ITJourno.com.au Media News
On July 4, 2011 Allie Coyne of ITJourno.com.au followed up her article about Flickering Colours with another piece about my work. This time the focus was the upcoming Playculture journal and blog, which I am in the middle of planning with the editorial staff. We are literally 'in the middle' of planning, so some stuff is well underway, but many things could change between now and our first issue. Hopefully most of this information is relevant. This piece also mentions the upcoming new programs for videogame studies at Macquarie University. More on that as it becomes more publicly available.
Australian universities are upping their focus on gaming, with The University of Melbourne sponsoring a soon to be laun?ched journal and accompanying blog, alongside the introduction of several new gaming courses at Macquarie University.
Lecturer and blogger Adam Ruch (pictured) is one of many academics involved in the development of Playculture: Journal of Videogame Studies. Sponsored by Melbourne University’s School of Culture and Communication, the bi-annual journal's website is currently online though still in design, with the first issue to be published early next year.
Accompanying the online journal will be a games-focused blog, run by Ruch and fellow blogger and Critical Distance founder Ben Abraham, with the entire project to be overseen by fellow academic and games writer Dan Golding. Ruch said the idea to create a blog was borne out of the "indecently slow" process that is academia publishing,
“It’s really difficult to be topical in academic publishing,” Ruch said. “World of Warcraft is still topical in academia.”
Mirroring the journal in critically dissecting video games, the blog will have an academic tone covering topical subjects. With content similar to Ruch’s solo run Flickering Colours project, his main focus is its accessibility.
“We’d like to see it as a bridge between enthusiast press and academia,” he said. “Say one in twenty Kotaku readers want to read more in-depth stuff, they can come to the blog and not be put off by academic language. We’ll be analysing games, taking a historical look at something, it’s flexible. That’s the key.”
With no interest in consumer reviews, the blog posts will focus on critiques and criticism, and will run anywhere from 500 to 3,000 words, significantly shorter than the length of journal submissions, which Ruch said were likely to range anywhere from 5,000 to 12,000 words. He told ITJ the heavy content load wouldn’t affected the regularity of weekly blog posts, but combined with the lengthy publishing process, may mean the journal will only be published twice a year.
“We’ll have to see what happens, it’s still in the planning stage, it’s hard to know what the readership will be like.”
Ruch and the team are similarly keen to stay away from news, and are looking for contributions from all writers, journalists and non-journalists alike.
“It’s a huge area, we’re not going to compete with IGN, and we don’t really want to, they’ve got a great handle on that,” he said. “But it doesn’t even have to be journalists, even if it’s just somebody who can write and has something interesting to say. We’re hoping to have a high level conversation, it doesn’t matter who it’s from.”
Ruch believes there is a hole in the market for publications looking to critically discuss and understand video games.
“We want to avoid the consumer angle, we don’t want to sell the games; so then you turn to things like art, cultural values, what are video games if they’re not just products to buy off the shelf,” he explained. “We’re trying to bring critical rigueur to the consumption of video games, look at wider interpretations of games as opposed to how many guns can you pick up. What does it say about the human experience, does it have a relationship with other artworks.”
Ruch said his, and several other academics' shared philosophy of "wanting to do video games seriously" has seen them lobby Macquarie University to increase its focus on gaming. The effort has seen the introduction of several new courses within the Arts and Science departments.
Starting in 2012, students will be able to enrol in several different programs within the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Information Technology degrees, with subjects covering interactivity and gaming, introduction to design process and development tools, critical theory, animation, as well as a third year game building program. Ruch said the university will introduce half a dozen new courses as well as tampering with several existing programs.
“It’s a big risk for a university to commit resources to a degree,” he said. “Off the success of [Introduction to Video Games, launched in 2009] the other convenor and I were able to argue successfully that we could get more students interested.”
Ruch said the new programs aren’t designed to compete with similar offerings at other universities and private colleges.
“We’re trying to bring some of that university critical understanding of what it is you’re doing and not just how to do it,” he told ITJ. “We want graduates to think more broadly. If they just want to do game programming all day, they can, but if they want to learn more than other degrees can teach them, that’s what we’re looking for.”