I worked a little disgruntled line into one of my posts this past week, and today I wanted to tug a little bit on that thread. It has everything to do with the revisions I made to my book manuscript (hopefully coming soon to a book shelf near you, assuming your book shelf has academic gaming books on it). There’s this strange thing that happens in academia that I’d like to reflect on for a second, because it caused me to reframe my book in what I hope will be a highly productive way.
People read my work, and they often say things like “why are you citing something so old” when I, for example, cite Dawkins when explaining what a meme is or when I cite Bandura to talk about a feedback loop. I do that because I am concerned about origin points. The argument is “newer things have been written about that,” which is true, but if a person is pointing to a theory, like, say, the feedback loop, I’m not sure why citing a newer version of someone proving Bandura’s idea correct is somehow a better citation than the original text. In fact when we teach research to first year students, we specifically tell them to go to the primary source (which would be the old scholarship) and not to the secondary ones.
At the same time that people make those sorts of comments, a second school of thought will suggest that at times work isn’t rooted in the history of the field/in other scholarship. I am speaking from my own experience because I’m just blogging at this moment and don’t want to drag other people into my rant, but I’m far from the only person to experience this. As a member of editorial boards, I often see people making the same sorts of comments on submissions, sometimes to the point that I write to the editor with my response saying “I don’t even get this person’s argument– please think about what motivated it.” In the case of my own work, there’s often a belief that any academic work about World of Warcraft needs to be cited in my work on World of Warcraft simply because it’s all stuff written about Warcraft. Even if it’s a book about religion that has nothing at all to do with social identity and raid dynamics (what my book is about), people expect the reference to be there because it’ a book about WoW so I should cite every single academic work about WoW. This is a bias that doesn’t trouble my literature colleagues, for example, as no one is told when writing about The Wasteland to cite every academic mention of T.S. Eliot.
And so herein lies my argument against this weird duality of academic publishing. If I’m going to cite something, I want it to be relevant to what I’m saying. I don’t think that we should treat the references in our written work as the gatekeeper for whether or not we’ve read certain things and belong in he field; we went through that initiation to become the 1% who have PhDs to begin with. It’s a foolhardy way to perpetuate our discipline, to try to force miniature histories into everything we write. But it also does something that I’ve noticed happening to other scholars (something I’m resisting, and something which is getting mixed responses from editors). It limits the ability to do real, unique, new research.
Why, you might ask. After all, isn’t that what we push ourselves to do? I always thought that was the idea of a researcher, after all, to do research and find new things or to put a new spin on things. In fact my most recent article to be reviewed by an editor was ripped by one of the three (one of the three– the other two liked it, which gives me confidence to claim that the one dissenter must have been inaccurate) because I apparently didn’t say anything new. But that’s part of this weird double-bind. We’ve chosen as academics that the litmus test for worthiness to publish our work is to show that we know all the other work, too, that we respect and have an encyclopedic understanding of our disciplines, to the point that we can make long lists of articles and books about the stuff we study. This seems to be, to most editors, more important than what WE are saying. To rephrase Nick Hornby from High Fidelity, it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know knows what you know.
But we’re expected to build on existing scholarship, too, right? At least I hope we are. Sometimes it seems like the “doing new work” part is subjugated by the “make sure you show us you know what everyone else did” part.
Which means we are STUCK. We have to give this reverence to the other people in order do our work, so if, for example, you want to write about “remix culture,” and “writing,” you have to go find all the other people who did it, and you have to incorporate everything they did. And if you disagree with one of them, you have to jump through hoops to make sure you express your disagreement in a way that isn’t viewed as hostile or disrespectful. Meanwhile editorial comments are exempt from this, as I could show you three or four racist ones I’ve received in the last year-and-a-half that were apparently collegial and professional. But I digress.
A point in case example from my own work: There’s a rich vein of games research on “frustration” in games. Some people in this area of study believe that a game doesn’t need to be fun to be good. And their favorite example is the Dark Souls series. I would argue in response, and I have before, that this is where “fun” is too slippery of a word to really use in this argument. “Fun” isn’t a scientific term, and since we cannot come to a communal definition of it, trying to claim ownership of its definition borders on arrogance. I base that on my own research and what gamers have said to me. I studied WoW for quite a long period of time (two years of participant based research, and about eight months in the dead MOO City of Heroes before that. I also teach a week long unit specifically on Dark Souls in my game theory course and have for three years). Those games have moments of said frustration. I asked, point blank, if people were “having fun” in those moments as part of my research protocol, and all my participants but one said yes. The one who didn’t say yes told me she “didn’t know for sure.”She did not say “no.” So I have what should pass as evidence for my position that it might be narrow to claim that frustrating games aren’t fun or aren’t meant to be fun. But when I assert this, I am told– most of the time– to go read Jesper Juul’s book (which I read and I love and teach with, as I think Juul is a games visionary and only disagree with the idea that people tack onto his work vis-a-fun). I was even told once, in a moment that I found ironic, that I couldn’t disagree with Juul just because I had my “own definition of fun that I preferred.” I can’t have a definition for the word, nor can my research participants, because someone else wrote about it a different way already, apparently. And to be clear, Juul doesn’t try to own fun in his book; he’s way smarter than that. People who use Juul’s book like a baseball bat try to claim that he defined fun so that they have a baseline for their argument. It’s a moving strawman argument that is used in a weird paradox to claim that arguing against a static definition for fun is making a strawman out of Juul, which should sound confusing because it is both confusing and ill-thought-out, but I’ve had this discussion with an editor about comments on one of my drafts.
Things like this are why some people hate academics. I would argue that much of this goes back to that binary/zero-sum argument I mentioned last week; I think people believe that if you disagree with a portion of a theory you must, by virtue of that, believe that the person who made the theory is entirely wrong, is evil, you hate that person, and you live only to rain suffering down upon them. I’ve disagreed with numerous scholars, including ones that wrote the book and taught the class. I never disliked any of them because of it. But I think that’s how academia sees it. I remember being told by a professor once that, after I pointed out what I saw as a flaw in a book written by the professor’s mentor, that I shouldn’t “disregard an important work.” I wasn’t disregarding it at all. I was using it as part of my own research. I just thought one aspect of it didn’t work the way the professor thought it did and wanted to discuss it.
Another quick example. If you want to talk about having an academic hero, I have like five that are my dream team and who I end up citing all the time. I got to work with a few of them, actually. But one in particular feels like he’s of tremendous importance to my career though we’ve only met in passing (I doubt he even remembers me). It’s James Paul Gee, the guy whose book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy was the book that gave me the realization that I could do what I do for a living. I teach with portions of his work all the time. I LOVE James Gee. If I was a person who didn’t have hyperawareness of personal space, I’d have hugged him when I met him. The guy is amazing. But in one of my talks at a conference, I pointed out that I feel like my voice brings something different to games research because Gee was a scholar who decided to study games and I was a gamer who grew into a scholar. My positionality is different. A person during the Q&A asked why I felt like I was “better” than James Gee. I responded in shock, and sort of with a joke, that I couldn’t imagine anyone got that idea. So the person spit that line back at me, that I pointed out that I was a gamer first then a scholar. I reiterated that I felt that gave me a different perspective. Not better. Not worse. Different. It meant I saw things another way. I still, years later, get that question sometimes even though after that first experience I majorly ramped up the respect shown before and after saying it. Because it’s an important part of my work. I’m a first generation college Cherokee gamer who studies culture, identity, design and narrative. I look st things in a different way than most of my peers. But I don’t see why I can’t consider Gee a master researcher, love him, adore is work, want desperately to be his friend, and still say that my research perspective is different from his because I grew up playing games since before I could read. It isn’t ME who is assigning that a value that is “better or less than.” It is me expressing that things are different. We need different views. If everyone sees the world the same way, we all lose.
These sorts of interactions create a false sense of acrimony and a distorted sense of how merit for accomplishments should work in academia. It shouldn’t be viewed as disrespectful to disagree with someone else’s ideas or like a shot across the bow to express that we see something in a different way. We live in the world of ad hominem Presidency, so I realize some people might have trouble separating it, but I feel like I can safely say I don’t agree with Socrates when he says that rhetoric is a tool of evil without being seen as someone who doesn’t respect Socrates. Likewise, if my research points in a different direction than someone who has already published a piece of work, I’m not sure why that new work cannot complicate existing structures. I know it’s not like science where I can give someone an experiment to go replicate to prove my position is right, but that was true for the first theory, too. Ours is not literally a science.
I know that since I used my own work in my example this might look like axe grinding. It’s not– I really don’t care if I “lose” the “fun” argument and I sure as hell don’t think I’m better than James Gee at anything other than perhaps Pokemon or Warcraft (just kidding, JPG, if you’re reading this– I’d love to challenge you to Hearthstone and gush again about how your book sort of created the self-designed track that was my MA and the base of my PhD).
What I’m actually worried about is something that is far more disconcerting.
If we continue with the way we’re starting to treat academic publishing and the way we’re determining the merit of scholarship, we’re creating a system that squashes ideas and forces new scholars to do a certain type of work and to come to conclusions where the authors are forced to machine their results and ideas to fit the field. If they mention a thing that someone else mentioned, they are expected to bend their material around to meet that other person’s ideas. If they don’t, they’re seen as being “combative” or “not professional.”
I know some of you reading this will say “but that’s not what happens. We want to see those new conversations.” And I think, in our hearts and minds, we all believe that. I know *I* want to see those conversations. I want people to engage any ideas I put into the world. I want them to pull on my ideas and prove me wrong when I’m wrong. I want to review the journal article so innovative and amazing that the person struggles to cite anything because there just aren’t enough people doing similar work. I crave that. I want to see articles like Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” in every issue of everything I read. That’s what we need! We are the last line of defense for critical thought. We are at war. We need to fight smart.
But I’ve been actively involved in publishing in my field– publishing my own stuff, reviewing for journals and conferences, etc.– for little over a decade, and I’ve seen that we do NOT have that open sense of how research works. People are building ramparts and trying to defend existing scholarship, trying to actively force new scholars to fall into a line behind everyone else. It’s an attempt to defend the structure that exists when the reality of academia is becoming intersectional and interdisciplinary. The days of being an expert in one thing are over.
And at the same time that this is happening, another line of people are trying to make sure no one goes more than about a decade into the past when they cite, trying to replicate what science does for every other discipline, so that not only is there a line forming where everyone has to cite everyone, but the line is moving further and further from the point where what they are citing was actually something new. It’s like we’re compositing the field, then we’re slowly moving away from the composite, so the ideas are being recreated and recreated, but as we cite new people saying the same things people said before we falsely act like it’s new, like to go back to my original argument here, we care claiming that since Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in the 1970s it’s not his idea but rather the idea of someone who wrote a piece with the word meme in it circa 2007.
We have to think hard about the ramifications of this, and I know that the pre-tenure hybrid scholar like myself can’t be the guy to lead the way in this fight because no one will take my criticism as anything but sour grapes. I know that, really, I do. I realize that it’s easy to make a case that I’m just frustrated for myself. Only… I’m succeeding in spite of the troubles I see in the system. I’m going to be okay. I have an article coming out this month, I have another one in review. I have two chapters out recently and a third coming. I have a contract signed for my monograph. And honestly were it not for the need to publish for the sake of my job I’d gladly give every last bit of my research away for free on this blog. I just want to share my ideas. I like to think, to solve issues, to push cultural acceptance. I don’t really care that much about where I’m doing that. I just also like my job and want to be considered worthy of it, and for someone like myself that’s already a harder case to make than it should be. So I have to get published so I can have tenure so I can continue to do the work that matters.
I don’t want to become a cog in a machine that keeps this system moving, though. I care too much about issues that are already minimized. I’m not going to tell every student I work with that he or she has to start by paying deference to my work, to people I studied with, to people who taught me, before they can talk about Indigenous rhetoric, for example. Who am I to presume that I hold the truth that the field must preserve? My ideas aren’t any better than anyone else’s.
They aren’t inferior to anyone, either.
And if I don’t agree with you, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But you don’t get to tell me I’m wrong, either. We just have to let our ideas do the talking and respect that we both worked to get to the place where we can present such ideas.
It shouldn’t be a contest to see which of us can name the most other scholars in the field in our parentheticals. We all lose at that game.
Unless our hope isn’t to do fresh work. Maybe that’s how we should behave if we want our names to be in the parentheses in everyone else’s work?
That doesn’t seem important to me. But what do I know? I don’t even have tenure. Yet.