The unmanned micros attended to the general business functions of the company: the main service, customer service, billing, accounting, commissions, regulatory interfaces, etc. This was done in real time and in coordination with all of the other human users. The robots constantly surveyed the environment and decided what to do. Minimal human intervention was needed. There was no operational down time for these old-fashioned, practical (because they were essential), functions. It worked well and produced huge volume processing capabilities which exceeded those offered by other computing platforms.

Finally, my point: during this adventure it became clear to me that another level of shared processing involving the users and the employees was needed. The collaborative software available at the time (15 years ago) was clumsy and lacked any computing muscle. It was also poorly designed and unreliable. The idea of game-like interfaces was always on my mind, but beyond my available time and budget. So if what you are talking about, and I am really unsure what you are talking about, involves producing on-demand community collaboration to advance public interests such as city hall activities, legislative bills, scotus cases, election irregularities — all the societal governance hot spots, then you will get all the funding you need.

I am a latecomer (e.g. post-tenure) to the study of games and virtual/synthetic worlds as well and I am lucky to be in a department at an institution which thinks it might actually have merit as an area of study. But. . . .

Game Studies (if such a thing exists or should exist) has the potential to be enormously threatening to a number of academic institutions. MMOGs don’t rely on instruction; they rely on experience. And as a result, I think they produce not only different knowledges, but different ways of knowing. I think the guild has been an awesome example of that. I have been thinking alot about what kinds of knowledges matter, how language develops, social normative conventions of guild speak, etc., etc. There are real, serious, social and cultural issues lurking about, as well as deeper metaphysical ones (I swear, I think we barely avoided a collision with existential phenomoneology the other day), aesthetic ones, and even practical ones.

Our fight, I fear, is not about getting games studies taken seriously, but what we do when people finally figure out there is something to take seriously. My major concern is that the most interesting and revolutionary work gets squashed under the weight of media effects, game addiction, or MRI scans of kids playing GTA to see how their brains light up when the take a baseball bat to a cop.

I guess I share your concern, but also see some very deep institutional issues that are going to need to be resolved if we are going to have good and interesting work not only see the light of day, but find a home in the academy.

I feel you on this one Tim. Some years ago I was teaching in the Language, Literature, and Communication department at RPI and, one semester, taught the basic graduate course in communication theory. Most of our graduate students were there for an MA in tech writing, a very pragmatic bunch. I taught the course in terms of what theory was interesting, as theory. My students complained that it wasn’t relevant to their practical problems. That didn’t surprise me at all. As far as I could tell, there simply wasn’t any theory that would have been of much practical value to them. Writing good tech manuals is very different from designing a telephone system.

As for your brilliant graduate student, that’s a conundrum as well. It’s clear to me that theory is built on a world of practical analyses. If you want a theory of online gaming, you need to construct a bunch of case studies, in whatever conceptual language is available and convenient. Given a bunch of such cases, you can then examine them and start formulating a theory.

As you rightly point out, tenure is key here, because it allows more senior scholars to support more junior research (through launching journals, hosting conferences, peer reviewing, etc.). The observations with which you begin, about the affordances of online collaborations (guilds, blogs like Terra Nova) actually make me more optimistic that an area like game studies and the people that do it can succeed *without* formal disciplinary status.

Of course, the downside of this is what you also note, it puts graduate students in the unenviable position of having to kowtow to a particular discipline’s sacred cows. At least this is an acute, rather than chronic position (at least ideally). Perhaps grad students’ difficulties will be somewhat ameliorated over time by the increase in legitimacy, senior presence in the field more broadly, and the increasing prospects for having outside reviewers who study games.

In the end, it’s only a matter of time (or so I tell myself this week).