Why Blog on Video Games?

Why lay all this groundwork about this blog? Why not just dive into the substance and write something about video games? The first article was justifying the important of video games. The second post was explaining how I got here. And this post is explaining why I am blogging. Will we ever get to something of substance? Yes. Soon. But, this ground work is important. My view of blogging was influenced by a wonderful article that a friend pointed me to in The Atlantic entitled "Why I Blog"

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog

I will let the article speak for itself, but will speak instead to how it influenced my thinking. I am used to much more formal writing. I think an idea through, organize it, express it, revise the expression and so on. The end product often bears little resemblance to my original thinking. And, yet, there is value in that original thinking. It was the unprocessed reaction to ideas as they occured rather than one possible final interpretation of those ideas. And the purpose of the blog is to capture those unprocessed reactions. The blog, as Sullivan says, is a public diary. It captures your reactions as they occur and puts them out there for everyone to see.

I often make statements based on my personal experiences such as "in the early days of the web, nobody saw it as a vehicle for commerce." Today that statement sounds absurd as the web is at the very heart of commerce. And, yet, I can recall when teaching a class in web applications in the mid 1990's that I would have to make the case for commercial uses of the web. These perspectives are important because our initial reactions to old 'new' technologies can help us understand new 'new' technologies. And yet these reactions are often lost in the published record. Blogs are a way of capturing that raw material out of which sense is later made. And there is value in capturing that raw material.

I must also admit that I have become somewhat disenchanted with formal academic publishing. The model we use of reviewing past literature, testing hypotheses using a formal methodology, explaining our results and conclusions, and then having our work reviewed by peers seems to be appropriate for natural science where we are attempting to discover the properties of the natural world. But, objects of study in social sciences do not, as Robert Pirsig once put it, "hold still." Concepts in social science evolve and change. So we are studying a moving object. In the world of technology we are often studying objects that do not even exist in the world today. We are ofter making claims about things that ought to exist. Attempting to study future worlds brought about by technology using methods of natural science just doesn't seem to make any sense. And it is also why so much academic publishing in the field of technology just seems to be irrelevant. So, when something does not appear to be working, it is best to try something else and that is what I am doing.

As I begin this journy out of the comfort of everything I already know and into this new realm of video games, my goal in this blog is to capture my thoughts and reactions as they occur rather than sorting them out into a cohesive collection of organized sense making packages. This will probably appear as though I am bouncing around a bit and, indeed, I will be. Our thoughts as we have them do bounce around. One day I am interested in technology; another day history; another day I might be pondering and reflecting. I might be excited by a book I just read; something somebody said; a new game that game out; a new insight. But, whatever it is, I will report it as accurately as I can. And if I change my mind about something later and revisit it to revise it, well that is why I am blogging.