Last week's Association of Internet Researchers' conference in Vancouver was a fine setting for an age-old debate: what, if anything, do academics offer the games industry, and vice versa? Subtitled Let's Play, the conference featured several strong tracks on gaming. Admittedly, Joe or Jane Gamer would rather shoot their way through Halo 3 than think about the complexity of the rhetoric in the textual fabric of the interactive landscape, but between the close readings, the academics were surprised at their own vehemence when it came to the place of industry at their conference.
I usually argue that the games industry and academia should come together. After all, where would researchers be without the sources of their analyses? And while the attention to detail and the experimental outcomes of Ivory Tower residents may not initially appear to affect the bottom line, those who've heeded the suggestions of research have reaped rewards. Will Wright's background in sociology, for example, is credited as laying the foundations for his gazillion-selling Sim-related series.
Yet academic critics maintain that the industry repeatedly pooh-poohs their important insights. And indeed, they do. They provide the analytic evidence for what industry does so well (and so badly), but are only called upon in the rare event that industry requires mainstream validation. Academics are even asked to run "experiments" which "find" fodder for PR machines to belch out in press releases to achieve mainstream headlines.
In the industry's defence, a lot of what academia does present is irrelevant. While conceptually interesting, close readings of a game series released several years before really don't have any bearing on current practices. But we're now at an impasse: neither camp is right or wrong. Each feels the other owes them something: academics say industry doesn't take them seriously and industry says academics get enough through the use of their properties.
There has been a self-defeating trend to try to integrate the two at conferences. Academics are marginalised into their own silos at industry dos while industry types are accused of sales pitching at research forums. Both sides hope for a cautious validation by including the other, but walk a fine line between bridging the gap and committing high treason.
Is there any point in encouraging integration? Will we someday see a giant hybrid game-academic monster? In the present climate, this idyllic future seems unlikely, but I live in quiet hope that one day, geeks from all colours of the interactive rainbow will put down their BFGs and just get along.