Yes, you’re right, I’d love to write about that dev-dev relationship. Have talked about it briefly (at IndieCade 2010) but not in an academic context. Actually, I’m reading some relevant (and excellent) art theory right now about collaborative art practices (Grant Kester’s new book). Will try to do a blog post about it some day, at least.

I think if you look at the footage from E3 and the game press surrounding it (PC Gamer, RPS and others) you’ll see that even the press guys felt that E3 has become an entity obsessed with explosions and warfare as its principle component. Which distorts the reality of what games are (i.e. completely ignores non-violent games, indie games etc). The fact is that E3 represents what will be mentioned in the non specialist press as “mainstream” games. So people reading that press will have a very skewed view of what games are in comparison to the reality.

Not all games are about spec-ops soldiers walking away from nuclear explosions after just slaughtering half a city for fun.

I’m curious about what you meant by “psychopathic games”, or what kind of games do you think help strengthening people’s ignorance on games?

You pose a good question there. I’m definitely NOT a psychologist and yet I’m interested in the psychology of players for my specific questions. In this case, I’m generally standing on the shoulders of others who have learnt more about studying the psychology of games (from people like Lennart Nacke) and even then I’m never going to suggest that my experiments are without flaws.

The point is that as a researcher you generally use the expertise of others and then subvert their work for your own ends. I’m sure that a purist in any specific area could pick flaws in any game-specific study much as I don’t doubt a game player could pick holes in any attempt for a sociologist to enumerate aspects of game design.

The fun part of academic work, is realizing that there is a huge amount of variation in the quality of research and the depth of thinking applied to it. Not all research is as valid or as valuable and it is part of the academic role to figure out for themselves how to see the wood from the trees.

We wouldn’t take someone who never reads seriously as a contributor to literature, so I think there’s an ethical issue for people who don’t at least try and understand games trying to contribute to the discussion.

I’ve been in the situation where I’ve had to defend games against some people with prejudicial preconceptions before and I’m kind of tired of that ignorance. Of course game developers often don’t help (with some pretty psychopathic games out there), but I think academia has a lot to offer games as a medium if we can just get both sides to grow up a bit.

I agree completely. It always surprises me to meet a game studies scholar who does not really play games and this has happened more than i would like! It is my passion as a gamer that lead me to study them in the first place and the countless hours of gaming really do bear some productive research fruits. I also think it is important to look beyond the bounds of digital gaming for the same reason. Recently board games have let me reflect on digital games anew fairly regularly.

This said, for me at least, it did take a while to slip out of the defensive manner that being a gamer in societies that (until recently) did not take games seriously causes and to stop making excuses and just point out when games are not suitable or when they fall down for particular purposes. Henry Jenkins has written about the potential and perils of being, what he terms, an aca-fan at some length in some interesting pieces.

Also, in the interests of being open minded, perhaps there is something to be offered by researchers who can bring totally outside perspectives (I.e. who are not part of gamer culture)? Obviously this has born fruit in some disciplines such as anthropology before.

Still, my instinct as a gamer and academic (gamademic?:) is that an interest in, passion for and a shed load of experience playing, games is the way to approach their study. Works for me anyway : )

Adam.