Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Hi Laurie and Zach

Thanks for your replies. First of all let me apologise for being so curt. I certainly didn't mean to cause offence and am sorry for causing any bad feeling. Also let me say that I think my attitude to game studies is compatible with yours. I strongly believe that we can benefit greatly by bringing other disciplines to bear on games. I also appreciate that any kind of game study degree is currently likely to be situated within humanities or computing departments.

All I really want to suggest is that you could improve the focus of this website by only posting about material that is first and foremost about games.

I accept that there will be people on this site who are interested in both professional writing and games, and that the institution in question might be a good place to study games. However this position is principally about professional writing, not games. While the successful applicant might do some games-related research there it still doesn't look to me that this is especially what the advert is looking for. While for my tastes an advert for a Professional Writing job is too tenuous, and example of an appropriate post might be an ad for a position that explicitly includes teaching in the FIEA, or say an Assistant Professor in Narrative Game Design within the English department. A perfect example is the Faculty Director position for a new Gaming Center at New York University (http://www.digra.org/news/archive/2008/01/31/job-faculty-director-of-gaming-center).

You have to draw a line somewhere, and I think if you're going to include professional writing then you could end up including jobs in philosophy, engineering, biology, psychology, usability, computer science, literature, architecture, etc. They definitely can all be useful for the study of games, but they don't start from that point and most of the work conducted in these fields is not about games.

This is your site, and you're at liberty to post whatever you think is relevant - as I am to comment or skip over material I'm not interested in - but I do think that gameology.com would be best served by only including material that is at least mostly about games.

Cheers,
Gareth