I know many PhD students blog, and attempt to engage a wider audience, so maybe a certain pre-dissertation move away from hyper-specialization is already happening. On the other hand, it’s quite risky for grad students (and the untenured) to put significant effort into activities considered marginal by their field’s mainstream. I’ll be interested to see how this evolves (and what I can do to support the experimentally-minded).

Maybe a change in who peer reviews a book is just one particular kind of change in audience positioning, insofar as the peer reviewers are supposed to be knowledgeable representatives of the intended audience? I suppose that might make an author’s job harder: everyone now has to be right about all fields they discuss, because once someone finds your stuff, the defense that it wasn’t intended for them doesn’t work that well. But it might be a good thing, nonetheless.

feedback that will
continue throughout
the writing process.

but i now recall that
you were specifically
interested in reviews
that occurred along
a track parallel to
peer review, which
is always done when
the writing is “done”.

-bowerbird

start by giving people
the book’s _outline_,
so they understand
the whole picture…

then flesh it out…

-bowerbird

To me this implies that the GTxA peer review experiment was successful not only for the reasons I identified (e.g., a community and a reputation for the blog) but also because it was friendly to some of the near-real-time ways that a wider group of people select things to read on topics that interest them (e.g., Google alerts).

So, as we think about the future of peer review, it may not only be necessary to design approaches that perform review of individual sections/examples, but also ones that draw in as many of the potentially-interested communities as possible during the time of the review. Even though it wasn’t conceived with the second of these in mind, the blog-based review form responds to both of these, which makes me hopeful that others will experiment with it (or related forms) in the future.

I think it then becomes more important for those discussions to all be accurate, even avoiding errors that don’t impact the book’s own argument, because the authority of the author of the book will be cited for these individual propositions within the book. Previously any errors might be buried in a book that wasn’t even on the subject: maybe it’s not so important that a Sims example be exactly right in a book on architecture that just uses it as a passing illustration, so long as it’s right in the ways that are relevant for its use as an architecture example. But now it has to be right enough for the game-studies and AI audiences, too, since any errors will be more likely to be read by the audience you didn’t expect, either damaging the overall academic literature and debate as misinformation gets repeated, damaging the author’s reputation if it’s exposed as misinformation, or both. In fact, I recall your book itself exposed several such wrong-in-the-details examples from other authors’ writing, of various levels of severity.

And I think, as you discuss, it’s hard to get that sort of cross-cutting feedback from traditional peer review, whether in journals, books, or conferences, because you would need too many reviewers (in your case, an expert on every system discussed, game-studies and digital-humanities experts, AI experts, game designers, etc.). So this is one model for how to get the details right— expose it to everyone, and hope people who know about the details point out problems before the book goes to press. I think there’s a good chance they will in many cases, at least if the authors themselves are alive and reachable: many people have a strong interest in learning how their work is being discussed by others, and would appreciate the opportunity to make corrections or clarifications before something that misrepresents their work gets published.