I’m settling into Portland, Oregon now, after moving here a couple of weeks ago from Boston. Between the move and switching to working full-time on finishing Facade for the next two months, I haven’t had much time to blog, but I’ll toss out a quick…

I am interested in bridging the divide, otherwise I wouldn’t have written the post (even if it may not appear that way :). I already know the PDF you linked to – it is highly interesting for the insight it gives into EA.

maybe the real problem is we don’t have agreed upon standards of ‘better interactive entertainment’. If there are such standards for academia and for industry, I would love to see them, and if/how we can bring them closer together.

I will write up a bigger article for the games community on bridging the joystick divide between academia and gamers and can post ideas from it here if interested, but a more immediate step might be to look at articles on this divide and tell us what the industry thinks of it.
For example http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/tshah/PauschAcademicsFieldGuideToEA.pdf
There may be a better starting point, I just thought this may interest you.

Personally, I definitely wanted Twisty Little Passages to be of direct use to IF developers, including Emily Short, Adam Cadre, Andrew Plotkin, Paul O’Brien, Stephen Granade, Dan Shiovitz, and Graham Nelson, but I wasn’t trying to write a book that would be as directly useful to, say, Will Wright and Tetsuya Mizuguchi. My hope is that the book will be one of several factors that fosters continued innovation in interactive fiction. It would be great, also, if what is learned in IF can trickle up to commercial gaming in various ways.

With the discussion of academia vs. industry/practice blossoming at Intelligent Artifice and Terra Nova, a comment at the Zen of Design blog strikes a chord:

Double-coding is the practice of creating a work of art that speaks to two different audien…

I must admit your interpretation is not unreasonable. The merit I referred to was, once again, in the context of making better interactive entertainment.

>> a. There are more humanities scholars than humanities posts (pls correct my cynicism)and there are many new ‘design’ posts.

Must game design necessarily involve only the humanities? How strong is that split?

>>I know in my departments there is a real shortage of experienced multimedia teachers.

I suspect that, ironically, it’s just as hard to go from industry to academia as vice versa. Except for the vocational side of things perhaps, but I have not been impressed with the quality of that in the past.

>>d. Building successful spatial environments takes a huge amount of experience-let alone interactive ones.

Why spatial environments? Spatiality is not an essential element of interactive entertainment (even though some game academics claim the opposite).

>>And they are very complex to evaluate or communicate.

True. This is a general problem of thinking and talking about games. One could call this a vocabulary problem, but it’s really a problem of the concepts behind the words.

>>e. As Socrates said, if you want to know art, don’t ask artists. Teaching is a different skill to designing.

I agree. Ask me about my guitar teacher sometime – just don’t ask me to play the guitar.

>>f. Perhaps the biggest reason: games are not easily (at least in my country) seen as research. Certainly not at the level of refereed papers, books etc. Tis a real shame.

I remember reading on the Digra list about the political struggle behind being able to study games – how some people strongly demarcated games from other media studies simply as a way to get funding.

>>g. Traditional scholars are prescriptive knowledge based, their very medium
of learning is different.

I totally do not follow you here, sorry.

>>If you are asking a more prescriptive question, ie how we can remedy this,
I would be very interested to know.

Well… How can we improve communication between academia and industry? How can we increase the amount of thinking that goes into making better interactive entertainment (I realize I must appear obsessive by now ;)

This also goes back to the topics Robin raised.

I must admit, though, that I can’t remember which articles these are.

I’m no fan of the counter-snobbery that ensues against the Ivory Tower by self described pragmatists. The fact is (and THIS is a restatement), there is good stuff out there but it is hard to find. I don’t feel like assessing a bad piece of writing is a waste of my time – in many cases it creates new ideas. Being unhappy with the status quo is one of the fastest ways to go about changing it. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it and all that guff”. (Hmm, by this reasoning, anything good I do is a result of someone else doing it worse, or just really pissing me off in the general sense).

In conclusion: I love academics, and academics love me (I have photographic evidence).