A few weeks back there was some 𝓭𝓲𝓼𝓬𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓮 about games research on bluesky. One of the more specific points being made was that it was costly or difficult to engage with academics or to publish and participate in academic spaces. It's very possible I've misunderstood what was meant by this, but it made me think that this point comes up a lot and I think it creates some misconceptions around what academia is, why academic systems work the way they do, and how you can participate in them. This is a short post about other ways of thinking about engaging with academia, based on what you want to get out of it (and a little bit about where some possible misunderstandings come from).

Before we dive in, for those who don't know, my experience is from the sciences here - different disciplines operate differently, so a few of my generalisations should be understood as just that. However most of the critiques I saw came from people targeting either scientific spaces or hybrid technical/design spaces, rather than say, a straight humanities conference, so I think while they're imperfect generalisations for academia as a whole, they do actually hold pretty well for a lot of spaces game designers are interested in engaging with.

What Does Sharing An Idea Cost?

It's not exactly a secret that academia involves a lot of voluntary labour, and a lot of excruciating costs. This is pretty accurate! We do a lot of work that ostensibly¹ is 'voluntary' and unpaid, and there are also costs associated with things that don't make sense, like paying a fee to get your work published somewhere. If you publish a paper at a conference, for example, you will usually need to pay a registration fee to attend and present the work, and without that the paper won't be published. Journals do not usually (usually, in my experience, some do) charge you to publish a paper, but may charge for open access, or additional pages over a limit.

The reason the system can sustain itself with charges like this is that universities are getting tangible things from paying these costs to publish their work. In the UK, the quality of a university's research directly affects funding given out by national research agencies every year, and it has secondary impacts on the league tables students use to decide where to study. This has the knock-on effect of making it good for academics, because good research leads to promotions or job offers, affects tenure track applications in the US, and more (of course academics also write papers for lots of other more personal and positive reasons). This is not a financial system aimed at independent researchers. If a student asked you whether it was worth them saving up for a GDC All-Access pass each year, you would (I hope) tell them no. GDC only (barely) makes financial sense if your employer is paying for you to attend. It's a similar premise here.

We can argue about whether publishing should work this way, and whether it makes sense to pay $3000 to make a journal paper open access² but those questions are separate, in my opinion, to the question of why universities continue to engage with the system despite these costs. They do it because they get stuff from it, but that stuff is not desirable for most other people. So if we want to engage with academia, doing it this way is like buying a new iPhone in order to get a pair of earphones - it's certainly a way to get earphones, but if you're not looking for a new mobile phone you're paying a hundred times more than you need to.

What Do You Want

So if independent researchers and industry experts and designers don't care about league tables or research rankings, then why do they want to engage with academic spaces in the first place? If we try and understand that, maybe we can think of other ways we can achieve this without engaging with academia's most obvious, but most expensive, routes. Obviously I can't say exactly what people want from academia (I barely know what I want from it) but I suspect the following few things cover at least a chunk of cases:

Sharing your work with a new community. As much as we joke about academics, they're an interesting group of people with their own ways of working, thinking and communicating, and it can be really useful to get their opinion on ideas or projects. The pressures on us in our job make some things harder, but other things easier, and so we have lots of unusual and interesting knowledge that we can offer, or perspectives that might be more rare in industry or art spaces. Finding communication channels that academics share allows you to get insights into how your work fits into the wider research context, connections to work in other fields you might not be aware of, or suggestions from a different audience.

Recognition. One of the subtler or more sheepishly-made points I saw pop up sometimes in the discourse recently was the idea that academics don't cite work outside of papers - I could write a much longer blog about this idea alone, but the short version is that I think they absolutely do cite game designers (I know I do), and also that game designers are, equally, very guilty of not citing academics too³. If you do believe this though, or even if you just acknowledge that people often don't read outside of their own communities, you might see writing papers as a way to get cited for ideas that you're proud of, or things that you think might leave a mark on the space. I think we can be a bit weird about this sometimes - there's nothing wrong with wanting to be recognised for an idea or a bit of work! It's totally expected.

Prestige and Respect. We might not want to say it out loud, but sometimes we want to do things just because there's some prestige, mystique or aura involved in it. Speaking at GDC, having Edge review your game, winning a BAFTA - these are all things that have a special feel to them, and I think certain areas of academia are the same. Publishing an academic paper means entering your work, your ideas, into a permanent scientific record, and feeling like you're part of a long-standing tradition of knowledge sharing. Having work peer-reviewed or published in places of record can also add a sense of weight to things you've written - it can feel more 'real' to some people, and have a stronger sense of authority.

Bridge-Building. I've spent the last decade-plus trying to do all of this communication in reverse: trying to find spaces in game development communities to talk about research. The reason I do this is because I think there's a lot of interesting overlap and cool connections to be made, and that we can't expect two completely separate communities to magically start talking each others' language and reading each others' work. I think some game developers have the same passions and want to contribute their ideas, perspectives and experience to research, to foster tighter collaboration, find new common interests, and broaden everyone's horizons. This is a generous and community-minded act, and it is hard to do. I've encountered a lot of barriers and resistance trying to go the other way - it's natural and understandable. We just have to be careful it doesn't lead us to write off entire communities.

Publish or...

As I say, I'm sure there's many more reasons people might want to engage with academic spaces, but these are some that I see as common ones, and also ones that I see in academics trying to go in the other direction. So if I'm a game developer, and I want to engage with academics for whatever reason - sharing an idea, finding new collaborators, whatever - what can I do instead?

Let Us Come To You (Or Vice Versa). It used to be common (maybe less so now) to do a 'tour' of universities giving little seminar talks to groups. You'd take a train for an hour somewhere in England and rock up to some university you'd never seen before, give a 30 minute talk about the last paper you published, and then have lunch with the research group. A few times I've been invited to do this at games studios, and it's always been an absolute treat. One way to build more connections with academics is to invite them to speak to you and your colleagues, and hopefully get an invite to come and do the same in return. It's very common to give these talks online now, so it makes it easier than ever to reach out across the world and find interesting people willing to talk to you. Occasionally these invites toe the line between 'free labour' and 'meeting friends' - only you know where that line is drawn for you, but I do think that volunteering time to build connections and communities is a valuable thing, if it's framed right.

Ask For Publishing Advice. There are many ways you can write and publish papers either without paying a fee or with a much reduced fee, and the best way to find out about these is by asking academics for advice. For example, there is no cost for publishing in the IEEE Transactions on Games, an online journal. It does cost to make the paper open access, however you are free to publish preprints of these articles elsewhere, meaning you can make the text freely available to anyone. ACM Games I believe operates on a similar principle. The EXAG Workshop allows for remote presentation, which lets you avoid turning up in person to the conference (AIIDE) to present. Conferences increasingly have industry tracks with different expectations and requirements, specifically to encourage you to submit to them. The bottom line is that I think there are a lot of ways to publish in academic, citable, peer-reviewed formats with zero cost to you.

Find (Or Make) Hybrid Spaces. One of the reasons the Roguelike Celebration is probably the best games event on the planet is because it has speakers from a lot of different communities. You can see a talk about gardening, then a talk about old books, then a talk about sudoku design, and a talk about software architecture, and there's a rich series of connections between each one but there is no 'home' community for the conference: it is its own space. This is also what I tried to do with PROCJAM back in the 2010s. These hybrid communities are going to attract the exact sort of person who is interested in bridging gaps, which is exactly the kind of person you want to find. The point here is that spaces to find 'academics' are not always academic spaces. If this is something that matters to you, I think we desperately need more spaces and communities and events like this, so why not help us build these bridges by making a space for this locally or online!

Publish Elsewhere. Despite my best efforts, academics are still using the internet. If you post online, we will sometimes see it! You absolutely should write about your ideas or make short videos. You can even treat them like little conference talks - make some slides, slap the 'record presentation' button in Powerpoint and throw it up on YT. I've tried to do this with my conference talks, because I think it's a lot easier to digest ideas this way than through the papers. But really the most basic advice is: you don't need to do anything special to engage with academics, the important thing is to get your ideas out, and most importantly, get them out in places that are public, easy to access, and free. Follow more academics, get to know them, get to know where they share their work too. We've lost a lot of shared social spaces in the past decade, and rebuilding is slow.

Work Directly With Academics. At King's College London we have a number of ways that developers can take on projects with us, some requiring very little work at all. For example, our KEP program lets you set a problem for undergraduates to take on as their final year project. You attend a couple of supervision sessions at the start and the end. This is a great way to try out an idea with us, and can lead to publications. We can also co-sponsor PhDs, apply for impact funding together, write grants together and lots more. These projects don't have to take up a lot of your time, they can be more or less involved as you want, and they can let you explore an idea you have or extend something you've built into new space.

Strong Accept

I found the academic discourse depressing. A lot of generalisations got thrown around, followed by some weak hedging of bets, and some bizarre stereotypes that were old and inaccurate fifteen years ago when I heard them for the first time. I don't think this stuff is helpful. Academia has its problems, but - like game development - it's also a sector that is very poorly understood by those outside of it. The discourse also erases the fact that most of the young game designers people celebrate today are also students, and many talented early career academics are also making games. What good does this discourse do them and what message does it send? What actually matters is that people find ways to share ideas, work on projects, repurpose resources and support one another regardless of who pays their salary or what job title they have.

I think it's also worth acknowledging that academia is a space that has its own interests, expectations and practices. Some of them might be annoying or seem trivial, like our reliance on a slightly formal way of writing (which I still bump up against). But others are much more reasonable and important, in my opinion. A lot of writing I see about game design is what we'd call autoethnographic work, or practitioner accounts of how someone has worked to solve a problem - however they're often presented or internalised as if they were much bigger theories, or wide-reaching studies. Game designers uncover a lot of interesting ideas as they work, and this knowledge is often intrinsically valuable. But academics often need to assess such ideas differently in order to critically evaluate how true or applicable they are, and one person's account or an idea based on a few game designs isn't enough. So while it's easy to joke and complain about the ways academia appears frivolous, it's also worth remembering that we have different standards to meet in terms of rigour, replicability and confidence of our work. This is not a criticism of the work game designers do, but it is worth mentioning as I rarely see it come up in discussions about the 'gap' between academia and industry.

But I'm taking it as a good sign that people are wanting to engage with academia, even if they personally had confusing or bad experiences in doing it. So I hope some of this helps provide different directions for people to explore, like free publishing routes, different communities to join, or ways to kick off projects. I'm always happy to talk to people about these things, and in particular if you'd like to do some work with myself or my colleagues at King's, please get in touch.

Footnotes

1. Sometimes I think this folk understanding of academia overreaches a bit. For example, the work of organising a conference is 'unpaid' in the most literal sense, but also I am paid by my university to engage in and support the international research community, doing things like... organising conferences. Reviewing work by peers is one of the fundamental pillars of academia, and generally I think it's fine to see this as part of our job that doesn't require extra pay. The real issues with voluntary academic labour are that 1) external companies are profiting off that free labour (which isn't always true but definitely is a lot of the time) and 2) that academics are generally overworked, and so that extra labour appears to be outside of our working hours. Which it generally is, but the issue doesn't stem from the fact I'm not paid for it. Arguably, even if I were paid for it, that would not really make crushing overwork better. We should do things like peer review as part of maintaining our shared community, but also we should have reasonable workloads and stable incomes that allow us to do this without hurting ourselves.

2. Another misconception here is that a lot of journals and conferences allow authors to publish versions of papers on their personal sites for free, especially 'preprint' versions, and in many cases academics just put versions online anyway. My current employer has a (somewhat strange) Open Access policy which says that we must upload versions of our papers regardless of Open Access costs or regulations, and they will defend themselves legally if this gets challenged by a publisher. So advertised costs do not always parallel what is actually going on behind the scenes.

3. I don't think there's any malice in it, it's just the world is big, information is harder and harder to find and digest, and that's why you have entire conferences dedicated to specific sub-sub-subfields, because as human knowledge expands we can afford to have people drill down even further into small parts, which is great but also leaves them a bit blinkered to adjacent things. In academia it can sometimes feel like a snub, but at the same time it's also something we recognise as a feature of research communities: for example, I helped run a computational finance course this year and I kept finding overlaps with my own research work in procedural generation. I could never have anticipated this! Running events and workshops to foster interdisciplinary collaboration is an intentional thing we do to try and encourage these discoveries.