A group of faculty from the University of Florida has issued the following call for papers:

Call for Papers: Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space, and Ecology

Editors Sidney I. Dobrin, Cathlena Martin, and Laurie Taylor seek proposals for a new collection of original articles that address the use and place of space and ecology in video games. This collection will examine video games in terms of the spaces they create and use, the metaphors of space on which they rely, and the ecologies that they create within those spaces. This collection will address the significant intersections in terms of how and why video games construct space and ecology as they do, and in terms of how those constructions shape conceptions of both space and ecology.

The editors seek proposals for innovative papers that explore the intersections between ecocriticism, theories of spatiality, and video games. Ecocriticism of video games straddles studying ecology as the Earth (or alternate world setting), nature, and land, while adding physical representation and experimentation through video game spaces and other technological spaces. These video games spaces create their own spatial practice through their representation and through the players' lived interaction with the gaming environments as constructed worlds. Video game spatial analysis comprises the created representation of space in the games, the players' experiences with those spaces, and the nuances by which those spaces are constructed and conveyed, including their portrayal of cultural norms for space and spatiality. In addition, the editors are looking for several papers that specifically address children's culture and education in terms of video games, space, and ecology.

Editors seek contributions which explore and initiate conversations using the triple lens of ecology, space, and video games about areas that may, but will not necessarily, pertain to:

* Role of imaginary space in video games
* Implications of Sojaís Thirdspace and other spatial theories on video games
* Artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL) and the creation of artificial ecologies
* Games specifically designed for education about ecological concerns, places, or uses (Oregon Trail, free online games)
* Over-all ecological educational/conceptual effect of video games
* Environment in video games and how it is constructed spatially and rhetorically
* Relationship of the players to the game worlds arenas, landscapes, cities, and worlds
* Rhetorical effect of nostalgic and romantic representations of nature
* How video games effect eco literacies
* Rhetorical effect of architecture and the creation of game spaces
* Function of utopian and dystopian World Constructions
* Creation of communities within artificial lands (often in MMORPGs, like Everquest homes and communities)
* Ecologies of play: evolutionary change and progression (powerups and enemy progression in relation to evolutionary models); cycle of life and death and the disruption of that cycle with re-play
* Game creatures / anthropomorphism; cyborgs / cloning
* Relationship of science and nature (control in games like Zoo Tycoon, science as a perversion of nature sci-fi games)
* Analysis of ecolological tropes: mastery or control of nature (SIMCITY and the natural disasters as the opponent; land as something to be controlled and colonized in Civilization)
* Cultural construction of nature (prevalence of post apocalyptic worlds in Japanese games like Final Fantasy)
* Virtual zoos viewing and capturing 'nature' (photographs of alien creatures in Beyond Good and Evil, capturing creatures in Pokemon)
* Intersections of eco-theories and visual rhetoric as portrayed in video games
* Historical representations of physical spaces and its relationship to the cultural definitions of those spaces (Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor)

Some of the following questions may help in orienting essays, but they should not be limited by these questions:

* What role does the physical setting play in the plot of the video game is it interactive, is the space helpful, is the space important in terms of game play or game narrative, or is it just a blank space on which the game is played?
* How is nature represented in video games or a particular video game?
* For the symbolic construction of species, how do games define human and nonhuman?
* Are the values expressed in the video game consistent with ecologiocal wisdom?
* Do different genres treat nature in different ways that are consistent within those genres? Are there stereotypes within games that relate to nature?
* How are the nature and technology represented narratively and spatially in video games - what are the implications of this?

Hat tip: Jonathan Winkler

Erin, I am sorry to say but if the above passage had appeared in the reading comprehension section of my SAT or LSAT I would not have been able to answer a single question about the meaning of the passage.

Could we ask Seamus Heaney to provide a prose translation of this passage so the less erudite amongst us (by which I mean me!) can understand it?

And, I ask this seriously as a lay person, is this type of linguistic construction common in English departments? If so, why? Seems similar to early Europe where the Bible was only available in Latin so that only those schooled in that language could understand (and hence control) its contents.

And by the way - Oregon Trail is a great video game for kids - as is Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego.

"Seems similar to early Europe where the Bible was only available in Latin so that only those schooled in that language could understand (and hence control) its contents."

Isn't dismissing the field of digital studies an attempt to control the content of the discipline of English?

There are many reasons why the Bible was not translated into vernacular languages. "Early Europe" was comprised of primarily oral cultures, so even if the Bible had been available in languages other the Latin, very few people would have been able to read it. Literacy rates were extremely low.

Additionally, if people did not know how to read, to what extent would they have been able to think critically about one of the most significant cultural authorities of their time? A parallel question might be asked now: If no one is thinking critically (and teaching others to think critically) about the impact of video games on our culture, to what extent will consumers be able to understand their influence?

Finally, why shouldn't this study originate from within an English Department (particularly one with a well regarded reputation in computing and the humanities)?

Beneath the jargon, there are some interesting and important issues here. A computer interface inherently creates a model/metaphor for whatever world it is about. The model/metaphor, in turn, influences how the user perceives the problem domain for which he is seeking the system's assistance.

A recent book, "In The Beginning...Was The Command Line," addresses some of these issues. The author argues that graphical user interfaces tend to limit the user to a predefined role, to a much greater extent than text-based interfaces. He then extends this argument beyond the computer space, to films and even theme parks, postulating that "iconic" ways of knowing lead to more uncritical acceptance of the viewpoints represented than does learning by reading.

As an example, he mentions a replica Hindu temple at Disney World, and suggests that the views of Indian culture that attendees will absorb will be only those that the icon-builders wanted them to absorb. (Erin, I immediately thought of the "tunnels of oppression" that you've written about.)

I've been trying to write a review of this book for some time, without much success, and hope my summary here isn't too disjointed and confusing.

No question that there are interesting questions being asked here, and no question that we do need to be thinking critically about the role video games play in our culture. My post--to be clear--is not "dismissing the field of digital studies," nor is it an "attempt to control the content of the discipline of English." Questioning the disciplinary basis for a proposed study is neither dismissive nor censorious.

These particular scholars may be the hottest things ever to hit the field of digital studies--I don't personally know. But the current state of "English" as a discipline is such that you do not have to have any genuine understanding of non-literary fields you wish to "theorize." English has so divorced itself from a narrowly defined identity (the study of literature), and has so expanded its purview (anything that can be described as a "text"--and that includes not only video games, but the body, sexuality, nationhood, race, and class--may be "read" by English scholars who have no other qualification but their putatively unique close reading skills) that we ought to be scrutinizing projects such as the one proposed above closely and as a matter of course.

And to think, I was told by my mother that I'd never amount to anything if all I did was play video games. See, mom, you were wrong! There are important questions being asked about video games now and I'm unprepared!

It's indeed often true that when a discipline (or an organization) tries to expand its mission too much, it abandons its core. This is exacerbated by trendiness; the desire to do "what's cool" rather than "what matters." These phenomena are bad enough in business, but there they are inherently limited by financial considerations--coolness doesn't put money in the bank. In academia, though, there seem to be no real limiting factors on the pursuit of fashion...thus, I agree that projects like this should be scrutinized closely and even with a jaundiced eye.

My point above was that there is possibly an emerging discipline having to do with the interaction of people and software/devices. University computer science departments have done a generally lousy job in this area, and traditional human factors studies, while useful in their sphere (where do we put the switches in the airplane cockpit?) are too limiting for today's environment. I suspect that people with a background in English could make a contribution to this emerging discipline *if* they could avoid excessive theoretical orientation and politicization.

"Seems similar to early Europe where the Bible was only available in Latin so that only those schooled in that language could understand (and hence control) its contents."

Hmm. Much as I love the King James translation, and enthusiastic translator that I am, I do see the Church's point in restricting access to the holy texts. The moment unschooled people started reading - and interpreting - it, religious wars broke out all over Europe. Germany, for one, I think, has never recovered.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

It's possible, I guess, that valuable insights could result from that conference, but I have to my admit my own prejudices make me see little in that call for papers but fervid academic wanking. Is it any wonder that members of the general public (and an increasing number of former academics themselves) think that humanities professors, English professors especially, are effete, out of touch, self-important, and resoundingly irrelevant?

I don't think it's unfair to ask why that sort of thing is being overseen by an English department. Perhaps it's even more appropriate to ask: Why isn't that sort of work the purview of a *philosophy* department?

Judging by this, it seems that the people who have left the Canon behind have really left it behind. Erin is probably right that they at least belong in another academic department.

This *might* be because English lit. should really devote itself exclusively to the study of literature and literary language. I gather Erin is a Canon person. I am too, sort of: I personally believe English literature can be constituted by a soft canon, with serious literature at the center. But it can also profitably include 'minor' and popular (un-serious) works. In any case, the focus should always remain on writing and language (rather than other media). We could debate that point all day, and indeed, the Canon question has been debated very nearly to death.

More practically, some separation might become necessary because traditional literature scholars and popular culture people are speaking utterly different languages. By what standards can a Renaissance scholar judge the work of someone who spends his/her time watching ("analyzing") Reality TV or playing ("interpreting") video games? And vice versa.

(BTW This is a point Berube makes in "The Employment of English")

Questions from a long time contributor to the state of Florida's operating funds: Why should taxpayers foot the bill for research such as this?

UNLIKELY SCENARIO

Florida taxpayer: Say, what's this I hear about you studying video games?

English professor: Not me. I'm writing a book on irony and ambiguity in Shakespeare's sonnets. Nothing but the canon for me.

Florida taxpayer: I used to think you all were "effete, out of touch, self-important, and resoundingly irrelevant," but now I see I was completely wrong. Why, what Florida taxpayer would fail to see the relevance and importance of your topic? Carry on, then.

"The author argues that graphical user interfaces tend to limit the user to a predefined role, to a much greater extent than text-based interfaces."

As a computer programmer and user, I can attest that this is quite true - I accept it as a postulate, needing no further proof.

The command line lets you do anything the computer and your imagination are capable of; the GUI lets you do whatever the designers thought of.

To the overall question, I can hardly wait for the deconstruction of computer games to appear in learned journals.

There was a possibly similar conference at Princeton last February:

FORM, CULTURE, & VIDEO GAME CRITICISM

There are the requisite number of colons in the seminar titles.

If "we do need to be thinking critically about ... video games," as Erin wrote, then what department is better suited than English to consider the questions raised in the call for papers?

When I saw this I immediately thought of submitting a paper. However I agree with Erin, the English department is not the right place for it. It also doesn't look like they're searching for honest answers given the leading nature of the questions they ask (and they're not asking other more problematic questions).

While I'm sure there are implications and information to be dug up out of the themes and contexts of video games, it looks to me like the organizers of this conference are looking for a lofty excuse to play video games they normally wouldn't be caught dead enjoying!

Ellie and George: I would say something, but as an employee of the people who decide to spend your money on such things (the Florida Legislature), I suppose I couldn't possibly comment. I'm itching to, but...no, I can't.

Remember, there are English departments and then there are people who do rhetoric and composition. Sid Dobrin falls in the latter category. To his way of thinking, I'm quite certain, this is the direction that all 'English' departments should go as they leave that dreary literary stuff behind.

Sigh.

I dunno, Erin. This seems like something of a cheap shot. I think these are exactly the sorts of things that I'd want English grad students and professors to be thinking about. It's easy to dismiss the issues they raise, as one commenter did, as "academic wanking," but I doubt I'd understand the CFP for a chemistry department if I encountered it without any domain-specific knowledge, either.

Look: video games, at their core, are the intersection of two cultural phenomena, "toys" and "stories." As the storage capacity and technology behind video games has improved, the narrative aspect of games has taken on more and greater significance. At a high level, communication and language can be said to be about signs and signifiers, which -- surprise, surprise -- are also integral to the video game experience.

In other words, if this isn't a legitimate thing for a thoughtful English department to be doing, then I don't think there's -anything- an English deparment could be doing that would make you happy. I guess maybe if there were a bunch of grad students sitting around diagramming sentences, that would be OK.

There are, of course, good arguments that other departments would be a good home for this sort of analysis, such as film studies. But really, since those of us who play and make videogames do so for the most part in the marketplace, and not at school, it really is the definition of an interdisciplinary study. So I think the burden is on those who think this is _not_ an appropriate thing to present a positive argument, rather than just presenting some handwaving and knowing smirks about those wacky English department types. I think the question notably missing from your item is "Why _not_ an English department?" Maybe you have a whole list of reasons, other than personal prejudice, justifying and explaining your dismissive attitude. But since you don't present those reasons to us, the readers, we don't know what they are.

I've written at some length on some of the narrative issues involved in constructing video games. You're welcome to sample for yourself: http://www.tgr.com/weblog/archives/000026.html. I personally think they're worth thinking about, and I'll welcome anyone from any discipline with the intellectual tools to do so. The more the merrier.

Yours,
peterb
software engineer

I agree with peterb here--while English isn't the first department I would think of for the above CFP, the other department that does spring to mind (Economics) could be criticized the same way.

There's a problem with any new field in how to fit it into the established fields. Very few schools have an established "video game" department. If you cut out any thought of approaching it from within an already developed department (i.e. English, Economics, Art, etc.) you make it almost impossible to study in any meaningful.

In fact, there is a very strong conservative streak in academia, which rejects inclusion of a new domain in already established fields. As such, the fact that thought about video games *is* starting to appear in a number of different fields is a sign: It's been a significant cultural phenomenon for long enough that those who would rigidly reject any such study as frivolous are finally beginning to see that there's something there.

Given that, it remains for researchers in various fields to see how this phenomenon relates to their own field. Cultural studies looking at the culture of video games, English looking at narrative and other communicative features of video games, Economics looking at the behavior of "goods" in video games, etc. There's a lot there.

And of course, there's also the fact that film and cultural studies and the like tend to happen in the english department in schools that don't have a separate dedicated department for those fields. As such, finding this sort of thing in an english department isn't surprising at all.

I understand the rationale for cultural studies. I also understand very well why and how this study is emerging from within an English department. My degree is in English and I have written a book that falls squarely within the genre of cultural studies. I realized, in the course of writing that book, how many problems are inherent in the enterprise we call "cultural studies." The most pressing of these have to do with what claim the "cultural studies scholar" can make to expertise in the area he or she is theorizing. Related ones have to do with how overbroad notions of metaphor, narrative, textuality, and discourse license equally overbroad claims about what a given pattern can tell us about "culture" (another typically too-broad term that license massive conceptual and argumentative over-reaching).

A question, one of many that could be asked: Is it necessary for people who "theorize" video games to understand the technology underwriting them? Can we think responsibly about video games' "imaginative space," as the CFP calls it, in the absence of that knowledge? How many of those who will eventually be chosen as contributors to this volume will have that knowledge? Does it matter? Humanists without much or any understanding of computers have made quite a hash betimes out of their efforts to "theorize cyberspace." Humanists without any specialized knowledge of human biology feel free to pronounce that there is no "natural" sexual difference, that sex and gender are ultimately social constructs "deployed" for ideological reasons. The botched manner in which humanists who are not philosophers often take up philosophy, or the notoriously uninformed and decontextualized way Marx and Freud circulate in the humanities, are other examples of this problem. In the past several decades, academic humanists have tried to expand their frame of reference--and hence their claims to political and social relevance--by adopting methodological premises of the sort that underwrite the CFP above. Too often, the result is seriously non-serious, arrogantly presumptuous work. I don't think it's responsible, myself. And like I said, I know whereof I speak; there is nothing like doing cultural studies work for learning where its problems lie.

That said, let's be clear. My post is not motivated by an unexamined conservative streak, but rather by three interlocking concerns. The first is a strong sense of the kinds of problems CFPs like the one above pose for the creation of responsible scholarship. The second is a similarly strong concern for the role English is playing in licensing--via a vast and growing body of "theory"--scholarship whose claims to genuine expertise are highly questionable. The third has to do with how the disciplinary expansiveness of English, in which anything goes, the wilder and stranger the better, is slowly but surely destroying the field, which no longer has a content or a mission or a set of evaluative standards that its members can agree on. I've written a lot about this last issue on this site.

Erin,

Thank you for clarifying your interest. I appreciate it.

I'm not going to address the general issue of "disciplinary expansiveness" in English deparments, your last point, because I'm clearly not qualified (and, frankly, not that interested).

I think your earlier question "does one have to understand the technology behind videogames to discuss them" can be answered with a simple, "No." Obviously there are aspects of videogames that do require specialized domain knowledge -- when the University of Florida English department starts calling for papers on optimizing algorithms for ray-tracing, I promise I'll be the first in line to rally the villagers with torches -- but as I said before, a videogame is a narrative married to a toy.

To give you an analogy, let's look at "just" toys. I can imagine a psychology department that wanted to call for papers investigating "what makes toys fun?" The question you raise is similar to the question "Is it valid for psychologists to opine on what makes toys fun when they don't know anything about woodworking, or lathe construction, or plastic injection molding?"

Can an English teacher think responsibly about A.S. Byatt's novels if she doesn't know how to make paper, to produce ink, to typeset, and to bind folios?

Alternatively: you're asking if it's OK for a food critic to have an opinion on whether sausage tastes good, when they don't know how to slaughter animals, grind, spice, and prepare them.

I think that question answers itself; and I think your question "Is it necessary for people who "theorize" video games to understand the technology underwriting them?" answers itself.

So having dismissed the distraction of the technical argument we can frame the more interesting question. Videogames construct narrative through a combination of the following elements (not all of which are present in every game): words spoken and written, visual symbols in motion, sounds, tactile feedback, and "gameplay," which is another way of saying "a set of conditions for scoring points and/or advancing in the game". In terms of narrative, there are abstract games that have no plot, but only a "theme" (for example pong, or the theme of "conquer territory" in "Ataxx"), but this is far more the exception than the rule. Most videogames that any modern player will encounter will, in fact, have a fully fleshed out narrative, possibly including protagonists, antagonists, conflict, and resolution.

In terms of gameplay, there really _isn't_ too much under the sun: a game that innovates based on gameplay or technology only comes along once every few years. Yet the industry moves millions of units, most of them to people who have _already bought_ variations on the same game. Therefore, those units are not moving based simply on improved technology, but on the basis of a desire of the player to experience a new narrative. What is it in those narratives that draws players in? The specific issues raised by the CFP that I care about is how the construction of a virtual space impacts narrative development and realization.

I think that's a legitimate question, and I think it's an appropriate one for an English department to investigate.

It is interesting here that no one is bringing up that this is an inherently geographic examination. Space, and the production/creation of space, has been discussed widely in our discipline and is at the forefront of our critical theory. And what I see is not "Why is this coming from an English department?" but "Why hasn't anyone in all of these comments mentioned geography?" I find it interesting that Americans usually have no clue what academic geography is and have not progressed past an elementary school understanding of it. I used to blame the university for this ignorance, however, as I think more and more about it, I'm starting to just blame Americans, the most geographically (and by this I mean, all facets of geography) clueless industrialized nation in the world.

As far as this coming from a computer science department, I don't think those departments stress the criticial theory that is needed to address the creation of space by video games in any sort of real way. It is not the binary code these editors are seeking to talk about, but the experiences of those who play the games, and through the socio-spatial dialectic, how these games are creating social and physical spaces.

What I cannot understand is the original post's negative tone. What disturbs me more here is NOT that English is encroaching on the space of geography, but that the original poster had such a violent, bitter response to what he or she saw as English not remaining true to itself. Isn't that being essentialist? How can a discipline ever progress without stretching its wings? There is a certain commonality across all disciplines, in that they all use mostly the same vocabulary of critical theory. I do not see a problem with this-far from it. Actually, I view it as a benefit of being an academic in such a connected age.

Although I fundamentally agree with PeterB, I'm sympathetic to Erin's distaste for know-nothing theorizers. As an English scholar with a CS background, I see/read a fair number of DigHum papers that blow chunks. There *are* some situations in which ignorance of the underpinnings maims the scholarly effort.

I'm surprised that no one has stated the to-me-obvious: The disciplinary borders are (and should be) falling apart. We English teachers are on call 24 hours a day to defend the relevance of literature, and even within my dept. the walls of the historical-coverage model require vigilant defense. Meanwhile, various modern phenomena need studying yet don't fit neatly into any existing discipline, so of course English (among others) reaches out for them.

Not everyone thinks that various modern phenomena *do* need studying, but more and more, I see such people as blinkered. If it's something that people do, how can studying it not tell us something about people? Call me a retrogrouch, but that's what literature does -- like the rest of the humanities, it tells us about what people do.

"I think that question answers itself; and I think your question "Is it necessary for people who "theorize" video games to understand the technology underwriting them?" answers itself."

As a CS guy, and an English guy, and a videogamer, I think you're wrong to dismiss this out of hand. Studying hypertextual theory, I've come across a number of outrageous claims resultant from lack of knowledge about technical underpinnings. ("Binary is phallocentric," comes to mind.) While I don't think it's necessary to be an expert, it helps to have a working knowledge of the technology.

The more important aspect, in my eyes, is having enough experience with engineering and game design to be able to understand why designers choose to formulate their games as they do. But I didn't get the impression that this call for papers is interested in that at all, even though it's integral in trying to understand the "narrative" of a game.

To address a previous comment,
The Bible was translated into vernacular languages.and frequently. Old English before 900 AD, Old Norse (don't know, but certainly before 1200), Czech during the Hussite
rebellion 1410-1430, several
German translations existed before Luther, and
at least the psalms in Dutch. Don't know about Romance languages. Literacy in the Hussite rebellion, the peasant rebellion of 1381 (Steven Justice wrote a nice book about this), and the Paris revolt of 1356 was socially complex, certainly not as simple as priveleged clerics reading and illiterate villeins not.
In no case were the translations done with approval of the church hierarchy.

Useful study of culturally important expressions isn't always enriched by creating
or enlarging well-funded professional channels, not then, not now.

There's also the possibility of an impedance mismatch-- why should a monograph on video
games be more succesful than a ballet about
statistical physics?

LW writes: "In no case were the translations done with approval of the church hierarchy."

That's not true, actually. The OE translation of (most of) the Bible was not only done with church approval, but it was done partly by churchmen -- bishops, even (gasp!). The 16th century saw a number of church-sanctioned translations of the Bible, as well.

Also, the psalms were always exempted from Lateran IV's forbidding of Bible translation.

(Not necessarily important -- just setting the facts a little straighter. Nothing to see here. These aren't the androids you're looking for.)

Erin writes early on in these comments:

"...the current state of "English" as a discipline is such that you do not have to have any genuine understanding of non-literary fields you wish to "theorize." English has so divorced itself from a narrowly defined identity (the study of literature), and has so expanded its purview (anything that can be described as a "text"--and that includes not only video games, but the body, sexuality, nationhood, race, and class--may be "read" by English scholars who have no other qualification but their putatively unique close reading skills) that we ought to be scrutinizing projects such as the one proposed above closely and as a matter of course."

I'm sure she needs no reminding of this, but the "why aren't we just concerned with literature?" bus left the English department station about 25 years ago. And while englishgrad99@yahoo.com seems to lament it, English has become a much bigger field than literature. My department, an unusually diverse one, includes majors and minors in English education, linguistics, technical writing, journalism, public relations, and children's literature-- along with literature, of course. The proposal may be jargon-heavy and overly trendy, but these characteristic are hardly unique to folks in English studies.

Quite frankly, I wish the situation was as Erin describes. The fact of the matter is, despite the increasing diversity of English departments and the rise of disciplines/fields like culture studies and composition and rhetoric, the traditional "literature folk" still tend to rule the roost.

I think that the real question here is: Why do English departments continue to exist when they seem to have lost any legitimate function? Preservation of the classic literature might now be better handed off to a monastic group. The story telling process of the future is the virtual environment and the English department has no business there.

I see the call for papers more as a desparate attempt to stave off a call for an end to an obsolete discipline. Certainly, we need to teach reading and writing. But, a department of a university devoted to novels and poetry... what is it needed for? This discipline has devolved into a religious vocation and it should find a new home in the monastery.

Even the manner in which questions are raised is wrong. Once again, we see the passive and reflective taking precedence over the active and forward-looking. Note how the questions employ the traditional devices of the Rhetoric 101 instructor: the student is advised to construct an ideal world (as evidenced by current liberal orthodoxy) and criticize the real world by comparison. The political reality of the 20th century invalidated this technique. The great moral message of the 20th century was the Utopian thinking leads to mass murder, not enlightenment and general properity. It is long past time to question whether we should be teaching the young that it is a moral certitude that we should be striving for Utopia.

Such efforts at "relevance" are sure signs of a decrepit structure filled with people who are desparate to maintain a status quo that is crumbling. Does an English department have any purpose? That's the real question.

While plenty of academic research into computer games deals with optimizing 3D rendering routines and perfecting the reflection of flames on the blood droplets as they spatter against a mirror (I'm only exaggerating slightly), there are some games that do rely on character, plot, setting, and all the traditional storytelling devices. Since these games offer the player a kind of interactivity (some more interactive than others), details such as character, plot, and setting can be very different creatures in an interactive computer-mediated environment.

If you haven't already, I would recommend that you read Janet Murray's "Hamlet on the Holodeck" and Espen Aarseth's "Cybertext" -- two foundational books in the humanities-based study of computer games (though Aarseth's thesis is that a cybertext is best understood as a machine, that includes code and data, input/output devices, power supply, the user and the programmer -- so he's a good person to read if you want to see how literary study can feed into the study of games as technological devices and systems of rules.)

I agree that the calls for papers for the Princeton videogame conference and the ecology conference were both stacked with leading questions, but I take that as a sign that the academics who wrote those CFPs were investing all this energy in their project because they saw an intellectual gap, and were hoping to amass a body of papers to help fill that gap.

I don't think there's much to be gained by complaining about the jargon in an academic CFP -- the audience for a CFP is not the average person, or a person whose speciality is an unrelated subject. Still, as a former technical writing instructor and a perennial freshman comp teacher, I, too, shudder at some of the PhD-speak in academic writing.

I agree completely that somebody who doesn't understand computer technology is walking on a minefield, but there are people who couldn't actually make a movie, but who know enough about movie-making to offer valid criticism of a particular movie. While the original computer games were created by geeks for geeks, that's not the case anymore. While I do study computer games (and weblogs), I feel that my methods are fairly traditional and even stodgy -- particularly in computer games, since there is so much foundational research that has yet to be begun.

I agree heartily with Erin's observations about the problems that ensue when humanities researchers botch the science or technology they are trying to theorize. I wish more humanities scholars would collaborate with sci/tech/engineering folks (but darn it, the sci/tech/engineering conference are so expensive, since sci/tech/eng folks assume that a scholar has a nice hefty travel budget to cover the expenses... $500 registration fee? Chump change!)

I prefer not to use the term "videogame" because the particular kind of game I study is mostly text (and I gave a paper at it, with a colon in the title, at the Princeton conference mentioned earlier). So for me, it makes perfect sense for the study of text-based interactive fiction to take place in an English department.

If it's any consolation, the emerging field of computer game studies includes many marketing and production oriented people who also dismiss the value of the literary/humanities enquiry into computer games. If a study doesn't result in a proposal for a better algorithm or a more marketable product, they ask, why bother?

I imagine that humanists who've weighed in here might be able to answer that question in terms of their own research.

Thanks for launching a good thread. I know I'm late to the party, but I just ran into George Williams's recent reference to it on http://ghw.wordherders.net/archives/002544.html