This is a short guide to the various types of content and resources available to you on this website. If you have questions about our terms of use, please see our legal information pages, or feel free to contact us.
As you can see, Gameology.org is divided into three major content areas, commentary, resources and community. In general, "Commentary" includes content created by our contributors supplying their unique ideas and voice on a specific subject. "Resources" includes different types of data and information that we hope will be useful to anyone interested in Game Studies. And "Community" is our attempt to interface our project with the growing group of scholars, academic programs and websites that focus on Game Studies.
You can read more about each section and its constituent components below.
The commentary section includes content created by our contributors. Basically, the goal of this section is to carry on the conversation about video games and game studies at different levels of depth and currency. Through these areas, we strive to keep our readership informed and engaged about the topics important to our field.
The Academic Gamer's blog is the current incarnation of the group blog we started at www.academic-gamers.org that ran from early 2004 to 2006. We saw the blog as the beginning of the larger project that now makes up Gameology.org, so retaining the name Academic Gamers is our way of keeping that identity alive.
In our blog entries, we comment on the goings on of the video game world as well as the field of game studies. If you'd like to suggest a story, or if you've found (or made) something you think we'd be interested in seeing, please contact us with your idea.
Essays are our longest form of content, and they're a way for our contributors to really flesh out an idea. Frequently, the essays here have been presented at conferences or re-published in other venues. This provides an important opportunity for developing scholars to publish and share their ideas in an active and receptive environment and really work through a topic with the rigor of academic writing.
While our current essays are all by our contributors, we do consider unsolicited submissions. Please contact us for details.
Our reviews are longer-form content (that is, generally longer than blog entries) that examine a particular work in some detail. We review both video games as well as books related to game studies, and our general goal with these reviews is to bring the ideas of game scholars to bear on particular games to see how they work themselves out.
We're always interested in reviewing new material, so if you've got something you want us to look at, please get in touch.
Our resources section gathers together information that we hope will be useful to scholars pursuing game studies at any level. Some of this content is dynamic and frequently updated, so we provide an RSS feed of CFP announcements that we post.
Also, it's unfortunately still the case that some consider Game Studies as a field to lack a certain degree of legitimization, and we hope to address that problem by providing information about how to use games as sources in scholarly writing. We also provide a database of game images that can be used in papers--with proper attribution.
The term "bibliography" is a bit of misnomer since the root word "biblio" suggests that it is a list of books. We do have books, but perhaps more importantly, we also list citations for video games and other types of content.
Clicking on a citation that you see anywhere on this site (for example, at the beginning of a review or listed on the bibliography page itself) will take to the reference node for that particular work. Here, you'll see the citation again as well as links to an image gallery associated with the reference (if applicable), links to any content that cites the reference as a source, and links to any reviews of that reference.
We organize it this way because we feel its important not only to compile a list of the important texts in our field, but also to see how those texts are used in the context of Game Studies. Because of this structure, you may notice that some key text or major game is missing from our list, but that simply indicates that we don't yet have any discussion of it elsewhere on the site.
A note on the citation style: The format we're using is a slightly modified MLA Style citation, but since these are generated programmatically, there are probably inconsistencies and errors arising from the complexity of their entry. For that reason, we suggest double checking our formatting before using one of our citations in a paper.
References are currently organized into seven categories:
Our Calls for Papers section is a database of CFPs that we've culled together from various sources (including, for example, the massive UPenn list-serve) that have something to do with video games. These include conferences, essays collections, special journal issues, etc.
We try to keep our database updated frequently, but it automatically sorts CFPs by their deadlines so that it lists Calls that are almost closing first.
If you have a CFP that you don't see on our list, please contact us and we'll put it up.
Like any field, Game Studies is developing its own language and vocabulary. Our glossary function allows us to make handy definitions of key terms linked to their usage in other content. For example, if you see the word ludology anywhere, it should have a symbol next to it that links to its definition in our glossary.
We realize that some terms and their definitions might be controversial, but we try to include the most informative and neutral definition possible. If you have a suggestion for a word you think we should define, please contact us.
Our screenshot galleries group together images associated with items in our bibliography. So if, for example, we have a citation for a video game, the reference node for that game will link to a gallery of images associated with that game (if we have one).
You can also browse all of the galleries, and viewing an image from within a specific gallery will also link you back to the reference node from that particular item.
About our community section.
As you might guess, calendar events are just that -- nodes that signify that an event is taking place on a particular date. Most of these will be conferences, but they can include any event relative to the game studies community.
If you have an event you'd like to see listed, please let us know.
Our contributors are comprimised originally of members the Game Studies Group at UF, but we've also invited several more students who we've met along the way.
Our links directory is always looking to grow, so please send us your site if you think it belongs. One reason we started this site (and the original academic-gamers.org) was to join the active community of game scholars conversing on the web, and these links maintain those connections.
Our listing of Opportunities lists information about academic programs where you can pursue game studies in some capacity. While our interest is primarily with programs that encourage, for example, a humanities or cultural studies approach to video games, Engineering or Fine Arts programs are also worth listing.
If you know of a program (or you're in one) that's not listed here, please let us know about it.
The following sections outline the legal status of the content of this website. In summary, we don't take any information from you or use it for anything illegal. All original content on this website is by default assigned a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike deed unless otherwise noted.
Exceptions to this would include CFPs or opportunity listings in which the main content is quoted from someone else. Also, screenshots are a bit different as well. We believe our use of these image is defensible as Fair Use. See the section below for more details.
Unless otherwise specified, all content on this website is protected with a Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike Deed, which is pretty well explained in the CC document I just linked to. In some cases, an author may wish to reserve all rights to their documents, so if you want to use or distribute anything here, it would be nice of you to contact the author in question just to make sure it's okay.
Our policy is to collect no personally identifiable information about you when you visit our Web sites unless you affirmatively choose to make such information available to us. However, our Web servers do automatically recognize some non-personal information such as volume and timing of access as well as the Internet domain and IP address from which you accessed our sites.
Presently, our site allows anonymous users to post comments to our content. Doing so constitutes agreeing to our terms of use, but it also requires you to submit an email address. Please note that this address is not publically displayed, but is retained in our logs in case we need to track abuse. Hopefully this won't be a problem, but we may have to resort to a stricter comment-posting policy in the future.
By accessing this website (Gameology.org) you are agreeing to this explanation of our terms of use and are bound by its conditions. This is where I would normally insert some boiler plate, but in human terms, don't try to access admin areas of our site without permission, don't try to use our site for spam, don't copy our content and say it's yours, and don't be a troll.
If you don't follow the rules, your IP address will be banned.
Also, as a general courtesy, please don't hotlink our images. There are measures in place to prevent that anyway, but seriously, it's not polite.
[Note: We are experimenting with using Feedburner to manage our RSS feeds, so please use this URL in your feed readers: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Gameology. The original Atom and RSS feeds will still work, but Feedburner offers a more streamlined solution and we encourage users to take advantage of it. This page will be updated to reflect the switch once we decide to make it permanent.]
This site offers syndicated feeds of its content. These are basically XML documents using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) formatting that lists recently updated content from this site. You can "subscribe" to these feeds and view lists of recent entries as "headlines" in your favorite RSS-friendly client. These are what Firefox calls "live bookmarks" and they're updated in your toolbar or whever you put your bookmarks.
Internet Explorer has similar functionality, but I confess I haven't used it enough to know how it works. The forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 does, however, have a subscription manager built into its toolbar.
Opera (naturally) has built-in RSS capabilities which work rather well and integrate smoothly into the browser.
You can also use Thunderbird (and maybe Outlook?) as a standalone newsreader.
For information about RSS, Wikipedia's entry on the subject is comprehensive.
On this site, we offer 4 subscription options (or any combination thereof):
All our feeds should validate and seem to work, but if you have problems using any of them, please contact us.
Because of the way this content is organized, I can't be sure which exact content you're seeking information about. I can however tell you that the page you came from is what we call a "book page". These are individual documents that are hooked together to form an outline. These outlines can have several layers divided up into "chapters" or sections, and you can see the structure of the current book you're in in the Table of Contents that appears in the upper right of each page.
You can browse through the book's pages by clicking the "next" and "previous" links at the bottom right and bottom left (respectively) of each page. Clicking the "up" link will take you one level up that books hierarchy.
The book you were reading was probably one of these: