Don’t write the sentence “There has been very little research done on games” in any more papers or articles or theses and essays UNLESS you also have a full bibliography that cites those few existing works. I don’t care how many authorities you cite who may have written those words quite recently. Because yes, gamestudies is a new field, and therefore does not have entire library shelves to themselves, like literary studies. However, if the amount of articles and books you have to read to be able to understand the width of the field is so small, it is pretty lazy scholarly work – sloppy craft, simply – not to have read them all. —Torill Mortensen —Please, PLEASE stop (Thinking with my fingers)
Just trying to send a little link love Torill’s way.
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I consider myself a Rhetorician, Theorist, and Comic Scholar, so that automatically puts me in the same boat as you two, plus I blog. Although other comic scholars believe we no longer need to justify our area due to how much scholarly attention Comics received over the last decade, I believe we do, since there are plenty of naysayers out there who need enlightenment.
Torill is completely right: the writers are claiming to do something new rather than different and sometimes this leads to lazy scholarship. As with pop culture studies, I would imagine that video game theorists would need to take even EXTRA pains to establish the legitimacy of what they're doing. Both academics and the general public alike tend to historically be skeptical of any analysis who's topos is what is pleasurable in the contemporary culture. As someone who has dedicated his life to the popular genre of horror literature and film, I completely empathize.
Although my own Interactive Fiction Bibliography is several years out of date, when I first started studying text adventures seriously, I knew I was entering largely uncharted space. But I did what I could to change that.
The same has to be said for weblog scholarship -- now there's plenty to read.