Scholarship and Games
Torril Mortensen assesses Justin Hall's recent review of GameStudies. Mortensen thinks that Hall's complaint is that GameStudies is too vague and too academic, and observes that "What he doesn't see is that there is a definition of what computer-games are not, what does not work."I believe Hall's central concern lies elsewhere: Hall questions whether the scholarship behind GameStudies is sound, whether the scholars know the games as well as they ought. When he writes, for example, that one of the authors overlook " two games [that] are a part of an electronic entertainment canon," he's complaining of an absence of scholarship, not an excess of pedantry.