My provocation of the field of game studies and its practitioners has appeared today in The Escapist. My heart quails a bit at facing the consequences of this kind of piece, but while I admit some hyperbole in the cause of getting a conversation going, I stand by my central point, that the attempt to marry game criticism to game design is not a good idea.
At any rate, I'm in the process of trying very hard to put other people's money where my mouth is, and thereby to keep that mouth flapping. This is as good a time as any to announce that there's a Center for Video Games and Human Values in the works, for which my course "(Gaming) Homer" is actually the pilot. The center will be based at UConn, but its true existence will be entirely online, and it will include scholars of game studies, should they want to participate, alongside a truly interdisciplinary mix of the Humanities, the Social Sciences, Fine Arts, Education, and Business.
I'm pleased to say that Michael Abbott and Jeff Howard are my extramural collaborators on this project. I'm hoping they'll keep me from saying anything quite so provocative in the future, since they're much more sanguine about game studies than I am!
