Nick Wadham’s Associated Press article on video games research is making the rounds.
Here’s a list of the places where it was printed.
Of course I wrote pages of brilliant answers to the journalist and only ended up getting a few lines – but that’s just the rules of the game. So yours truly is mentioned as follows:
In Copenhagen, Denmark, the IT University has established the Center of Computer Games Research, which just graduated its first Ph.D., Jesper Juul.
Juul appears to be the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies. His dissertation “Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds” seeks to define what video games are, and how academics ought to go about studying them.
“There is an interesting naughtiness in taking something that many people consider unimportant and frivolous and then creating very detailed theory about it,” Juul said. But, he added: “I would say that video games merit much more analysis than novels or movies simply because they are less understood.”
Terra Nova has a discussion about what I really am the first Ph.D. in.
As Greg Lastowka notes, this really is a defining moment of mainstream awareness of what we are doing.
And we apparently continue to be a good story – the juxtaposition of “taking play seriously” just always has that catchy headline quality. Which is good.