How and where video games fit into academia is still very much up for grabs. This ambiguity surfaced a few times at the Princeton conference. Tevis Thompson, who did an insightful "close reading" of the game Super Mario Brothers at the conference, advocated that actually playing the games should remain part of studying them; he taked of critics using their "hand-eye" (analogous to a film-studies use of the "cino-eye") to make sense of what they are seeing onscreen.

David Thomas, a writer for the Denver Post and the game theory site buzzcut.com made a passionate case for maintaining an accessible vocabulary, mostly for the sake of keeping the players who have already contributed a great deal to game evolution involved in the development of the field.

I think it was Thomas who expressed concern that video game studies (or "ludology," as it is being called in some places -- Greek for the study of play) was in danger of being "colonized" by other disciplines. In informal discussion, a few conference attendees agreed, expressing annoyance that critical theorists and scholars in the field of cultural studies already seem to be making inroads into the discipline and cluttering it with esoteric jargon.

Some academic camps have made more claims to the discipline than others. There are apparently established schools of video-game thought in Italy and Scandinavia. Barry Atkins, a Principal Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, spoke out against what he saw as a tendency in these two camps to take all the fun out of games (witness their desire to name the field ludology rather than give it a more accessible title). The opening salvos fired by Atkins have led to some heated battle online.

Atkins expressed concern that games were often getting discussed in terms of labor, and made a case for maintaining a sense of the aesthetic pleasure of gaming within the academic study of games. The problem, as Atkins noted, is that this returns our discussions to the realm of subjectivity... never a position that academia finds defensible, and an especially difficult one for those of us in education under the Bush regime, with its ever-stricter demands for quantitative data.

A sorting out of play itself seems to be in order. John Voiklis, one of my TC peers, made the distinction between "play" and "playfulness" the other day in John Black's practicum. He pointed out that work can be like play, if we enjoy what we do and approach it in a spirit of creativity and fun. One distinction there, I guess, is that play-like work doesn't enjoy the social moratorium that actual play does. I personally am hoping to get some time to go back and look at the literature on play and its purposes in learning and society. I've already done some reading on creativity, mostly in the context of television, and this has touched on the subject.