be very interesting to collect those artifacts for the cultural record.

I'll be curious to see how this project develops, since it could potentially be very influential in how other collections begin organizing and preserving new media and video games more specifically. The idea of oral history is a particularly good one — the historian in me is glad people are working on things like this now, as opposed to scrambling when it's almost too late.

University of Texas at Austin Looks at MMO Preservation [Game Culture] & LJ Talks to Megan Winget, Who Studies Preservation of Online Games [Library Journal] [via GameSetWatch]

We also spoke on the difficulties of it being a stable field .... He was comfortable with the term game criticism, but had some reservations. Like the rest of us, he is nervous.

"Narrative games are barely past the infant stage, and critical commentary and analysis about them are even less developed," he warned. "Everyone is still trying to figure out who everyone else is, and in this process communities form themselves. We are on the ground floor of this effort to try to figure out how to talk intelligently about video games - how to analyze them and develop a critical language to discuss them. We're not like other disciplines (I'm not even sure I would call us a discipline yet), because we're all figuring this out together; we don't even have the terms yet."

He told me, "Part of our trepidation about what to call it is that there is already a field called game studies, and some of us aren't comfortable with where that's going or don't feel we quite fit in there ...."

A lot of us are treading (or going to tread) in a relative no man's land — outside our 'home' disciplines, but not at home in game studies. In any case, it's an interesting interview — and the whole series is definitely worth a look. There's some wonderfully thoughtful musings and discussion about gaming, the gaming community, and beyond.

Game Community Interviews, Part 4 - The Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott [GameSetWatch]