Christian McCrea

The email list known as GamesNetwork is the primary discussion list for games research in the English language. It must also now be abandoned and destroyed. It only has one good purpose - It collects CFPs, which are benign. Aside from that, it then has two major forms of conversation.

1) The bibliography search.

A tourist will emerge with a singularly woolly topic and ask that the collective mind produce a bibliography. Rather than coming to the group at the end of their research with questions, they decide to make a google out of the collective and demand that this all-so-amazing link between tangential phenomena be declared wholly original. Why else would their 10-second web search have yielded no perfect quotes to use in their mind-bendingly shitty article? 

2) The inflamed sore.

An off-hand comment will balloon into a deranged festival of misreading as jaded academic vampires whisper all sorts of dimsal euphonies in order to progress some long-forgotten implacable territorial war. Young graduate students will assume this discussion is of some worth because they will have heard of some of the participants. However, it is not. It is a thunderously masculine ritual of self-hatred devoid of meaning, producing precisely zero carry for the field. Worse, the arguments on Gamesnetwork have now begun to inspire and provoke articles in journals which are just as deliriously meaningless.

Conclusion

The culture of the GamesNetwork list is now completely poisonous. We wait on the list for arguments to emerge and to be rude to tourists in the meantime. Very serious opportunities for discussion are further fragmented not because there needs to be an email list - but because there is GamesNetwork, and it kills intelligent conversation. 

It would be better to have no list like it at all. Should there be a list, it needs heavy theming and moderation and a diverse culture of research multiplicities, pointed at contemporary issues. The current list seriously disrupts the ability to have a collective conversation with your peers.