Diane’s question is excellent, btw. We lapse into these academic/non-academic distinctions as if they had some substance, when we’re probably just pointing to conventions of discourse — and perhaps motivations for using those conventions.

I do worry about any work that takes place in total isolation from any discussion of craft or experience of prior work, since more often than not it tends to reinvent the wheel (badly); I also worry about any theory formed without practical experience, since I often find it either vacant or silly. This is not, by the way, an complaint leveled specifically at game studies. There are works of classics scholarship that have left me wondering whether the scholar had ever written anything creative in his life.

Ultimately I think over-emphasizing the division between an “academic” approach and a “practical” one does both sides a disservice. It encourages professional academics toward obfuscation and abstraction, while strongly implying to the practioner that academic input is useless and abstract discussion of craft a waste of time. In fact, the core skills of the professional academic are useful in every sort of intellectual endeavor: the ability to read, write, argue, study precedents, compare, draw conclusions, postulate new directions, experiment, explore, and refine one’s thought with new input. The professional academic may have access to different resources and use different terminology, but ideally (in my opinion) what he writes should still make sense, and be of value, to an educated layman, with a little explanation of terms.

There is also an issue of focus, of course. Academic writing does often tend to say, not “here is how you achieve goals X, Y, and Z,” but “here is what was achieved by works A, B, and C.” It can take some work to read that second kind of essay and come up with ideas to take back to one’s own craft, especially if the discussion doesn’t go much into means.

Being forced to address past work usually makes an author’s argument more credible and fair, and usually improves the quality of the argument itself, since it’s more informed. However there are plenty of times I’ve seen lousy academic work get away with not properly citing past work. Also, both academics and non- are usually guilty of not citing each others’ past work, even if they carefully refer back to their own camp’s past work.

And sometimes academics build new theories totally on top of or within past theories, sometimes without any new experimentation or firm grounding in usefulness or reality. When this goes too far, this is when non-academics feel like academics are in their own little world, guilty of “intellectual masturbation”.

Using myself as a case study of a non-academic who has published relatively extensively in academic venues, I’ve found my argumentation has been forced to become more rigorous, to rise towards the requirements of academic discourse. However, free from the need to publish or perish, and free from the politics of getting tenure, non-academics like me don’t have to deal with the temptation to publish for the sake of publishing, which may make it easier to keep our feet planted on the ground.

To return to the original quote from gman, “I don’t agree that academics can teach us ‘how we can make [games] better’”, I wouldn’t exactly respond with, “No, academics can teach developers how to make games better”. I would answer with, “Academics can offer ideas, analysis, techniques and experimental results to help developers make games better.”

The university isn’t the only place that offers good environments for thinking, so I don’t mean to claim all advanced thought for academics. I do want to resist the idea that “academic” means “meaningless and without any impact in the real world,” though. I think electronic literature, interactive fiction, and video gaming would be much worse off if the environment of the university, and the thinking that took place there, hadn’t been around.

Kubrik engaged the services of Marvin Minsky on 2001: A Space Oddyssey.