I work for — not to brag– one of the most innovative programs in the country. We’re small, but not THAT small (we have 400 majors and we are growing by the day). We do all sorts of innovative technology/design/game/app sort of stuff. It’s hard to talk through everything we do in one sentence without it looking insane. So I’m just going to talk about my corner here.
I work in games, with a focus on identity, class and culture. I also study collaboration. I do Esports. Esports is growing like a juggernaut. There were more eyes on the last League of Legends World Championship than were on any sports event other than the Super Bowl and the finals of the World Cup. It’s big. Really big.
The problem I run into is an issue that comes from all sides: from higher up administrators (though ours have been very, very good about this), from other academic peers, and from students. The problem? Buy-in.
That seems crazy, right? When you’re working on something innovative that is growing at 12 times the rate that the National Football League grew, that is going to be the largest entertainment revenue stream in the world within five years, that is so ubiquitous that even non-gamers know what you mean when you talk about playing games competitively… what’s not to love? We just placed a graduate at Blizzard, one of the biggest gaming companies in America. We’ll place more this coming year. This is a field about to burst at the seams.
But it’s hard to get people to jump on, because:
- If you’re a traditional academic or an administrator, all you see is risk (with a diminished sense of the reward). This doesn’t make logical sense, as every academic program is a risk, but there’s an added stigma with gaming (see my post from yesterday). So it’s sometimes hard to get people onboard. The higher ups at my university were skeptical at first, but they see it now, and they’ve bought in. And I’m lucky, and I thank them. But it’s a big problem nationally. And the gap between “traditional” fields and emerging fields is such that I actually left my home discipline so I could fit into a program. That shouldn’t ever happen. The people who are doing the most innovative cutting edge work in your field shouldn’t be chased away. That’s bad for the very nature of evolution.
- My peers who get it are worried about themselves, so even though there aren’t the same turf wars that there are with other programs, there are still turf wars. Everyone has their sense of how this is going to go. I like to think I don’t, but I might be lying to myself. I have a sense of where I am going; I’m not sure if everyone is going with me or not. But I’m going to support anyone else making the effort to blaze a trail. I wish everyone felt that way. I wish academia was truly supportive and collaborative and open. I found a place that is, but it’s literally the only place I’ve found like it.
- The weirdest issue is on the student level. Many of our students are great, and they work hard and they get involved and we help them to realize their dreams. It’s what *I* feel like my job is to do. It’s my calling, my passion. But I have a large group of students I’m trying to work with right now in terms of Esports stuff that are oddly territorial, and I worry that the only way I can get them to understand how things work is to throw one of them under the bus. You see, last year one of them messed up really bad. I — with the help of several colleagues– saved him and the group and fixed the problems, but we didn’t set things back to where the group had dreamed things would go. And I, as I always am, was a voice of reason while being their cheerleader, which means I had to tell them lots of things they didn’t want to hear. As I said in another post here this past week– the truth can most certainly hurt you. But this group of students now has this weird sense that I’m the enemy. It’s funny, really, as they’d have been literally done, their organization all-but-blackballed, had I not made a huge effort to save them. But they saw it another way because they were taking misinformation from one of their own. Because of that, I have all these opportunities to offer them, but some of them won’t buy in. And they’ll lose out to students who will. And that’s… sad. But I can’t fix that for them.
The buy-in issue is at the core of all of academia’s problem right now. At the end of the day, you have to make a decision. If you’re an academic just for a paycheck, you probably picked the worst job you could. The pay-to-work ratio and the chances of random red tape binding you are way out of alignment for someone looking to just do a job and go home. If you came for power, that was stupid, because academic power comes at the cost of being able to innovate, because those who are the most secure in their jobs are the most conservative. And if you’re a student and you don’t buy in– what are you paying for? Why go to college? Why research?
All I ever ask if anyone I work with is that they commit to the process. I worry sometimes that even that is asking too much.
But you have to buy in or you have to sell out.