It seems that social gaming studies have more to do with sociology, namely structural functionalism, than they have to do with game studies. There’s no gameplay outside of behavioral Skinner boxes. I think the ‘social’ in social gaming is misleading, if anything, panoptical gaming seems more adequate.

I think it does, the questions are 1.) can/how do you know, and b.) even if you can answer 1, what can you do then? I can just envision many cases where these questions are unanswerable, and I’m not sure its worth spinning our wheels over.

Of course there are instances where the impact of the researcher’s position is obvious, but I think these tend to be easily identified as such.

In other words, of course there are “ideal” conditions under which research is done, which includes the researcher’s ideas, opinions, and attachment to the subject. But is there always a pragmatic value in chasing these questions? Can you force disinterested people to research something they don’t care about? And if so, can we prove the quality of their output is superior to that of a fan researching something they love? Who decides, and who enforces?

I think it’s important to keep these questions in mind (as you clearly do), but ultimately I’m not sure we can do much beyond adjust our interpretations of writing/research accordingly.

I don’t know, does that makes sense? :-)

“I would submit that it’s precisely this sort of attention to trends that has hamstrung game studies (it’s not the only culprit).”

“On the second point, there’s an argument to be made that since social games are both unarchivable and changing so rapidly, it’s now or never.”

Does the reason for studying something (“it’s shiny” vs “now or never”) make much of a difference if the result is the same? Certainly we can debate endlessly the role of “objectivity” in such a study and how motivations might influence it, but we can’t always control for such things and we are not the only field who has to deal with this.

And of course we can always use better theory. Anyway, the very nature of the field requires adaptability and paying attention to overnight shifts in the landscape. I would venture the important question is not “do you love games too much / not enough,” but rather “can you talk intelligently about all kinds of games.” It seems to me that this is how lit / film / art / etc. professors go about it.

Interestingly, I felt I took some flack for writing about casual games because some people assumed they were the only games I liked. (The horror! The horror!)

As for the danger of always going after the latest and shiniest phenomenon, I think the ideal is to have a theory that’s well grounded in the history of the art form, but is also able to talk about new developments.

The being a fan / non-being a fan thing is an issue onto itself – we have historically had both kinds in game studies. Ian, do you like newsgames?

I think that casual games and social games are interesting because they are new ideas of what a video should be, who should be a video game player, and what type of relation you should have to a game. As such there is a substantial challenge in making sure that we have the theory to talk about them…

On the second point, there’s an argument to be made that since social games are both unarchivable and changing so rapidly, it’s now or never. I’d find that sort of pragmatic position a much more compelling argument for alacrity than the moral one.

“We ought not essentialize. There’s knee-jerk panic and there’s thoughtful criticism. If game studies can only ever say happy fanboy things about games, we will have been fools.”

I would agree with this. I mostly object to your use of the word “disparagement,” which I see as a far cry from thoughtful criticism. I would say something like “social games are boring and stupid, like sports [Hi Abe!]” would qualify as disparagement.

Anyway, I don’t mean to start a long argument around connotations.

To return to Jesper’s point, I think the obvious answer is that the academic machine is a slow and plodding one. Why aren’t people doing PhDs on social games? Well to start it’s a fairly recent phenomenon, so I doubt many people out there are ready, willing and able to supervise such a project. It’s also entirely possible that a lot of good scholarship on social games is simply trapped in publishing limbo, waiting to be reviewed and/or printed.