[game_edu] Where to post academic job offers?

[Ian Bogost]

On Mar 20, 2008, at 9:38 PM, Erin Hoffman wrote:


> But my one hesitation in entering academia at any kind of full time  

> level is that I would have to stop being a professional designer,  

> and I am leery of that both for my own mercenary interests and for  

> the sake of the testing of my design skills. I think academia would  

> indeed be very positive for a designer on a short term, but I would  

> worry for myself about eventually stagnating if my games were not  

> being played by a wide audience (a gaming audience that, as every  

> designer experiences, is implacably, uniquely, and intensely  

> critical).


There are a number of full-time, tenure-track and tenured academic  
faculty who also manage to get games made and played by large  
audiences as well. I've been able to do it, I think Tracy Fullerton  
has been able to do it, and I think what Brenda's talking about is the  
same thing too. There are of course more who serve in adjunct  
positions, and many more academics who also make experimental or  
research games. But I just wanted to point out that it is possible to  
be both a real academic and a real commercial game designer.

In many fields, but especially in engineering fields, it is quite  
common for university professors to have active commercial  
professional lives, not just consulting but also business ownership or  
directorships. I think this is actually a pretty viable thing to do as  
a scholar in games too. For my part anyway, I find that my research  
and my games end up entering a dialogue with one another that they  
would never achieve unless I were doing both simultaneously. But it's  
not necessarily easy, and I won't pretend to have mastered the dance.

Ian Bogost
Georgia Tech / Persuasive Games