The Dangers of Academic Blogging

I intentionally tried not to post about this (I guess I am meta-posting now) for a simple reason: this is not the way that a scholar discussion should take place….

This is not how this game is played. If anybody has to respond about what has been said at a conference, that should be made based on the actual papers that were presented. Of course, since papers are published on, well, paper, they are not up-to-date to the wonders of blogging technology, which allows us to have a debate instantly. Again, I have no problem in defending my position and ideas, contrasting them with other arguments and changing my mind if I am proved to be wrong. But I simply cannot do that based on anything but the original authors arguments. If we do not follow these simple academic rules, then he get into a “he said she said he said” game that could be a lot of fun, but will not do any good to videogame research….

[I]f we want to be serious about game research, we must discuss based on published material and not on blog posts, which can be useful for many things, but cannot be the only source of material for scholarly debate. —Gonzalo Frasca —The Dangers of Academic Blogging (Ludology.org)

In reply to Gonzalo’s post, I wrote, in part:

My other major area of scholarly interest is weblogs, where this kind of metascholarship, as messy as it can be at times, seems to me a vital part of the academic discourse. When I couldn’t attend BlogTalk in Austria last year, I greedily lapped up the real-time blogging on the event, with the understanding that what I was reading was just that — blogging.

Do we need a new symbol like the smiley… a suitably unassuming icon that means, “This is my own subjective opinion, based on what I remember hearing six hours into the day-long conference I attended a couple days ago”?

Nah, probably not.