Produced by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Education Committee, the 2nd Annual Academic Summit will take place March 4-5, 2003 at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose, CA. The goal of the IGDA Academic Summit is to foster the growth and development of the video game industry by supporting new research projects, taking a more critical look at the study of games and by ensuring graduates, who have studied video game development, come to the game industry with a solid foundation of knowledge.

The list of industry and academic speakers includes:

Espen Aarseth - University of Bergen
Ernest Adams - game consultant
Doug Church - Eidos Interactive
Jason Della Rocca - IGDA
Robert Huebner - Nihilistic Software
Robin Hunicke - Northwestern University
Gerard Jones - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Brenda Laurel - Art Center College of Design
Frans Mäyrä - Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere
Ken Perlin - NYU Media Research Laboratory
Warren Spector - Ion Storm
Eric Zimmerman - gameLab

Aristotle was trying to figure out the emotional realism when making his typology of emotions.

Aristotle's List of Emotions

Andrew Rilstone is a writer, games inventor and part time-genius. This is his comment to the movie Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: What the heck does Peter Jackson think he is playing at?

What I like about book roleplaying games like Call Of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and Unknown Armies is the way they handle rules of psychology. In other games they are either left out or static beliefs, like the feelings shown in any episode of Star Trek. In order to develop better book roleplaying games we do not need realism of how to kill through all sorts of means. These rules are actually easier to handle without sophisticated statistics for all kinds of weapons and armor. Instead we ought to focus on how emotions and social interactions function as dramatic consequence and of course how to represent this in a game session. The key to succesful book roleplaying games is believable psychology made through emotional realism.

Greg Costikyan just started a blog dealing with games, game design, and game culture.
It's at:

http:www.costik.com/weblog

He hopes to be posting a fairly extensive essay every week or so, dealing with one or another of his bete noires, some recent development in the field, a particular game, or something of the kind.

He's starting the blog mainly because he rarely finds this kind of material on the Web; consumer-oriented sites offer mainly reviews, while professional sites offer mainly how-to material. He wants deeper analysis, and since he doesn't often find it, he might as well write it himself.

Lots of theory, no analyses. That's how computer game studies are developing at the moment. We need to make analyses in order to justify the theories made - or maybe find out whether or not they are true. Otherwise we are just making a lot of statements without any substance.

By way of Frasca: There Are No Words (Yet): The Desperately Incomplete Language of Gaming by Matthew Sakey.
We sure are in need of a critical vocabulary for computer game studies.

Bryan-Mitchell Young writes:
"Think about the notion of a documentary videogame. not a documentary about a videogame, but a videogame that is a documentary. Such a thing doesn't seem possible does it? Think about the implications of that. There can never be the equivelent of a Blair Witch Project for videogames. Think about that for the implications on a reality versus fantasy debate."

I'm not sure this statement is true, because the computer as medium is much more than just gaming. It's the world wide web and databases, desk top publishing and e-mails as well. A combination of these types of computer media would in fact make the difference between fantasy and reality blurred like in the Blair Witch Project.