GamesNetwork Must Be Destroyed
The email list known as GamesNetwork is the primary discussion list for games research in the English language. It must also now be abandoned and destroyed. It only has one good purpose - It collects CFPs, which are benign. Aside from that, it then has two major forms of conversation.
1) The bibliography search.
A tourist will emerge with a singularly woolly topic and ask that the collective mind produce a bibliography. Rather than coming to the group at the end of their research with questions, they decide to make a google out of the collective and demand that this all-so-amazing link between tangential phenomena be declared wholly original. Why else would their 10-second web search have yielded no perfect quotes to use in their mind-bendingly shitty article?
2) The inflamed sore.
An off-hand comment will balloon into a deranged festival of misreading as jaded academic vampires whisper all sorts of dimsal euphonies in order to progress some long-forgotten implacable territorial war. Young graduate students will assume this discussion is of some worth because they will have heard of some of the participants. However, it is not. It is a thunderously masculine ritual of self-hatred devoid of meaning, producing precisely zero carry for the field. Worse, the arguments on Gamesnetwork have now begun to inspire and provoke articles in journals which are just as deliriously meaningless.
Conclusion
The culture of the GamesNetwork list is now completely poisonous. We wait on the list for arguments to emerge and to be rude to tourists in the meantime. Very serious opportunities for discussion are further fragmented not because there needs to be an email list - but because there is GamesNetwork, and it kills intelligent conversation.
It would be better to have no list like it at all. Should there be a list, it needs heavy theming and moderation and a diverse culture of research multiplicities, pointed at contemporary issues. The current list seriously disrupts the ability to have a collective conversation with your peers.
Don’t forget shameless self-promotion Christian! I used the list for that once.
I’m okay with it being another resource for searching out material, because while Google can offer some great insights, there are often materials hidden away behind library paywalls and awkward categorization. While often I suggest that people go to the librarians that are assigned to their program to search out material, I don’t know of any that specialize in game studies at any of the three institutions here in Toronto. If I wanted to be extra-sure of something, I would bug gamesnetwork, because lots of smart people actually pay attention to it and can offer insight.
As to the incoherency of the culture, I suppose that is the problem with list-servs in general - in that they sort of force us to watch play by play somebody’s ego get hurt, and then watch the awkward public dancing that ensues. There could be a better culture on gamesnetwork, but it would have to be smaller and more regulated. Gamesnetwork’s beauty is in its public access. Anybody can get on and say whatever they want. Sometimes that results in the mundane, but whatever. I’m sure that most of the people on it actually prefer to turn to their own networks of colleagues and friends for in depth discussion, rather than an amorphous blob such as a list-serv. Specifically so much of what used to transpire on list-servs runs through twitter, blogs (like this one!) and the like.
But maybe there should be a change. It might help DiGRA to put some energy into figuring out gamesnetwork, see what works (CFPs all day everyday) and what doesn’t (petty squabbles over minutia).
