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 Features
We're Not Listening: An Open Letter to Academic Game Researchers
 Rule #2: Speak The Language
Academic writing is abnormal. I know that by the time you escape grad school the rolling cadences and ritualized forms of the journal article are graven on your very soul. But really, you might as well present your research in the form of an interpretive dance as hand a producer an article written for academic publication. Reading an academic article is an obscure and highly specialized job skill, one which most of your potential audience doesn’t have the time or desire to learn. It’s up to the researchers to make their work accessible to the audiences they want.
The goal here is to convey information clearly and easily to specific types of game industry readers. They’re already going out of their way to read it, so make it as easy as possible for them to assimilate your proposal.
This is not to say that researchers need to dumb anything down! This audience is just as smart and critical as any journal review panel, and it’s the one who is potentially going to have to spend days or weeks implementing the ideas. Rejecting the proposal is the easy route, the one that doesn’t mean changing the schedule or undoing any finished work.
Think of it like grant writing. The way research is framed in a grant proposal differs from the way it is presented in a classroom because both the audience and the goal of the presentation are different. The core of the research remains the same no matter what the audience, but different aspects are important in different forums. The same talk that knocked the audience’s socks off at CHI is going to fall flat at GDC. Don’t write a research paper, write a business proposal.
A couple specific guidelines:
- Start fresh. You’re talking to a new audience, so you should be creating a new presentation. Don’t just take out the same PowerPoint presentation from the last academic conference and adapt it. Start a new slide deck and add every slide with a view towards the new audience and what it needs to know.
- Lean and Mean. Think one page. Academia rewards writers for covering all the bases, making sure every tiny step is supported and documented, and for detailing how the current work fits into the existing literature. This is good and appropriate for academia, but industry readers don’t care about most of that. Start from the bare bones of the argument and put on the minimum flesh necessary to convince your audience to invest in your ideas.
- Use examples from bestsellers. A good example from a popular game is more effective than a great example from something they’ve never heard of. Industry people often suffer from an “if-they’re-so-smart-, why-ain’t-they-rich” attitude towards smaller titles. Even if the small title is a perfect example of how the theory works, they’re going to be less likely to listen if they haven’t heard of the game ahead of time. Commercial success is one way of making sure that the audience will respect your examples, but you can also use titles that are well known or critically acclaimed but which weren’t necessarily huge blockbusters. It’s also important to keep your examples as current as possible, because many industry folks will see a three-year-old example as ancient history.
- Look forward, not backwards. Lose the lit review. Don’t quote references. Don’t worry about background material. This is about specific, concrete recommendations and the impact on their game. Shape the presentation from the recommendations outwards, providing only the background absolutely necessary to justify the recommendations.
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