Suppose you’re a scholar interested in the theory of games as an expressive form. Do you want to seek the widest possible public audience? Why? What’s in it for you? On that topic in particular, a wide public audience is as likely to treat you with scorn as appreciation even if you communicate clearly and make important points. It would only be worth it if you were aiming to engage some intersection of public interest and games-as-expressive-media, say on the question of “violence”, with the aspiration of changing the way that we legislate about or publically debate that question. Or, for example, if you wanted to convince people who presently see digital games as valueless that they’re really quite important and aesthetically interesting. But that’s a well-occupied niche.

So instead let’s say you’re trying to talk to scholars. Which ones? Galloway primarily chooses “critical theorists, film theorists, media theorists”, and therefore quite rightly selects their preferred vocabulary, their general intellectual aesthetic, and even the conventional aspect of that genre of writing which requires novel terminologies and theoretical claims. If Galloway were primarily talking to scholars in what’s becoming known as “game studies”, he might write somewhat differently–and my critique here could be merely seen as a game-studies oriented scholar peevishly complaining that he’s not first talking to me rather than those guys.

This is why I like that Miller article: it tries to sketch out the deeper reasoning about why we write the way that we write.

Over in my corner of the world there is a fair amount of talk how best to write and present scientific information, most of it concerning the dilemma of how to be sufficiently precise without being grindingly dull. I’ve had long editing sessions with academic advisers focused on making my prose clear–for example, making sure I’m using the standard jargon in the same way everybody else does. Of course the target audience is specialists, not the general public, but even within this circle there is professional pressure to reach as many people as possible. In my own discussions with colleagues about presentation I find myself adopting what I think of as advertising language: even the driest equation-laden slideshow has “arcs” that “tell a story”. Some of the pressure to do this feels structural: there’s a lot of competition out there, and if you’re paper/slideshow/poster is too hard to grasp people will just pass it by. All in all, it’s better to be understood than ignored. I would think similar pressures would apply in other disciplines.

Jargon has its place. My own field of computational linguistics employs plenty of it, and papers often contain row upon row of mathematical equations, the most opaque jargon of all. But riding above it all is an Orwellian (in the sense of the Miller article) sensibility. Obscurity is permissible only to the extent that it is unavoidable, and part of the intellectual skill you develop is to know when you don’t understand something because it’s hard as opposed to when it’s poorly presented. (Obviously, that is, or at least should be, a general reading skill.) In practice, of course, none of this is clear cut. Some scientific papers are harder than others, and some people are better writers, but in general obscurity provokes tetchy impatience among my colleagues. It’s a variety of tetchiness I find weirdly absent when I talk to friends who study critical art theory, or the like.

I’m not trying to some kind of tired Two Cultures retread here. These are the same groups of people, drawn from the same narrow cultural band, at the same institutions, with the same predisposition for vanity and bluster–and yet the rhetorical goals seem markedly different. I wonder if there are reasons for this that are inherent to the disciplines. For example, scientific prose is dull by design, but even highly technical philosophical writing has a literary cast. Sometimes it seems to me that the obscurity is a kind of literary effect (albeit one that is not my cup of tea). Or maybe, as you allude to, certain technical terms are chosen to have a harsh “scientific” sound, a form of science-envy that more technical fields are not going to be as prone to. (Though not immune to either. Sometimes when theoretical linguists start slinging around Greek letters and quasi-mathematical formalisms it’s hard not to roll your eyes and say, “Physics envy strikes again!”)

Nice points, too, about the mad proliferation of new vocabulary within game studies. Something about the field, and digital studies more generally, seems to encourage neologism, and I agree that this can be read both as an innocent (if not always wise) desire to coin appropriate, specific terms for artifacts and processes that are, well, NEW, and less nobly as a kind of disciplinary marking of territory and tactical move toward branding one’s own professional identity. (It would be so much easier if we could just trademark everything.) The linguistic arms race is frustrating because it pushes those of us in the field into a paradoxical state of being very competitive with each other, yet often ignorant of what everyone else is saying. For such a small field, it’s already surprisingly balkanized.

Personally, I like the terms diegetic and nondiegetic in game studies — I think they’re pretty useful carryovers from film theory. But I’ve been accused of engaging in excessive jargon myself!