Jason also started working with the Learning Games Initiative (LGI) early on at the University of Arizona as a graduate student, much like Jennifer deWinter and Ryan Moeller; their early experiences working with Aristotle's Assassins were similar to Jason's, who was invited to join the project when someone discovered that he knew Greek. [Transcript available here.]

Unlike some other LGI members who described their research to me as drawing on theories such as object-oriented ontology, Jason (a rhetorician and Burke scholar) objected to the prevalence of game studies' borrowing terms from other disciplines. "You need to propose some terms that are unique to games," he articulated. [Transcript available here.]

When I asked Jason which scholars he admires or follows, he offered up several LGI members with whom he had worked in the past, including Marc Ouellette, his co-editor on the edited collection The Game Culture Reader. "I guess I'm attracted to people who are asking unpopular questions or questions that aren’t obvious," Jason stated. [Transcript available here.]

Jason continued with his discussion of how game scholars come from different disciplinary homes by describing how collaboration is key in game studies work. While it's much easier to work by yourself, he noted, game studies wears its collaboration like a badge of honor because "you did something hard." [Transcript available here.]

As someone who has written about surveillance and identity in social networks, I was intrigued by Jason's feelings toward social media. When I asked him about the implications of the intersections of social media and games, he described how he and Marc sometimes played through games together via social media, but that beyond that, Jason couldn't understand why someone would put themselves out there at the mercy of "the withering trolls of the Internet." [Transcript available here.]

 

 

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