Gaming and the liberal arts

Scholars need to make more kinds of things

I also question whether traditional academic distance may not often be as lazy, as simple-minded, as the kind of "vulgar aca-fandom" you are critiquing. It seems to me that it often comes from a refusal to engage with texts and the people who consume them. It often starts from an easy dismissal of the value of the work, a disdain for its fans and creators, and a desire to signal one's distance from anything commercial or popular. It often does not ask the kinds of hard questions you are claiming for the virtue of skepticism. For me, then, there is no special virtue from either starting place -- only the need to be honest about where you are starting from and your own stakes in the analytic process and to be unsettled and multivalient in constantly questioning the texts in which you are engaged. To me, this represents the virtues of the best fan criticism and it represents the virtues of the best outsider criticism.

I'm not suggesting that fans of pop culture artifact X (for any X) are wasting their time and ought to read Chaucer instead. Rather, I'm just not sure I agree that intense fans are sharp critics. I think they are pedantically detailed and vehement investigators, but I don't know that such digging leads to criticism. Let's take this further: it's a criticism I would extend to most academics too... many "careful readers" of whatever (Chaucer, even!) aren't really any better. In that respect, I agree with you that traditional academic distance isn't a salve (as I begin to suggest above, most "traditional" academics suffer from the same negative fandom that concerns me).

according to research by Nielsen Co. The time spent on social media accessed from PCs rose from 15.8% in June 2009 to 22.7% in June 2010, according to Nielsen, while online gaming gained more modestly to 10.2% of online time from 9.3% a year earlier. But that was enough to push gaming past e-mail, which fell to 8.3% of online time spent at the PC from 10.5% a year earlier.

separating social-media time from gaming time has become tougher, given that a growing portion of online gaming takes place via Facebook applications such as Zynga's Farmville, Nielsen analyst Dave Martin acknowledged.

. The shift of e-mail use from PCs to mobile devices accounts for some of the decline of time spent on e-mail at PCs

Gamification Boot Camp,™

A Facebook spokesman said the company wouldn't speculate about Google's initiative but said the company expected new social-networking efforts by others and "looks forward to seeing what others have to offer."

Many users now rely on their friends on Facebook—not just Google—to discover content and products they can purchase on the Internet. And much of the content generated by users on Facebook is generally kept out of view of Google's search engine.

In an interview this week, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt declined to confirm the development of a social-networking service that would incorporate social games, rumored to be called "Google Me." When asked if Google's service might resemble Facebook's, Mr. Schmidt said "the world doesn't need a copy of the same thing."