You have seen me rant before about peoples’ perception of my gaming as research practices. This time around I want to do something a little different. I recently saw a call for a special issue of the journal Well Played that wanted people to answer the question “What does it mean to be well played?”. I started to think about what it means to be well played as an academic and how that’s difference for me than it seems to be for folks who make games or write about games for a living.
One of the first things that I had to come to terms with was the fact that in some odd way I do write about games for a living. In the same sense that I write (research based writing) as a part of my job and that what my research and writing is currently about is games, education, and rhetoric…I write about games for a living. So why is it so difficult for me to play games without feeling guilty for playing games in the first place?
Let me say, it’s been a long hard struggle, but I think that it’s one that has been made easier by the work that we do here at NYMG. Oddly enough, as academics our research (and writing) is largely invisible labor. Not only do people not see us doing our research (or in my case see what I do as being research), but most times they never see the products of our research. That is unless they are specifically in our areas, but that’s preaching to the converted, right?
What NYMG has done for me is not only hold me accountable to myself (having to write at least one post a week, talk to people about NYMG—online and off, and researching and preparing for the actual podcast every two weeks), but also by giving me a specific audience to talk to. And I think that it helps that this audience is not all academic. It makes me feel like our work here does something. Something other than be published in journals, edited collections, and monographs that (in their acceptability to our academic institutions) become largely uninteresting to those outside of the ivory tower. So to you, readers of NYMG, I say thank you.
Thanks for finally giving me the push that I need to stop relegating me gaming research to late nights (after all of the real work has been done—even the housework) and to finally seeing it as equal to doing research in a more traditional sense. Which means that I can come home after dropping Pea at school and playing games all day. (Un)fortunately what this also means is that sometimes playing games takes on the same feeling of drudgery that more traditional forms of research do. Good lord, how many times do I have to play through these tutorials and only the tutorials? What did I do to deserve this? It also means that I have to try to force myself to play games that I just don’t like or even ones that I fins offensive (within reason of course). And it also means that as a woman, a gamer, and an academic that I sometimes find myself an outlier in both the gaming and academic communities. (It doesn’t help that I am an inner city Black girl with a certain amount of attitude—a demographic that is largely absent in both communities and typically unappreciated in both.)
So, back to the original question. What does it take to be well played as an academic? And the answer seems to be dedication and acceptance. Not the acceptance of your academic or gaming peers, but acceptance of yourself. Finally accepting that not only are you a gamer, but that gaming is a part of your work. It means playing on through the doubt, through the irritation, and through the haters.
And so to you gentle readers I say what I say to myself every time I fire up a game, Play on Playa, Play On.
