The Crossroads of Information, Interaction, Meaningfulness, and Fun: An Opening Thought and Remarks

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2020 Game Studies Preconference, “The Crossroads of Information, Interaction, Meaningfulness, and Fun.” I am Shane Tilton, the vice-chair elect for the Game Studies Interest Division. I am coming to you live from Ada, OH, and the campus of Ohio Northern University, where I am an associate professor of multimedia journalism. I was the planner for this session, and I will be serving as the chair for this event.

There’s a little bit of housekeeping to do before starting today’s scholarly work. First, we need to thank Justin Danowski, William Eichhorn, and the rest of the National Office of the National Communication Association for their logistical support as we needed to shift from in-person in Indianapolis to the virtual realm that we find ourselves in today. This shift required tons of emails being sent between us and arranging for access to the Zoom room where we are today. Thanks to their hard work, the presentations from today’s session will be available on the NCA Convention Central website at the end of the day and remain there till the end of the month.  

It is essential to acknowledge the work of the Executive Committee of the Division. Steph Orme and Emory Daniel both provided the necessary support to continue this preconference moving forward. It is their deep passion for our Division that motivates me to craft sessions like this that can support the junior scholars in our Division. Without their effort, this preconference would not exist.

I also want to thank the Ohio Northern University School of Social Sciences and Human Interactions, their Institute of Civics and Public Policy, Geek Therapeutics, the Higher Education Video Games Association, & Take This for their logistical and technical support for this monumental task of running an all-day session. It can not be overstated how much support is needed to run an event like this. They all have my admiration for their ability to help at a moment’s notice.

The last bit of housekeeping is how we will keep this event organized via social media. If you post anything on Facebook, Twitter, WooFoo, Instagram, or MySpace, please use the hashtag #NCAGS2020Pre as a means to show off to the rest of the world the work that is happening here.

Today, friends, is an important anniversary for the Division. It was exactly five years ago today in the Rio Conference Center’s Miranda One ballroom in Las Vegas, NV, that the Game Studies Interest Division had our grand premiere. The theme for that conference was “Embracing Opportunities,” and we did just that. Andrew Weaver and Jaime Banks put together this showcase of scholarship that allowed the Division to introduce itself to the Association at large. The theme of that preconference was “Games as / with / through Communication.” Nick Bowman was able to work with the wide variety of techniques that were embedded in that session to create a comprehensive representation that would act as the foundation for future research in our Division. I hope that today’s session provides as much inspiration for the members as that one did five years ago for those lucky enough to be in attendance. 

During this first groundbreaking session, game scholars in our Association could come together and address the vital issues that drive our research. We were no longer a patchwork collection of misfits separated by the various silos within the Association. Rather, the Game Studies Interest Division was finally the banner that united us together. For some of us, that meant making this division a new home in the Association. For others, a deeper connection to the root of communication scholarship. For me, it meant sharing this passion with my friends in the Association.  

Today’s theme of “The Crossroads of Information, Interaction, Meaningfulness, and Fun” is a reflection of that original preconference that began the work of the Division and a nod to the city that was supposed to host today’s session. Indianapolis is the Crossroads of America. Many of the highways and byways that connect the various cities of the United States run through that critical American metropolis. The metaphor of that city provides by acting as a virtual home for this conference seems appropriate. The scholarship coming from today’s session will expand the Division’s focus while keeping us on the theoretical and praxis roads of scholarship familiar to the Association. 

During today’s first morning session, the panelists will address the problematics related to representation and accessibility within the realm of gaming. In that session, scholars engage with several of the diversity matters central to the Association as a whole and best suited for examination by our Division. Game spaces become a reasonable proxy for addressing issues surrounding disabilities, gender, and sexuality when academics in the field of communication do the hard work of applying thoughtful scholarship and keen methodological practices toward the research questions and hypotheses that have become more exposed in our discipline over the recent years. I believe that the presentations in that session meet this stated standard.

The last of the morning sessions will shift to how gameplay enhances social discourses through a rigorous examination of the ideological spectrum found in most popular games and gamers that play them. These scholars attempt to decouple the game’s mechanics from the underlying story that drives most of the gameplay people experience when enjoying a game. One of my academic passions connected to our Division is addressed in this session. I believe that this Division can do more to explore how the mechanics of gameplay can be applied toward improving communication pedagogy. In this second session, Joe Lasley’s work explores this crucial area that impacts all that have the pleasure of teaching in higher learning institutions.

I will be talking more about our Keynote speaker before her talk. Let me simply say now that I am beyond pleased that Dr. Rachel Kowert agreed to provide a conversation on how the pandemic and recovery from COVID-19 will impact game studies for the near future. Dr. Kowert’s scholarship in this area will be useful for those who attempt to reorient their research during the upcoming year.  

We will conclude the day with the panelists in the last session explaining how to read gamespaces as a text for critical examination and examine those spaces as a place that has meaning for those playing in these socially constructed sites. The nature of this work moves the scholarship within the Division toward a more critical/cultural focus. The beautiful aspect of our Division is our ability to support various epistemological positions and still maintain what makes us game scholars. 

The purpose of this preconference is to do more than just give a platform to our various scholars or even to kick off the scholarship of our Division for the conference. Instead, this time should allow us to pause and determine what we should consider the critical areas of examination for our Division. I will be serving as the program planner for the 2021 annual conference. The plan is to meet in person in Seattle from the 18th to the 21st of November. The theme for next year’s conference is “Renewal and Transformation.” It is this spirit that I want to share my vision for the research for the upcoming year. 

One of the areas we need to consider is the number of slots we will have for 2021. We are scheduled for six slots. One of those slots will be the Business Meeting. This limitation means I will have five spaces to work with to highlight the excellent scholarship within our Division. For other divisions that I led in the past, I would co-sponsor to maximize our contributions to the Association. This practice makes more sense now. I know Communication and the Future, Human Communication and Technology, Mass Communication, and the Visual Communication divisions would be logically reasonable to work with given some methodological and thematic commonalities among our divisions. Therefore, scholarship that can bridge two or more of these divisions would be appreciated. It would provide me with the flexibility to find the best place for your research.

Another consideration that would be helpful for the Division’s development is a diverse group of reviewers examining the scholarship before next year’s conference. The best means of understanding the work being produced by the Division is to be actively engaged in critically examining other scholars’ work. Volunteering to be a reviewer ensures that the best scholarship finds its way in front of our membership. Writing papers and presentations without performing this crucial step has the same value as speaking all the time without actively listening. One gets stuck inside their own mind without considering others.

It is also fair to delve into how we share our scholarship with the Association and the general public. When I contemplate submitting my research to a communication association, it must be grounded in how I define the discipline of communication. My understanding of communication is that it is a scholarly discipline that promotes the careful examination of how individuals and communities exchange meaningful information and culturally relevant interactions to extend socially significant work. Those exchanges of meaningful information and culturally relevant interactions tend to be an after-thought once we return to the academic halls that we are more familiar with. I see that my colleagues’ rich work at these events be largely forgotten when we leave the conference site. We must explore ways to make our research more accessible beyond the traditional format of standing or sitting in front of a screen and delivering prepared remarks about the work. Those scholars that break this traditional mold in a meaningful way will find success in our Division.

My final wish is more thematic in nature. I beg my fellow Division members to look at the communication practices that relate to our Division in three different arenas of study that I feel are underrepresented at both the conference level and the publication level. My first presentation for this Division was a case study on how social deception games could be used to teach communication skills. I applaud those that examine how gameplay can enhance communication education. The second area that I feel fits our Division that we do not have enough focus on is traditional and analog gaming and the information and interaction during gameplay. I will admit that social gatherings around these types of games have been frowned upon due to the pandemic. However, using the board game Pandemic during an actual pandemic in communication scholarship seems reasonable to me. The last of these is more meta in nature but I would enjoy research on how academics play. The 2018 annual conference in Salt Lake City was a beginning point for this conversation. There were multiple sessions about the connection between the two, but nothing further for that point. I would ask my fellow Division members to consider what is underrepresented and novel in our Division as a challenge to present scholarship in those areas.

To conclude, I am reminded of the words spoken by one of my mentors, Raymond Puchot, when considered the role of the chair at a session of this nature. He would say that the chair’s role is to:

“be able to cheer the work of the scholars, provide a clear summary of the individual papers & the connective elements between the various presentations, focus on the questions left unanswered by the research, and challenge the scholars to go beyond what was stated in the written and spoken word related to their given research.”

In the audience now and watching this session later, my request for you is to take the wisdom of Professor Puchot and reach out to these talented scholars with a critical eye on the work they are doing. The only way we advance as a Division is by providing the necessary support to our members. Senior researchers should help our graduate students by giving their time and knowledge in order to make the work the younger scholars are doing better. Junior scholars should remember the help that they received and try to pass it forward when they can. 

It is on that note that I want to welcome you once again to the 2020 Game Studies Preconference and remind you that the hashtag for this preconference is #NCAGS2020Pre.

I will be around in the Zoom chat if you need any help. Otherwise, we will take a short break and start our first session at 9:30.