[Jennifer deWinter speaking]: So game studies is in this strange place right now. The advice I would give now is not going to be the advice I’d give five years from now. And that’s because game studies both belongs within multiple disciplines, and it’s a discipline that’s forming within itself. So when I advise my graduate students who are looking for PhD programs (because we offer a Master’s in interactive media and game development but nothing beyond that) I ask them where they would like their home department to be and what their primary teaching responsibilities to be. Do you want to teach coding? Do you want to teach writing? Do you want to teach math? And then go get the degree in that with a specialty in games. 

So that’s one way to go about it, is just to use traditional systems and to … to create a niche for yourself. And it’s easy to do that anymore because games are so prevalent. And it’s even easier if you go into serious games because universities see serious games as a possible revenue model. But from there if a graduate student really wanted to go into game studies in a very serious way there are … that there are programs out there for that. We have a couple in the U.S.: Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon. You can also go to Copenhagen where you can get a PhD for free. It’s an expensive city to live in but the degree is free, your coursework is free. Swinburne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, can offer that degree. England has a couple of good degrees. And of course there’s Ritsumeikan in Japan offers a games studies degree. So there are options for who want to go into game studies; it just differs where the research specialty comes from. 

From there I would say a game studies hopeful should play games. And … play a lot of games, even if it’s for like 10 or 15 minutes a day. Because you need to be an expert in game play and that there’s no amount of watching or reading about a game that will ever give you the visceral experience of playing the game along with all of the designed-in frustrations, joys, accomplishments, and other emotional and physical affordances. 

In terms of publication venues or things that they might read, we … we’re lucky in that there are a number of journals out there now. There’s Game Studies; Games and Culture; Eludamos; Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds; Reconstruction does a lot with games. And then there are game series books, right, like Landmark Essays on Video Games; Jesper Juul’s one out of MIT on key terms in games like failure and uncertainty and he’s collecting more of these; my series on game designers. And then from there, game publications are happening broadly within individual disciplines, right? I think within rhetoric and composition, we still try to make all of game studies about how we can teach with it, and I think that that’s dangerous, and I would warn people to think through that very seriously. 

And here’s why: LGI’s motto … and we don’t have one in Latin; it is in English … LGI’s motto is “games teach multiple things in multiple ways,” which sounds very positive and hopeful except for what it is, is it’s ultimately a warning. That we think that we’re teaching one thing, but ultimately we’re also teaching ideologies, we’re also teaching material affordances, we’re also teaching algorithmic intelligence. We’re teaching … we’re teaching negative things as well as positive things. And a primary example of this is … that I like to give my students is that Solitaire is originally packaged with Windows 95 back in the mid-90s not … not to give people something to avoid work with. It’s packaged that way to teach people how to use the mouse, which is a new material affordance on the computer. And so they hide this very … very important training within this soft structure of a game. And there are all kinds of instances of that. So if we just think we’re going to pick up a game and teach one thing and that we can control for these outcomes and the [unintelligible] of these outcomes, we’re ignoring a tremendous layered experience of games. And so I would say for anyone starting out in rhetoric and composition interesting in going into game studies to approach the pedagogical application of games with some level of trepidation and forethought. And possibly start with analysis of games before going into application.