After spending the week in Europe, and most of that time in the fast boil of the Level Up games conference, I figure I’ve traveled 8,000 miles and lost at least 40 hours of sleep. Still, it was a trip, in many senses of the word, that I would do again in a heartbeat! My head is so full of thoughts that I feel like I wont have the time to get them all down into some sort of useful format.

But I’m trying.

This particular effort might be best described as my “Open Conference Feedback Form”. As such, it’s a quick hit and meant to be helpful. But due to the nature of such things, I won’t claim that it is comprehensive or even accurate in every dimension. Enough apologizing.

For your consideration, I submit three themes from Level Up:

As exciting as it was to see 500 people at the conference, and as stimulating as the more that 500 different points of view were about what the conference was all about (yes, as far as I can figure, some folks had more than one point of view in mind!), it only underlined how unformed this discipline is at the moment.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it did tend to give the whole conference a sense of lunching from topic to topic—often in the same session.

I know this will improve as researchers dig in and we reach some form of consensus around some of the big ideas. Along those lines, I’d offer a short list of some of the key questions I think we need to work on first, based on questions left in my mind at the end of the week.

• What is a game, what is a video game?
• What defines the field?
• What are the key standards and methodologies for approaching the field?
• Are video games a medium in their own right or do they belong to another area of media studies?
• Does the science of video game development belong with the study of video games as a medium?
• Other questions I think might be somewhat fundamental:
  • What is play? How does it relate to game?
  • Do the study of traditional games and the study of video games belong together?
  • Does the study of computer simulation and education belong with the study of games?
  • Does the study of online community and digital identity belong with the study of games?

I’m not so naive as to believe that we will ever find absolute truths in these answers. But I do think we need to gel a bit. I can’t imagine many geologists wandering one of their conferences saying, “I wonder what constitutes a rock?” A few givens, even if challenged later on, would help stabilize and focus the research!

Areas we need to do better

The field is currently dominated by a handful of personalities: This is a great credit to the vision and dedication of these individuals. But it threatens early on to leave the formulation of the discipline in the hands of a limited few. At any conference, there are always some speakers you’d like to hear more from, and others you like to hear less. Overall, the balance of speakers and topics was good. But considering the number of ideas the conference was trying to get out, it did seem that we heard from some people more often than necessary.

Regardless of the quality of the speaker, at an annual conference, I would like to take in as many relevant points of view as possible, not continue to explore one researcher’s thoughts across many topics. I’m not pointing to anyone in specific because I think this was a thematic flaw in the conference, not of any particular presenter!

Recognize the computer behind the video game:. If video games are unique, and worthy of study, it must be in part because of the nature of the computer. There are computers in places ranging far from games. I felt that much of the research took the computer for granted. Personally, I only met one computer scientist while I was there. He was working on a games modeling language, which holds great promise, to my mind, for the simple reason that he was trying to connect the language of computers to the language of games.

Guiding and supporting students: As a rough and un-scientific estimate, I’d guess that 30-50% of the attendees were students. In addition to offering better guidance on the “big questions”, listed above, I think we would do a great service to the student community—graduate and under-graduate alike—by building curriculum plans and tracks that help them focus their studies, offering suggested cannons of games and books that would aid in study, emphasizing tools and methodologies that they will need as they develop as researchers and making a strong effort to help students connect and build community. I know that Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, past and present DiGRA board member, has this on his agenda. We should recognize that today the discipline is open and students have remarkable access to practicing researchers. In many, many cases, the researchers themselves were students not so long ago. But as the area develops, we need to focus on developing and fostering our student community. Far too often, the students were left to the side while we barreled ahead with our theorizing. We need to bring them along with us!

People missing in action: I know it was the first conference, and I know it was at an odd time of the year (at least for some American researchers). Still, there were people that we consider to be core to the character and stature of our field who were not there. I won’t list names since I have no real interest in picking on people. But as a community, we need to recruit and encourage participation from the brightest stars in our universe. Fortunately, many of those names did attend. Next time, we need to extend that list, even if it is done virtually, as with the Brian Sutton-Smith presentation (which was brilliant by the way!)

Over-representation of Northern Europe and the US: As an American, a big chunk of the world makes it easy for me to remain in my cultural safety zone. The Netherlands was a wonderful example of an open society that seems willing to deal with the rest of the world without the subsequent fear of eroding their own culture. So, as a mono-language tourist, I safely wandered the streets of Utrecht with the confidence I could stop just about anyone and ask for directions.

Still, the tyranny of “Lingua English” is that we may be unintentionally excluding other parts of the globe. I do not think there was single participant from Japan and only a few researchers from Asia in general. Other than the estimable Gonzalo Frasca, I did not meet any other South Americans. Even southern Europeans--the French, Italians maybe a Greek or two—seemed in short supply.

I do not think our organizations can do much to solve cultural problems of language-centric research (which my country is most guilty of) or of other cultural factors that might limit the amount of research being undertaken in the first place. But we might look in future conferences to offer special regional scholarships or other recruitment efforts with an eye to increasing the diversity of the attendance in the future!

Things that went great!

The people and the community: I think there is a sort of frontier spirit in action right now in this discipline. Everything is new, so people are open. I cannot think of a single instance of meeting someone who was not generous with their time, their insight and their desire to cooperate. I think this stems in part from the fact that there is so much ground to explore that no one is particularly possessive of their “turf”. As the area matures, I hope this spirit of cooperation continues.

Games researchers have more fun! Certainly, those of us who have chosen video games as a field of study must have picked the academic area in some respect because it has to do with fun. As a result, I’ve never been to a conference where the fun factor was quite so high. From Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen’s “Buzz” card game to the late night carousing, I think more than one conference attendee came close to overdosing on play and fun!

The conference:. Although I have made some criticisms, I must emphasize that this conference exceeded my expectations in every area. From the quality of the visuals and the printed material, to the location, the events, the games and the parties, this conference set an admirable example for the future conference hosts. Period.

Industry participation: Although there were few commercial game developers in attendance, this is neither troubling nor surprising. Frankly, the industry is still trying to figure out what the academy is doing in their business and why it matters. With that said, I cannot overemphasize how important the presence of Doug Lowenstien from the ESA and Jason Della Rocca from the IGDA. It would have been quite simple for either of these guys to have blown off the overseas trip. But they are interested and they do see benefit in academic interest in video games, even if the day-to-day developer simply does not have the time to. Relating back to one of my complaints, I think it would be worthwhile to invite someone from the commercial industry each year to deliver a keynote. I don’t believe the academy needs industry’s permission to study games, nor do I think their on-going support is required for the field to grow. But I do think we should recognize that most of the objects we study did come from the commercial business. And we should world to foster connections and community the commercial world.

OK, one more complaint. Why do they serve beer in these tiny little glasses in the Netherlands?