The future of interdisciplinary critical games discourse (e.g. Proceedings of the VGHVI)

[Roger Travis]

I had a very interesting chat with Corvus Elrod a few days ago, in which I confessed to him that the submissions we've got so far for Proceedings of the VGHVI (hereinafter PVGHVI [at least it will probably always be a unique search term]) are almost all of a variety with which we're not sure what to do.

These are really, really smart pieces, mostly based on really, really smart blog-posts, which, as I look at them with my academic eyes, I can see being turned into "real" articles. (The scare-quotes around "real" are there to indicate that I don't think there's actually such a thing as a real article, as opposed to an unreal, or fake, one.) They don’t however, have the thing which professional academics, part of whose job-desciption is doing peer-review for academic journals, are looking for—what we tend to call a scholarly apparatus, or, to put it another way, a certain kind of footnotes. Not the fun kind of footnotes that tell you stuff that’s really interesting but had to be left out of the main text, but the sad kind of footnotes that tell you that the author of the article knows that he or she is bound to demonstrate that he or she did his or her homework.

As the initial call for papers tried to express, this kind of contribution was exactly what we were hoping to get. The problem is that I was terribly naïve in thinking that our contributors would just have to sit down with their existing pieces for an hour or two, throw some footnotes in there, and “Ecce!”: a “semi-scholarly” article, ready for peer-review.

We could go back and forth for a very long time about how good a thing it is to have peer-review in its old-fashioned form, and how useful a thing a traditional apparatus actually is, but I don’t think we’d get anywhere except a slightly more advanced state of depression about how the academy works.

On the other hand, Corvus evoked in me what seems like a possibly great idea for what we might do with these pieces, based on Electronic Book Review, which to my shame I had never investigated before, and which is very much worth anyone’s time to peruse. As I see it, the idea would be for an editor of PVGHVI to take a look at all submissions, and, in the case of “traditional” scholarly articles, to send them out for “traditional” peer-review, but, in the case of “non-traditional” scholarly articles, to post (given the author’s consent) such articles here at VGHVI and on our wiki. This posting would provide a CV item of at least a small value, and (more importantly) would initiate a process whereby these articles might in fact evolve into a more traditional form, as other VGHVI-members provide their expertise in editing and corroborating.

What do you think?

[David Carlton]

A couple of questions that came to mind when reading this:

* What do the submitters so far say? Have you described what would be necessary to turn them into a traditional academic article, and asked them whether they'd be interested in doing that?

* The suggestion in the last paragraph links being peer reviewed and having traditional scholarly apparatus. I don't see offhand why it's so important to link those two: might there be value in having peer-reviewed articles without traditional scholarly apparatus?

[Roger Travis]

David Carlton said:

* What do the submitters so far say? Have you described what would be necessary to turn them into a traditional academic article, and asked them whether they'd be interested in doing that?

This discussion is in large part an attempt to ask the contributors thus far what they say, under a veil of anonymity--that is, nobody has to acknowledge being a contributor as he or she contributes to the discussion. Response so far has been generally positive, from those I've chatted with.

* The suggestion in the last paragraph links being peer reviewed and having traditional scholarly apparatus. I don't see offhand why it's so important to link those two: might there be value in having peer-reviewed articles without traditional scholarly apparatus?

That's really the crux of the problem. I can imagine a new kind of peer-review, but it's a vision that's very hard to communicate, and even harder to get other academics to buy into. It sometimes seems to me like asking a sailor to come sail with you on a new type of boat that seems to have holes in the bottom and can't be tested, but which seems very interesting on paper.

[Erik Hanson]

This may be a little tangential, but a while ago I linked to a piece at Grand Text Auto regarding online review. The piece in question used a format like the one McKenzie Wark used for G4m3r Th30ry, but I'm pretty sure there are a number of options out there.

I've always found citations to be the most daunting and frustrating part of writing in both the academic and legal worlds. In my mind, they amount to a primitive and inefficient version of a hyperlink. I believe that the MLA started to recognize the change in the weather (though from what I've gathered of their response, I think they got it wrong).

Either way, I'll take a look for pages that have helped make citations easier for me in the past.