You are here: HOME >> WOW Review >> Wow Items >> Am I naive in thinking that we exist as a field

Am I naive in thinking that we exist as a field

Written by yanglu on March 13, 2009 09:37
If we do, where do we send our students to read through the literature? So far, I've treated Terra Nova as a sort of repository of ideasBut this will not easily sustain us as more scholars join the fieldSo..I wonderIs it time we publish a journal of our own? Or at least a yearly review of some form? 

I worry that knowledge gets lost as generations move on to other topics/activities and newcomers will see nothing but a whole lot of webtalk without much scholarly, peer-reviewed writing on the issues

And, yes, it does matterIf academensian's (pun intended) are to take virtual worlds seriously, then we have to give them reason to do soRBartle, you question why it is that MMOG's are constantly translated into the home fields of those who write on themWell, without a defined audience of our own that proves itself legitimate, we risk becoming nothing more than a fandom community around a technology that will, itself, grow tired, as all eventually do.

So, my questions include: Are we ready for a peer-reviewed journal on MMOGs? And, if so, who exactly ought to serve as peer review? And too, would we be "selling out" or whatever to establish such a forum for paper publication? And could we create one that worked in conjunction with the lively discussions here?  

EA seems to be considering involvement in other media (e.gmusic and movies) as well as broadening its game title and platform portfolioThis activity raises an interesting question: what is diversity (in a business revenue sense) when it comes to games/worlds genres? On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhereIt is how most of us conceptualize a simulationWe talk to the illusion of a world with many concurrent activities and a speak least metaphorically, to the agencies that can live in such places (e.gof Non-Player-Characters and Player-Characters interacting with shared world state)In the fact of today, however, such parallelism is a fiction - most games are implemented within a single simulation thread (they just iterate through all the objects quickly but in sequence.."butcher before baker before the cat jumps over the moon..."), but this is likely to change, perhaps very soon

A question for the future is how to implement larger simulations with more objectsIn a Gamespy.com article a while ago, Tim Sweeney stated that while the last ten years of programming progress were about objects, the next ten years will be about "ecosystems of objects." Buy SWG Credits keep your high powerAnd technology is moving away from an engineering-style application of linear rationality to solve problemsAs we are really have available stock of Cheap WOW GoldThey looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at usIt was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even strangerSomeone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted pointsIan made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research.