Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 4

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Game Studies as Field, Formation, and Geography: A Conversation [1]

Featuring:

Judd Ethan Ruggill, Arizona State University

Tobias Conradi, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig

Steven Conway, Swinburne University of Technology

Ken S. McAllister, University of Arizona

Rolf F. Nohr, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig

Theo Röhle, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig

This conversation began as a salon that was convened in February 2014, just after the 35th annual conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA). The theme for the salon was localism, with a principal focus on how the field of game studies is arrayed across countries, institutions, and time. The participants spanned the experiential spectrum from post doctoral researcher to dean, and represented three of the most developed regions in game studies and the industry it analyzes: Europe (Germany), Australia, and the US. The questions were prepared in advance by Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill, who moderated as well as participated in the salon.

The dialogue continued electronically after the salon concluded, with the participants subsequently prompting each other, expanding upon ideas only briefly mentioned during the salon (or even elided), and responding to questions formulated by Reconstruction's Alan Clinton. As a result, the conversation presented here represents a hybrid of sorts, a combination of oral and written interactions and reactions that in part embodies how ideas and relationships develop and change over the course of a scholarly exchange.

More importantly, the conversation highlights some of the challenges game studies faces as it goes global and becomes a structural part of many institutions: obvious differences in language, intellectual tradition, institutional orientation, and more. These are the challenges of any field, of course, but they are particularly salient in game studies due to its newness and the epistemological diversity of its practitioners. Scholars from almost every perspective imaginable are now studying games, intrigued by what the medium has to say about how human beings think, learn, and interact with the help of computers. This breadth, coupled with the field's incipience and simultaneous vivacious development, make for an acute and compressed laboratory in which to observe how ways of seeing and doing appear and evolve in the information age.

As with any body, the growth of game studies has not been without its aches and pains. Indeed, some of these are on quite poignant display in this conversation. Whereas such intimate sharing might be inappropriate in a traditional scholarly essay, we hope it here helps illuminate the human element of knowledge production, the fact that game studies is as much about people as it is the ideas they imagine and refine. With that we now turn to the conversation.

*****

Please introduce yourself and your institutional and professional context.

Rolf Nohr (RN): I am Professor and Dean of Media Aesthetics and Media Culture at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (HBK), and head of several major game studies research projects. I am also co-founder of AG Games (www.ag-games.de), an interdisciplinary network for German game studies.

HBK is an arts university, which in Germany means it has a different perspective on academic life and work than other higher education institutions. The heart of HBK is fine arts, but the university has other options too (e.g., media studies, art history, industrial design, communication design, etc.). HBK offers bachelors, masters, doctoral, and habilitation degrees.[2] There are 1500 students at HBK, with 450 students in media studies. HBK is completely funded by the German government. We have media labs, but principally we use the labs of the design faculty for game studies work. Currently, I am advising nine game studies-related dissertations.

Tobias Conradi (TC): I am a postdoctoral researcher at HBK and I am working on a project that deals with the emergence of business games in Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s. The project is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), a German-based research foundation. To add to Rolf's description of HBK, what is special about the media studies program is that students do both critical and practical work. They take coursework in mathematics, informatics, programming, and the like in addition to theory and criticism. These technical courses are taken at a separate institution and in conjunction with the HBK coursework.

Theo Röhle (TR): I am a postdoctoral researcher at HBK too, and I also work on the business game project. I only recently joined the group; before that I was at Universität Paderborn, which is a more traditional university and home to one of the larger media studies programs in Germany. Game studies in Paderborn has a reputation for its production focus, both in terms of economic perspectives and in terms of actual game development, which is done by teams of students in a game lab. Paderborn has succeeded in acquiring external funding for several development projects (e.g., a serious game commissioned by the Bundeszentrale für politsche Bildung), but I would argue that HBK's program has a stronger technical focus.

Steven Conway (SC): I am Lecturer and Convener of Games and Interactivity at Swinburne University of Technology. We offer a bachelor of arts and a double bachelor's in arts and science. As with HBK, the students in the second degree get both technical and critical training, including programming and aesthetics. Swinburne is a comprehensive university (BA, MA, PhD) and has around 20,000 students. The Games and Interactivity program has 90 students, with many more taking the subject as electives. Swinburne is subsidized by the Australian government—the amount is based on research output and domestic intake of students—but the university also receives tuition fees from the students. Swinburne has a trade school—known in Australia as a Technical and Further Education (TAFE) school—which can feed students into the broader university curriculum after a year or two of technical training (e.g., automotive, HVAC, etc.).

Ken McAllister (KM): I am a Professor of English, Director of the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English program (RCTE), and Planning Director of the School of Information at the University of Arizona (UA). UA is a comprehensive (BA, BS, MA, MS, MFA, PhD), land/space grant, and research-intensive state-funded institution with 40,000 students. The graduate program I direct has 53 doctoral students and 2 MA students, and is ranked among the top five programs in the country. Currently, I am chairing 7 dissertations and serving on six others as a committee member; most of these are related to games and new media in some way. With Judd, I co-direct the Learning Games Initiative (LGI) and the LGI Research Archive (LGIRA). LGI is a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.

Judd Ruggill (JR): I am an Associate Professor of Communication at Arizona State University (ASU), the largest public university in the US. The Communication program has roughly 300 undergraduate majors (BA/BS), 60 graduate students (MA), and is housed in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences of ASU's dedicated interdisciplinary college, the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Both the undergraduate and graduate Communication degrees offer broad training in the field of communication, with coursework in interpersonal, organizational, public, and mediated communication. The graduate degree is further defined by an emphasis on advocacy in theory and practice.

In addition to my duties in Communication, I also serve on the graduate faculty of the university's Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Department of English, and am an affiliated faculty member of the Family Communication Consortium and the New College's Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Literature certificate.

How would you characterize the field of game studies in your country/region? Other places about which you are knowledgeable? Consider the big picture: themes, institutional practices, hiring practices, and so forth.

SC: As far as what game studies looks like in Australia based on my limited experience—and here I mean the formal "Game Studies" area—it is quite broad, but I would argue it retains a pronounced cultural studies flavor. Outside of explicit game studies, there are quite a few labs that specialize in practical outcomes for designing games. Certain Australian game courses have a prominent practice-based approach, combining subjects on human-computer interaction, art, computer science, and engineering, such as Swinburne's double degree that provides both a Bachelor of Computer Science and Art. Throughout the degree, we have practical outcomes, from board games to augmented-reality and 3D model portfolios. The capstone project brings together 8-10 person teams to produce a full-fledged digital game. I know this is also broadly true of places like RMIT University and the University of New South Wales, to name but two.

As an expat—I am originally from England—it seems to me that Australia has a strong working-class mentality and anxiety about privilege, and so in the country's game studies work there is a pronounced focus on understanding media and culture from the ground upwards.

As I mentioned, I lived, worked and studied in England before coming to Australia, so I think I have a fairly good sense of game studies there as well. The British flavor of game studies is again quite heavily influenced by cultural studies, but specifically Birmingham cultural studies. This translates into a strong presence of fan studies and other types of reception approaches. It is very much a social constructivist epistemology. In Australia, it seems as if there is a much stronger emphasis on design than in Britain, though UK schools such as Falmouth University and the University of Glasgow are changing that.

RN: Game studies in Germany is more or less a theoretical thing based in social science, media studies, and cultural studies. The field has been around for about fifteen years. Eleven years ago, Britta Neitzel and I founded an interdisciplinary working group on games. During the first ten years of game studies in Germany, there was no home for the field, not even in media studies. Nobody was interested in what was essentially a marginal topic. Now, though, the idea of analyzing games is being adopted by a variety of individual disciplines. As a result, the interdisciplinarity that once characterized the field is disappearing; game studies is being siloed, and thus we are losing the epistemological history of the field. Perhaps some day it will reappear.

In Germany, there are programs in which people study design, but not as a practice. It is not called game design; in fact, to study games in Germany almost always means to study them in an extant disciplinary context (e.g., media studies, design, etc.). The reason why game studies is not a discrete field is because there is no real and established national game industry. There are lots of independent designers, but no big companies. Thus, there is no real corporate pipeline to partner with and channel students through.

Again, game studies is an integrated part of all manner of programs and fields, but it is not a freestanding entity with a core. It is more or less a label for things you can do in your own discipline. At the beginning of game studies in Germany, we tried hard to partner with game companies. There was an emerging industry back then. We tried to create academic tracks, partnerships, and so forth. Things dissolved when it came time to talk about money; the companies were not particularly interested in ponying up the cash to help the universities develop programs. So, game studies diffused into the university and the game industry imploded because—among other reasons—there were no university-trained workers to staff it. Of course, there are a lot of people in Germany who say that there is no crisis in the game industry, that independent game development is doing well. But this is at the small scale. Large scale operations are virtually non-existent. The industry is not particularly ambitious; it is thriving, but in modest ways.

This seems to me also to be part of a specific dynamic which is based in the idea of "the institution." In an epistemological sense, "interdisciplinarity" seems to mean that certain ways of thinking are woven together, driven by pure interest (which will sometimes produces "loose ends"). But in an institutional sense, "interdisciplinarity" means the cooperation between two separated institutionalized disciplines, theories, or schools with the inherent ambition to build a new, distinct discipline/theory/school. So, in an institutionalized context, everything that starts as an idea for collaborative work will have to fight against the dynamics of the institutional, which is exactly what happened to game studies. We tried to understand what we loved and to nobilititze something a whole culture did not exactly understand. We ended up giving away PhD degrees in "game studies," and are now fighting for tailored grants.

And just as a side note: the only strong (and worth mentioning) cooperation between the game industry and universities in Germany is the collaboration between Electronic Arts (EA) and the Cologne Game Lab. But as I see it, the pipeline between the Lab and EA is not working. The Lab is actually being excoriated by conservative forces for working too closely with the industry to perform truly critical game analysis. On the other side of the coin, the privately-funded Games Academy has not been able to establish a big, quality program over the years without cooperating with universities (and scholars from the field). It has also failed to build a pipeline to the (nonexistent) German game industry. Blue Byte, Crytek, and so on have more or less trained their employees in house rather than hire them from university game studies programs or the Game Academy. Which leads to the almost more sad story of the founding of an umbrella organization in Germany which was, in short, a ten year story of the battle between independent (local) game makers and big industry players (global) who wound up dominating the association.

TC: I would like to give an alternative reading of Rolf's point that game studies in Germany is not as interdisciplinary as it used to be. I think it is possible to trace this development back to the evolution of media studies in general. Back in the day, no one had actual degrees in media studies the way they do now, and so the people who came to do media studies did so because they were in other areas (mostly literature, sociology, or philosophy). As a result, early media studies were not only more interdisciplinary, they were also more broadly conceived theoretically. What we have today is increasingly homogeneous because we now have degrees in media studies. So, while there are undoubtedly advantages to the process of consolidating a field (e.g., having a clearer vision of the shape and desiderata of the objects of study, being able to get faculty positions and grants, etc.), there is also a downside to cutting away loose ends during this process. As game studies in Germany is a smaller part of media studies in general, the loss of interdisciplinarity in the latter has an effect on the interdisciplinarity in the former. So, maybe as long as the field is not narrowed down as an institutionalized "discipline" there is more potential for unexpected synergies. A field that is not yet a fully-fledged discipline is much more anarchic, and thereby offers the potential for unexpected combinations of thoughts, theories, and objects of study. As soon as an academic discipline becomes institutionalized, there will be discussions of a formalized curriculum, there will be canonical texts that you have to address when speaking about certain topics, and there will be somewhat obligatory master-theories that not only shape the way of thinking but also possibly bring about certain restrictions.

Stuart Hall advocated for "cultural studies" rather than "Cultural Studies," where the latter signifies the packaging of academic fields within a capitalist framework. I cannot help but think of where Hall speaks of the dangers of the institutionalization of fields. [3] Maybe game studies (as well as media studies in general) should be aware of the dangers that attend institutionalization and the "theoretical fluency" in consolidated fields of research.

JR: There may be a parallel between the German and US development of game studies in the sense that the field in both countries seems to be narrowing—or, to use Rolf's and Toby's phrase, cutting away loose ends—as it matures. Some of these distillations are philosophical in nature (e.g., the question of games as "art"), others epistemological (e.g., the infamous narratology/ludology "debate"), and still others political (e.g., arguing that studying games is legitimate rather than inconsequential or hobby research). And surely this trajectory of refinement is true of all fields—the more people learn, the better and more focused questions they are able to ask, as well as the more easily they can move on from ideas that may have run their course or have no particularly energizing future.

In the US, game studies has developed a substantial humanities and educational thrust, which probably explains the number and types of books and articles being published by academic presses. In the case of the humanities in particular, the development of game studies may be partly due to ontology and epistemology. Applied—read "practical"—research has not been a huge part of the humanities historically, at least not in the same way it has for other intellectual domains (e.g., the sciences, engineering). Perhaps game studies have flourished there precisely because of the lack of the need/tradition to produce monetizable results. Experimentation could happen because there is not the same tradition of grant seeking, technology development/transfer, institutional indirect cost recovery, and the like that shape how research is proposed and conducted in engineering, the hard sciences, and the social and behavioral sciences. Of course, this may not be the case for the humanities going forward, as publicly-funded institutions look for additional revenue sources to offset declines in state support. The humanities are likely going to have to develop more of an external funding model, a la the sciences.

Anyway, there is also an emphasis on game development in the US, especially in art and design programs. The US educational system is heavily driven by job placement—i.e., "Where are our students going to get jobs, and how are we going to make sure they get them?"—which can lead to the instrumentalization of education (i.e., a university degree as vocational training). In fact, the corporate and academic worlds have not only become deeply intertwined, but in many ways now mirror each other (in ways both good and bad). Think of the way university presidents are often hired, for example (via the same headhunting firms and processes that place CEOs).

At this point, though, there are still relatively few dedicated game studies programs in the US, at least in terms of programs that focus on game history, theory, and criticism. Mostly, game studies is headquartered in conceptually friendly academic units such as Communication, English, Media Studies, and so on.

This is not to say that games are not studied in other areas of the university (e.g., Computer Science, Education, Psychology, etc.). It is just that a lot of the institutional and intellectual activity surrounding games at the moment seems to be happening in the arts and humanities (though admittedly, these are the domains I follow most closely).

TR: I am still in the process of working my way through the game studies landscape, but in terms of a general comparison, it always strikes me that German media studies have such a clear focus on media history, including a very distinct approach to historiography. Judd mentioned earlier in passing that there are strong historical threads in US game studies. But the presentations at this year's SWPACA conference were not indicative of this historicity. And from what I have learned so far, there seems to be a tendency to reconstruct the history of (computer) games separately and retell it, much like a monumental history approach, as a linear succession of inventions.

From a German perspective, it seems vital to treat game history as part of a broader cultural history and to focus on the digressing aspects of this history. Michel Foucault's writings have been extremely influential here, resulting in historical accounts focusing on, as he writes "series, divisions, limits, differences of level, shifts, chronological specificities, particular forms of rehandling, possible types of relation." [4] So, underlying German approaches to media history is a general notion of entanglement rather than sequence. This does not preclude linear accounts of history per se, since Foucault himself has employed both genealogical and archaeological perspectives.[5] But it obliges scholars to look for non-obvious connections and relationships in the margins and to integrate these into the way game history is told.

I think there are parallels to a debate in the field of the history of computing, as it has developed in the US. In a seminal paper from 2005, Michael Mahoney made the case for abandoning the predominant "machine centered version of the history of computing" and instead telling the manifold "histories of computing(s)," including the way the practices of different communities—business, industry, government—were involved in the process. [6] Seen from this perspective, games also appear as an integral part of the negotiations that are constantly underway in society at large, rather than constituting a separate realm. Actually, it is strange that the focus on negotiated reading that game studies has inherited from cultural studies is so manifest in current analyses, but seems to fade into the background in the historical accounts. I think there is huge potential in advancing this focus on negotiations and distributed agency as a historical perspective, as well as in the context of German media theory (which is still haunted by the technological determinism promoted by some disciples of its founding father, Friedrich Kittler).

KM: That is interesting because I would say there is a nearly opposite trend in the US. Game studies in the US is largely production oriented, with increasing interest in professionally focused implementations of games (e.g., using games in health contexts). There certainly are game studies scholars and even groups of scholars who focus on the cultural, ideological, and pedagogical implications of games, gamers, networks, and so forth, but they do not dominate universities the way game development people do. That said, it seems clear that game studies in the US is becoming increasingly accepted as a field of inquiry, as is evidenced by the now commonplace treatment of games, game culture, and game production in newspapers, magazines, television, and other media. It occurs to me to wonder if this increasing acceptance is correlated to the increasing emphasis on production; I can imagine that many university administrators would have a much easier time justifying game studies programs that lead both to commercial jobs for students and to capturable IP for the institution rather than programs that turn out more academics who might find it difficult to get meaningful work.

Despite this trend however, I have noticed one compelling new development in game studies nationally and internationally that is actually about analysis and that is capturing many people's attention: the use of games (especially MMORPGs) to generate very large ("big data") sets. [7] This seems to be an exciting area of research that by its very nature—massive computing power shared over global networks—is ineluctably international and transdisciplinary.

Recalling Rolf's previous comments, I think that the US game industry is just as dependent on the university system as Germany, it is just that the US pipeline is much larger and more permeable than perhaps in Germany. Rolf mentioned that there really is not a thriving large-scale game industry in Germany, and so game design programs in universities there are modest. And in an editorial comment, Alan suggested this is strange since the US market is not dependent on universities yet does very well. But the truth is that the US market is very dependent on universities to produce workers with the many and varied skill sets requisite for the industry, from business, legal, and engineering fields, to creative work, human resources, and public relations. Nearly every major US game company is within 100 kilometers of a university—not by coincidence, but because game companies need the various kinds of people universities produce—whether or not they came out of "game studies" or "game design" program. Just as is the case in Germany, if the US did not have a large game industry, not only would there be far fewer game studies programs, there would also be many smaller conventional academic units—computer science, digital arts, intellectual property law, entertainment management, and so on. In other words, US game industry is powerfully anchored by the university system though this connection might only be apparent when a company such as EA creates a very specific college-corporation articulation (e.g., with the University of Southern California).

In the US, one of the main challenges is that the combination of age-old disciplinarity and diminishing public resources for higher education creates a highly toxic environment for transdisciplinary innovation—exactly what the game industry thrives upon. The "loose ends" each of us keeps alluding to are often just another way of saying "stuff people don't know how to monetize"—like the humanities, the fine arts, and hybrid programs that wildly cross intellectual and cultural domains. A loose end that someone can make "revenue positive" is woven back into the fabric of the university. A loose end that costs money—or is even just revenue neutral—is trimmed away. The institutional euphemism for this sort of hobbled thinking is "focused excellence," which basically translates as "we're only going to invest in fields we're already great at." When an institution adopts a management style like this, almost everything becomes a trimmable loose end.

Congratulations! You have just been given a cluster hire-four full-time tenure-track/permanent positions in game studies. Taking into consideration your institutional context, what would those hires be and why?

JR: Given the nature of my home program—game studies is only a small facet of a broad, interdisciplinary degree focused on human communication—I would look to hire the following people as a way to build general and broad capacity: 1) a designer/artist who is able to teach and also theorize design (there is a growing pool of people who can do this, especially now that study/build programs such as Georgia Tech's Digital Media PhD are becoming more common and more fully developed); 2) a technically-oriented developer specializing in the programming and interface creation side of game making; 3) a political economist or other industry studies person who could provide critical and empirical insight into the game industry; 4) a critical/cultural theorist to clarify how games relate to the human condition. Key for all the hires would be strong collaboration skills because a primary goal would be for the cluster to work together as a unit on large scale projects (e.g., grant seeking, university/community collaborations, public policy initiatives).

Also and ideally, one or more of the hires would have expertise in grant acquisition and forging corporate partnerships, both of which are highly prized by my university (as I mentioned earlier, part of what is happening to public universities generally in the US—and especially in the state of Arizona—is the need to offset dwindling state support with other revenue sources). It goes without saying, I think, that the hires would all have to be strong teachers too-—even at a research intensive university like mine, teaching excellence is essential.

KM: At the moment, we have what I suspect is a common situation at our institutions, namely that there are many people who think doing game studies is a good idea, but they are not sure how to go about starting such a program let alone maintaining and growing one. For that reason, I think my initial set of hires—like any optimistic administrator, I assume that this cluster is just the beginning of a much more ambitious effort to build a top-ranked program—would all be people who specialize in areas of research that would be likely to help promote the game studies program generally. Hiring a public relations researcher who studies the branding and marketing of computer games strikes me as one area with considerable potential for attracting both scholarly attention and corporate partnerships. Similarly, hiring colleagues with expertise in areas that are public facing—for example, running the LGI Research Archive and developing game studies-related web apps (including games and mobile apps)—would be key to keeping our program in the public eye. Finally, I would hire someone with a highly engaging pedagogical orientation who would be prepared to teach emerging new media/game theory and history in large undergraduate courses. With a foundation of hires like this, I think it would fairly easy to reach the escape velocity necessary to shift an institution from being interested in game studies to excelling in it.

In an editorial comment, Alan referenced cinema and new media studies vis à vis game studies. These have a somewhat tense relationship in the US, at least in many quarters. This is largely a generational issue I think, where more established media faculty have spent their careers focusing on the art, craft, and cultural politics of cinema and more or less look down on computer games as artless youth commodities. As a result, cinema programs tend to be heavily policed by the old guard, forcing game scholars to find (or make) other homes for their work—digital humanities programs and iSchools, of course, but also mass media and communication, the liberal and fine arts, and science, engineering, and medicine. In the US, people increasingly tend to go where they are wanted and respected regardless of the academic unit's name. This why many US universities and colleges could roster an entire game studies and development department simply by hand-picking individual faculty members out of numerous departments across campus. Indeed, in many such instances, such a bold reorganization would probably serve both those faculty and the institution well; the former because those faculty would find it much easier to collaborate, and the latter because the institution would—for a very small price tag—suddenly find itself in possession of an innovative new unit.

SC: I would hire into the following positions: 1) entrepreneurship/marketing (i.e., the skills to found an indie game studio); 2) a technical person who could teach Unity inside and out; 3) a musicologist who could also teach production; and 4) an art historian who could deal with game art and animation. The hires would need to be able to work together as well as on their own-and of course be skilled teachers.

TC: The first person I would hire would bring expertise in gamification and theories of governmentality (in Foucault's sense of "governing" as a way of forming, disciplining, and conducting the self). The second would be an expert on privacy issues. The third would be able to combine a technical background with a knowledge of design. The fourth person would be a critical/cultural theorist with a cultural studies background. While the first scholar would be able to address contemporary developments in the growing popularity of gamifying everyday life, and would already bring a critical perspective to these developments, the second and third members of the cluster would bring expertise in technology as well as an awareness of the more or less clandestine risks implied in gamification (e.g., "Isn't it a good thing to get encouragement from my fitness app?" "What does it mean that I track my jogging or eating habits with my smartphone?"). These strings of discussion would come together in the framework of critical theory provided by the cultural studies scholar. The positions are meant to work together and support each other, so that the theory is well balanced with practice. A key expertise of this group would be to not to fall prey to regarding games as static objects of study, but to analyse the ways in which "gaming" as a practice is (increasingly) involved in the practices of everyday life.

TR: My main criterion would be that the people I hire have experiences from other fields than games studies, e.g., business history, science and technology studies, law, surveillance studies, philosophy, or ethnography. Each of them would be given the task of identifying ludic elements in their area of expertise, both historically and with a contemporary perspective. Eventually, these analyses would amalgamate into an overarching research project mapping the cultural significance of games, including their shifting (micro-) political and economical alignments, attempts at co-optation, and the promise to provide spaces of refuge.

RN: I would hire in four different areas: 1) a scholar who specializes in history (i.e., game history and its analysis); 2) someone with a main focus on analytical perspectives (i.e., analysis of media objects as well as discourses, contextual and paratextual marginalia, game actions, and so on); 3) a scholar with expertise in theoretical epistemologies (e.g., interdisciplinary theory work, someone who can collaborate across many areas, and who can dive into new ideas and unearth new concepts related to new media and interactive experimentation), and 4) someone who is well trained in critical discourse analysis.

What is the thing you wish you could have done in your game studies career to date but is now probably too late to pursue?

RN: I should not have waited so long to start the game studies working group. Britta Neitzel and I kept postponing the kick-off meeting, and it took two years to happen. Had it started earlier, the group might have been bigger and more ambitious. In the lag, we lost people, energy, and organizational cohesion. Too much time was spent trying to define what the group was going to be—a society, a research group, etc. Maybe if we had started two years earlier, we could have managed to conserve the "gold fever mentality" a little bit longer. The way things worked out, "seriousness" infected the group fairly quickly after its foundation, and now it is more or less a media studies group rather than an interdisciplinary, exciting, crazy band of lunatics.

TC: Provided I end up having a career in game studies, it probably would have been better to write my dissertation on a game studies-related subject. My PhD might have been finished earlier and I could have played exciting and fun games instead of watching television coverage of people in distress and buildings being destroyed by natural and manmade catastrophes. But there is still hope: this is not impacting my career all that much because I am focusing on becoming a literate game scholar now that I have finished my dissertation on German media representations of catastrophes.

TR: Entering game studies at an earlier stage in my career would have opened up a lot of opportunities. Internationally, many job announcements in media studies now require experience in games studies. In Germany, a generational shift in media studies is underway. Oftentimes, older media scholars fail to take the student's current digital media environment into account in their teaching. To fill this gap, new positions are advertised under headings such as "digital culture" and the like, which are actually code for "youth culture." Obviously, this includes games.

SC: I would have written an autoethnography as a dissertation, documenting my former life as a semi-pro Counter-Strike player. [8] This was my original plan, but I eventually opted for a traditional cultural studies thesis instead. I am maybe now too old to go back into game competitions, which require very youthful reflexes. My angle would have been writing about the scene from the inside, as an expert. This insider perspective would be unique and would allow for certain nuances to emerge from the perspective of both the player and the scholar. I would have channelled a bit of Ned Polsky, blending sociology, autoethnography, ethnophenomenology. [9] It would have been fun.

KM: I would have pursued a job in a department that was more transdisciplinary, technical, and artistic. It is a tough slog being in an academic unit where not only is game studies generally dismissed, but so too is collaborating with people in the sciences and engineering. Fortunately, this type of siloed thinking about research and teaching is changing—including in my home context—especially as iSchools and digital humanities centers and institutes continue to grow in popularity.

JR: At one point several years ago, I bypassed an opportunity to forge a concrete connection with a well-funded and powerful information science research group. The group was highly technical, and computationally directed—that is, their first (and often only) line of inquiry was research tool development. I think I was too afraid of what such a partnership might look like in terms of my personal research interests and ability to meaningfully contribute to the group—while I am certainly technically oriented, I am by no means a computer scientist or even a quantitative scholar. So, instead of taking a chance and stepping outside my comfort zone—something I am normally pretty willing to do, particularly when it comes to collaborative research projects—I sat tight, and the group moved on without me. Sadly, the group is now in the process of being disestablished as a standalone unit and being merged with a non-cognate department, and thus even were I to try and reestablish a connection, the opportunity to fashion something innovative and long term seems gone. The circumstances have changed too radically to permit the kind of cross-disciplinarity that was available before, though maybe there are new options and new ways of doing I have yet to discover.

What is the worst professional mistake you have made (game related)?

JR: For me, it has been studying games in ways that are not particularly trendy or rewarding (monetarily speaking). There have been a lot of opportunities over the years for certain kinds of research support in game studies (e.g., for serious game study and development), but I have not quite been able to find the internal motivation to pursue those opportunities. The research questions were not always all that personally inspiring, and I find it hard at times to do something just for the money. It is not that I am some paragon of intellectual virtue. Rather, funded studies require a lot of reporting and assessment work (e.g., quarterly reports and so forth), and it can be challenging to find the motivation to do that kind of work if the study underpinning it is not all that exhilarating.

Also, I tend to get bored easily, especially when it comes to incremental research. I do not particularly enjoy inching along and treading the same ground for years, study after study, even though I probably do that all the time in my work inadvertently (I certainly do it in my teaching). The thing is, incremental research is one of the traditional and important ways to build an academic reputation and the institutional support that comes with it. It is the way one becomes known as "the expert," the one to call (and to fund) on work related to that subject. Pursuing a specific line of inquiry and producing dedicated results that justify that inquiry are also often key to promotion and tenure decisions. Again, notions of expertise comes into play, and rightfully (though not always necessarily) so.

KM: In 1999, Judd and I drafted an outline for a textbook on game studies. When we shopped it around to acquisitions editors at a few media conferences—there were not game studies conferences back then—we did not get any bites so we shelved the idea. As the field developed, we have talked numerous times about returning to that project, not only because we feel like we have a unique take on things, but also because a successful textbook could help resource a number of our other research and development projects. Alas, our other institutional responsibilities (and a steady stream of more interesting research projects) have kept us from returning to the textbook project, which would have stiff competition these days.

RN: It would have to be cooperating with people who are not great at collaborating. Because of my youthful enthusiasm and love of interdisciplinarity, I am generally willing to say "yes" to interesting people who do work (supposedly) in an area that I would like to be in. Usually I find myself some time later doing my own work and trying to fix all the missing additional interdisciplinary impulses of the project. But as I said earlier, maybe this is a systemic problem and not a personal problem. The way to real interdisciplinary and cooperative work with a complex but not sharply defined "research object" may not go through the university.

SC: When I began, I was teaching in an overly formal way about game studies (e.g., topics such as ludology/narratology, diegetic/non-diegetic spaces, etc.). This not only impacted my views, but also many students who, probably, did not get much out of these classes. It was stupid: teaching a divisive ontological and epistemological distinction between play and narrative for the study of the games does more harm than good for student comprehension. I noticed how the students started dividing their analyses up, between "narrative" and "game," when, phenomenologically speaking, gameplay is narrative. As I play, I interpret, I attach meaning to my action which in turn creates, at the very least, a context for my actions, and the cycle continues. If I struggle to attach meaning, and this does happen, for example, through an interpellative mismatch, then I lose interest in the game. Whether this is believing that my score in Tetris has meaning, or that I am saving the galaxy in Mass Effect, I need to enter the subjectivity the game rules provide, and with this subjectivity comes an alibi, a fresh identity for the player, with its own story: I am Steven-as-competitor, or Steven-as-Mario.[10] This tension between my existential and performative self must either be negotiated, and the game proceeds, or breakdown entirely, and I stop playing due to boredom.

TR: One of my earlier research projects focused on the history of digital humanities. In the title of one paper I quoted the pioneer Roberto Busa describing his work on computer concordances as "a great game of solitaire." Unfortunately, I never actually took this quote as seriously as I should have. It was only later that I realized that both the computer itself and a lot of the research being carried out on it are very close to certain combinatory game concepts—maybe in spite of, but more probably because of the formal strictness involved. Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz's ars combinatoria is a historical example of such combinatorial practices with game-like qualities.[11] And the mathematician Hao Wang puts it even more broadly: "We can justifiably say that all mathematics can be reduced, by means of Turing machines, to a game of solitaire with dominoes."[12] It would have been worthwhile to follow this lead and to start a larger investigation into the correspondences between ludic and scientific practices, especially in periods when the latter move into the computational realm.

What are the job prospects for graduates of your program? Is it more likely that they will get jobs in the academy, industry, government, military, food service, cab driver, etc.?

KM: I work in two different programs—RCTE and the School of Information—both of which have excellent placement records...though not in areas of game studies or production. The folks in the RCTE Program who focus on game studies get tenure track faculty positions in English, Media Studies, Communication, and Applied Linguistics departments, and teach game studies courses at the undergrad and grad levels among other non-gaming courses. In the School of Information, which is brand new, we are developing a track in game studies (production and studies), but we do not have placement stats for it yet. Several students who have come through some of the School's other, more established tracks have gotten jobs with indie studios and been brought in as crunch time support on a couple of triple-A titles, but until we get our new curriculum in place, our game studies-specific placement stats will not be much to write home about.

SC: Some students will get jobs in game companies (both professional studios and indie houses), while others will find a home in journalism, marketing, information computing technologies, and tech startups. A growing proportion are starting their own indie studios, such as our recent graduates Nick McDonald, Winston Tang and Hadleigh Barton-Ancliffe's Samurai Punk. They have already released two games and have received a good amount of press, which is always gratifying to see!

RN: Around 80-85% of our students are working in related jobs after graduation...and by related, I mean something having to do with media. Looking at these numbers, you have to keep in mind that the German education system values (in an idealistic reading) going to school for its own sake (the Humboldtian sense), not for job preparation. Our placement numbers are much higher than the 20-25% numbers for other humanities disciplines that are not so naturally adapted to problem solving as media studies. Increasingly, of course, neoliberalism is changing this model, forcing a change in universities all over the country. The new emphasis is on assessment, rapid progress through the degree, and hyper specialization.

JR: Game studies/industry-wise, I am not really sure—since we do not have a game studies program, we do not actively try to train and place our students in that field the way we do other with other fields (e.g., the not-for-profit sector). That said, our graduates at both the BA and MA level do find jobs in all kinds of places in both the public and private sectors, including with game companies (one former student is a senior producer at Bungie). For whatever reason, Communication is a surprisingly flexible degree, and seems to say to employers "I can do anything." I find I am constantly amazed at the diversity of jobs our students get, especially in the current economic climate.

Who is an important national figure in game studies who you feel is not particularly well known, either locally or internationally?

TC: Serjoscha Wiemer (Universität Paderborn). Serjoscha has written a lot of articles in German on game studies and is a very literate game scholar with excellent theoretical expertise. I am sure his new book will get a lot of attention in Germany.[13] And there are also some articles in English that should get the attention of international game scholars. [14]

RN: Britta Neitzel (Kunstuniversität Linz).

KM: Jaakko Suominen (University of Turku).

SC: Garry Crawford (University of Salford), Tom Apperley (University of New South Wales), Christian McCrea (RMIT University),Peter Bayliss (Swinburne University of Technology), Brett Hutchins (Monash University), Andrew Baerg (University of Houston-Victoria).

JR: Kevin Moberly (Old Dominion University) and Randy Nichols (Bentley University). Both are doing exceptional work, and have for years, yet for some reason they do not receive the kind of attention they should. I suspect that is going to change shortly for Randy, though, once folks get a chance to explore his new book, The Video Game Business. [15] Hopefully things change for Kevin, too—the field would be much the better if more people read his work. He is a committed and complex theorist, and is not afraid to ask challenging and even polemical questions. Fields grow so much more rapidly and interestingly when driven by people like that.

Which corporate sponsors have you worked with, if any? Are there are any that you would like to land? Which ones and why?

TR: That is probably one of the questions where national differences are most apparent. In Germany, corporate partnerships are still rare in the context of the humanities and social sciences. One long-term experiment on an institutional level is the Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft, based at the prestigious Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and with core funding provided by Google. Initially, this partnership received a huge amount of criticism in the press, despite the high profile scholars heading it. The debate has quieted down now, but it still remains to be seen how the academic reputation of those involved will be affected.

RN: Thinking about working with private money is a bizarre idea. I am deeply into the idea of free research; I do not want a private company telling me what to do. When I was an assistant professor, I held a chair sponsored by an insurance company. I did not like that set-up, of having to represent or be beholden to an outside interest. I currently have two PhD students whose work is associated with a non-game related company, and their research, which started out as deeply theoretical and politically minded, is now essentially prototyping work for the company. In an epistemological sense, I would call this "wrong." From a political perspective, it is clear that that is the way things are working. I am free to say no, but there are consequences. And of course—but this is maybe only from a German perspective—there is still the slight difference between "industrial money" and "military money." Working with games always means working very closely to the so-called industrial-military-entertainment-complex, which means if you are willing to work with industrial money you always have to ask and answer a serious question: "Does this industry money stabilize my position in an economical dispositive, or am I an interlinked actor in national defense politic now?'

SC: Coming from England, we have a similar culture of unease with private funding. I think the potential conflict of interest of such an arrangement is more trouble than it is worth, not to mention frequently distasteful. That said, I have worked with a few companies through the university, with the university serving as a threshold or shield. I was part of a team that made a game called Worlds of Navitas, teaching high school students about energy systems in the body, which has been quite well received by teachers. I also consulted on Patient Zero, a zombie-shooter played by teams within the physical space of a Melbourne warehouse. But I do so as a Swinburne representative, so I am in no way beholden to the client.

KM: I have actually been in the position of turning down a corporate sponsor many years ago. A defense contractor wanted to bankroll a technical communication program at the university. Initially, the contractor wanted to contribute money toward program development. However, as the discussion progressed, it became clear that the company wanted to shape the curriculum directly, rather than allow the faculty of the university to do so. Things were made more complex by the fact that UA is a land grant institution, and is thus obligated to serve the needs of its community. So, it was a challenging moment: how do we preserve the importance of research free from outside influence, and at the same time fulfill our mission as an institution?

If I were going to partner with a company today, I'd love to pair up with a small- or medium-sized game company of some sort. This could enable some very interesting contributions to the LGI Research Archive.

TC: With our new project, we will be relying on big companies to allow us access to their archives so that we can explore how they have used business games over the years. There will not be any compensation or support, but it will be a partnership. Of course, we will be disinclined to enter into a relationship if the companies set restrictions or attempt to shape our research. However, some level of quid pro quo is probably inevitable (e.g., thanking the organization in a publication), as with any partnership.

JR: I have received some small corporate grants over the years, but nothing to write home about (i.e., nothing involving a sizeable amount of money). And certainly not on the level that we are suggesting here. The truth be told, I would sleep with anyone at this point, to put it colloquially. If a company wanted to fund my work, I would be very open to the (sadly unlikely) possibility. And, as I think I mentioned, these kinds of partnerships are encouraged by my institution. They are part of the strategic plan, both locally and at the state level—the university aims to double its externally derived research dollars by 2020, as well as increase extra-university partnerships.

Now, I definitely share concerns with Rolf and Steve about having my research (and results) directed—or perhaps "interpreted" would be better—by the funder. However, I figure I could always step away from a corporate entanglement if it became ethically dubious. One of the beauties of the tenure system is a certain amount of job protection, that is, I doubt that abrogating a relationship with a corporate funder—assuming, naturally, that no academic or personal misconduct was associated with the abrogation—would cost me my job.

Of course, it seems highly unlikely that any untoward situation would ever occur. Given the nature of how such partnerships work in the US—with the heavy involvement of specialized support staff and university legal council in the establishment and smooth functioning of externally funded research—I would never be at a loss for advice and assistance in navigating a corporate collaboration.

When you look at game studies work in other countries, do you discern any thematic or methodological patterns?

JR: There is a certain scientism to German game studies that I both admire and envy. Scholars there treat humanistic inquiry with the same precision and orientation that we here in the US do in the hardest of sciences. It is not an issue of rigor, I do not think, but approach—the Germans seem to have found a way to effectively translate the scientific method into a humanities context while still preserving humanistic epistemologies.

RN: With American scholars, it is always a question of "where is the theory?" The references to high theory that are so important in Germany seem much less so in the US. On the other hand, German game studies is so theory-oriented that we spend a lot of our time in scientific wars. The American model is perhaps more down-to-earth, which maybe allows certain kinds of work to be done (maybe better, maybe quicker).

TC: It seems like there is a much closer relationship between theorists and practitioners in US-American game studies. Referring to the recent SWPACA conference, one gets the impression that in the US, many scholars also make games. That´s not the case in Germany, where the fields are distinct.

KM: I agree with Judd: the Germans seem to try to blend the complexity of being human with the desire to quantify the self. British game studies seems to constellate around the Birmingham tradition. Australian game studies seems to really emphasize academic-industry partnerships, or at least be fairly open to such things.

SC: US game studies is very diverse, as are all regions—I am not convinced there is a central identity to any of them. But speaking in generalities, I would wager that British game studies is concerned with similar questions as those posed by British cultural studies. Continental game studies has a pronounced historical materialist interest, and suitably enough I find this characteristic particularly evident in German game studies, which I find satisfying to read.

TR: I studied media studies in Sweden, where cultural studies was essentially regarded as the foundational framework for everything else. That is completely different in Germany, where cultural studies is treated as one very particular perspective that is not even hugely popular among media scholars. The US discourse seems much closer to the Swedish one, which I definitely think is a good thing. But hearing all these references to "old school" cultural studies at the SWPACA conference also made me wonder: to what extent are US games studies scholars using games to reassess and develop theory, and to what extent is established theory simply applied to new phenomena?

Where does play fit into your research patterns?

RN: The serious answer would be that play refers to action, which is a key element of my work. Besides the "typical" German love for theory-driven analytical work, I am always highly interested in making my work interventionist. Maybe this is the point to refer back to the origins of German game theory: Friedrich Schiller. His 1794 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man should be understand as idealistic and a utopian positioning in the context of "being free while playing"—it is a strong idea. And so the political idea of emancipatory action—maybe in a more up-to-date sense like Michel de Certeau's "tactical" act of dissident and emancipatory action—is something influencing the choice of topic of my research as well as my way of thinking. On the not-so-serious side, the playing around with theoretical approaches is the fun of game studies.

KM: I like to play an assortment of games—being in the archive makes that easy. I like to play the worst games, the ones that people seem to despise. I also like to play by talking with other people; think of the dissoi logoi. Game studies is a great place to talk with a diversity of people, to play with perspective and understanding. Another way I play—and I suspect everyone here does as well—is through collaboration.

SC: My strategy for writing is to do so as if I were a player. That is, in much the same way that I would confront the challenges in a game, I try to attack and undermine my own arguments from a variety of angles, constantly returning to my ideas to deconstruct, articulate, and refine them. I also play games whenever I can: on my phone, tablet, PC, consoles, and I attend a fortnightly board game meet to make sure I am up on the latest trends in that medium. The object of interest for my research depends on playing a lot of games and focusing on the experience of the play session, and how this experience is configured not only by the designer, but by social context, apparatus, the constant intrusion of the mundane world and its needs: writers such as Tom Apperley and Garry Crawford have spoken to this very well.

TR: Talking with colleagues seems very game-like in the sense that strategy is of paramount importance. The stakes are so high for an academic career—after six years of employment it is either clear that a professorship is in your future or that you are out of the game—that we spend a lot of time strategizing, playing around with the idea of entering or exiting the profession. I recently came across a research paper from organization studies relating Roger Caillois' games typology to the everyday skirmishes and power games in organizational settings. [16] It would be interesting to see the results of a similar study covering our own highly competitive and hierarchically structured academic habitat.

TC: What I find interesting about play (and the play of the players) is that the experience of play is always slipping away. The doing of play is not something easily (or even possibly) tracked down. So, play in my research is focused on recreating from archival materials a sense of what play at a given point in time and space was like, and how this sense can help illuminate play's sensations and meanings. Also, I like the idea of play as a nostalgic act, of returning to older games and seeing how my perspective has changed. Have I been spoiled by modern-day games, by the ways in which the medium has changed? Am I still captivated by the mechanics, experiences, and meanings of old?

JR: By actively trying to take on new challenges and write in new arenas for new audiences. As I mentioned earlier, I get bored easily, and playing with my professional practice—in the sense of doing things new to me—helps mitigate that tendency. I also try to play a new game every week, as well as revisit a game I have already played. The contrast is often helpful for expanding my perspective on both games and play.

To what extent do you rely on multiple languages to conduct your work in game studies?

SC: I am like a magpie—I see something shiny and I just go for it. I am constantly drawing from different theoretical languages. I am bouncing about between various perspectives, from Jung to Latour and lots in between. It is an alchemical process where I'm constantly mixing theory to find the best route to unpacking the object.

RN: We also do this literally, constantly switching languages and epistemologies. On the one hand, we have a strictly German research obligation. We have to publish in German, collect books in German, and so forth. At the same time, so many of the games we study are in English, as well as many of the theorists we read. There are few of us who publish outside of the German language; some of us are unable to, others of us are too afraid (what if the book does not succeed?). Few of us read French, or Spanish, or other languages—it is such a strange thing given that these are the languages of the countries that are literally just a few kilometers away in many cases.

TR: I think the challenge seems to diminish when you are talking with younger scholars. They have all grown up speaking, reading, and writing in English. The real challenge is with international conferences, where the communication challenges are intensified due to their liveness. Reading and writing can be done at one's own pace; speaking and responding is done at the pace of the conversants. There is also the challenge of explaining to the participants the idiosyncratic processes of presentation traditions, that is, how conferences in Germany run versus those in other countries.

JR: I am ashamed to say very little—I am barely literate in English, let alone in another language.

Put on your prognosticator's cap: what does the field of game studies look like in your country/region in a decade?

SC: I think there is going to be a large difference between what we would like to see and what we will see.

RN: If the western world has not collapsed, I see two scenarios: 1) the total marginalization of game studies (the field retreating to a discipline-driven condition, where folks speak about games from within and to their disciplines, but not across disciplines); 2) there will be game studies institutes, professorships, and so forth. that will be very boring: we will work in a field with a dominance of interpretation and ongoing "paradigm wars." Game studies will concentrate on flagships, and everything else will be marginalized. There will be an orthodoxy, not an emergence of difference.

TR: If there were a way to monetize old game software—to make it relevant and compelling to contemporary players (not to mention scholars)—then game studies will gain a certain cultural and economic capital much like film (whose back catalog, as Lev Manovich points out, can perennially be sold, keeping the medium relevant). If the archive is not interesting, I do not know if you can keep up a field of study that is only living in the present.

KM: I suspect that if game studies is still around in the academy in ten years, it will be largely driven by processes of gamification. As Theo and Lev Manovich suggest, that is the way you monetize history. Scholars need to be able to look to and learn from the past in order to produce revenue-generating projects. If there is no past to look to—no history to refute and correct—then there will be no reason for scholars to study the history and theory of the medium.

JR: I think it may look a lot cultural studies in the US does now—pervasive but neutered. Cultural studies was the hot thing once upon a time, with discrete programs, journals, jobs, and so forth. However, it was fairly quickly swallowed up by other fields (e.g., English, Media Studies, American Studies, etc.), and now exists primarily as an adjunct rather than a locus (e.g., scholars who "do" cultural studies, along with their area of expertise). As sad as it sounds, it seems as if game studies is headed that way, to be a piece of other things but not its own. Maybe that means more people will be able to study games, though, that the object will not be foreign but organic. That would be great.

Notes

[1] We are deeply indebted to Alan Clinton for his excellent editorial questions and suggestions.

[2] "Habilitation" is a professional certification that enables the recipient to work as a full professor.

[3] Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies." Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. 261-274. Print.

[4] Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1972, 10. Print.

[5] Sheridan, Alan. Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London/New York: Tavistock, 1980. Print.

[6] Mahoney, Michael S. "The Histories of Computing(s)." Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30.2 (2005): 119-35. Print.

[7] For examples, see the Virtual Worlds Observatory.

[8] Counter-Strike. Valve. Valve, 2000. Personal computer.

[9] Polsky, a Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Stony Brook, is best known for his book Hustlers, Beats, and Others (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), an autoethnography (mostly) renowned for its exacting and elegant descriptions of billiards culture, of which Polsky was an active devotee.

[10] Tetris. Alexey Pajitnov. Spectrum HoloByte, 1987. Personal computer; Mass Effect. Bioware. Microsoft Game Studios, 2007. Multiple platforms.

[11] For a more extensive discussion, see Margarete Jahrmann's dissertation Ludics for a Ludic Society: The Art and Politics of Play (University of Plymouth 2011).

[12] Wang, Hao. "Games, Logic and Computers." Scientific American 213 (1965): 98-106. See also Claus Pias's Computer Spiel Welten (Zurich/Berlin: diaphenes, 2002).

[13] Das geöffnete Intervall-Medientheorie und Ästhetik des Videospiels. München: Fink, 2014.

[14] "Interface Analysis: Notes On the 'Scopic Regime' of Strategic Action in Real-Time Strategy Games." Computer Games and New Media Cultures: A Handbook of Digital Games Studies. Ed. Johannes Fromme and Alexander Unger. Heidelberg and New York: Springer, 2012; "Rewriting the Matrix of Life: Biomedia Between Ecological Crisis and Playful Actions." (with Christoph Neubert). communication+1 3. Article 6 (2014).

[15] Nichols, Randy. The Video Game Business. London: British Film Institute, 2014. Print.

[16] Neuberger, Oswald. "Spiele in Organisationen, Organisationen als Spiele." Mikropolitik: Rationalität, Macht und Spiele in Organisationen. Ed. Willi Küpper and Günther Ortmann. Opladen: Westdt. Verl., 1988. 53-86. Print.

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