The summer is over. Back to work.

Every year I find that I all but stop playing games through the summer months. My mix of leisure switches over to seasonal activities like drinking beer, barbequing and hanging outdoors. The games can wait.

But this year it was something else, too. I realized that the world of games feels a bit stagnant. In part, I’m sure, this is due to the usual lull that comes before a new wave of console launches. With the 360 due in a couple of months, the focus on games has shifted from the present to the future. I’ve been though this hardware cycling enough that I don’t get too excited about it any more. In fact, the industry’s flailing of focus will probably be death of the business. Sooner or later fans get tired of always being told, “Just wait till you see the next thing.”

It’s exciting for a while but eventually it’s like playing the lottery--- the fun of thinking about the future either gets boring or becomes a destructive addiction.

So, that’s part of it.

Still, I don’t want to lay the whole issue at the feet of the gaming industry. Not when my bigger disappointment, I think, is how I’ve been feeling about game studies.

This past spring I headed out to the DiGRA conference in Vancouver. Because of a scheduling conflict that had me comminuting right in the middle to another conference, I did miss more of the game gathering than I would have liked. So, perhaps that colors my observations here.

What I noticed, though, was a thinning of enthusiasm about the topic of games. Rather than better interdisciplinary conversations, I found more talk about subjects of interest inside disciplines and less about games. More theory and less fun. Everquest and Half-Life are fine games. But you’d get the feeling that they were about the only games that mattered if you spend much time in the world of game studies. Games seem to be turning from a topic inspiration and into a fuel for academic advancement.

The thing that drove this home was a moment after the conference had ended. My co-presenter Gary and I were strolling around the Gas Lamp district in downtown Vancouver. We noticed a musty old game store across the street. For a moment, we talked about whether it was worth the effort to CROSS THE STREET to visit a game store. Then, I suppose, our collective guilt got the best of us and we decided to check it out.

Like those dusty old bookshop from the cinema, the ones where the hero finds some important tome stacked under sheaves of yellowing paper, this game store was a treasure trove. Full-sized arcade machines were jammed up next to racks of chose your adventure books and beanie babies. Behind the counter ran a full wall of shelves groaning under their load of classic board games.

The dreadlocked kid behind the counter held forth in the classic shopkeeper style about the store and it’s wealth of games. He swore up and down that the building’s four upper stories were crammed with more games. He illustrated what he meant by crammed by insisting that a flashlight and possibly even a spelunker’s rope were essential equipment in any excursion to exhume material from the archives.

His father, and maybe even his grandfather, had started the shop and pursued the dream of creating the best game store in the world. Even though the property was surely worth more as real estate than as a ludological curiosity shop, the kid made it clear that the game store would be there for the duration—they owned the building.

I asked about a copy of “Paranoia.” He said they were sold out of the original game but produced a box filled with expansion modules. I asked about “Ace of Aces,” a WWI aerial combat game I remember with fondness and have long since lost track of. He lit up again and talked about what a fantastic game it was—even though it was surely in and out of production 15 years before he was even born. Sadly, he informed me that they had recently sold the last copy—well, at least the last copy that he could locate. There might be more in the archives.

Gary and I spent a long time in that store. Chatting about old games with the clerk, marveling at the collection, estimating how much booty we could conceivably port back to Denver.

As we left I promised, “I’ll be back. Don’t know when. But I’ll be back!”

Then it hit me. This store was not more than 5 blocks from where the convention had taken place. But it took a random walk to uncover it. Why? This store should have been a site for conference gathering—or at least listed in the conference program. Rather than hanging almost invisible on the periphery, it should have been a highlight of conference.

Jesper delivered an address at the first DiGRA conference titled “Looking for a Heart of Gameness.” Well, I can tell you, a big part of it is in that game store in Vancouver—not in journals, conferences and the Web.

Sometimes I think we just aren’t looking hard enough.