I’ve accepted the fact that 2025 will be bad. – Professor Kozlowski
We’re not exactly known for prompt and timely updates here at the old video game academy. But hey, we’re still here, in our fifth year, give or take, and ringing in this new year with a post and a promise of more to come.
Taking stock, I have about 40 drafts ready to go, starting out from many points over these swiftly elapsing years, mostly along the lines of a games-in-literature connection. So many ideas for the student of games to contemplate, easily a year’s worth, are there in potentia. So that it’s my intention to shovel out this whole backlog little by little over the course of this year, knowing that the articles will be shorter and even looser than what I generally go for, because if not now, when?
Some of the topics I’ve been mulling over: cmrn of the infamous GSSB and his thesis on nonhumanism; the infinitely voyaging Sufjan; the inimitable Sloek; more Dostoevsky, naturally; Homer, Cervantes, Caedmon, Sterne; Monkey and Gargantua; Genji and his ambidextrous gloves; Pullman, of course, whose third Book of Dust should be dropping soon.
Whether there’s anyone out there reading them or not, I’m looking forward to the practice and discipline that will necessarily go along with such an undertaking. Much as I like the outlet for meditations on games and literature, though, my worry is that this site is not much help to anyone else, whether it be people teaching games or people working on their own researches, or some overlap of the two. To try again to connect with a community of people interested in reading and writing of this sort, then, is my main goal for the year, quixotic though it may be. The podcast form is a good one, insofar as anything on the internet is good, for conversations and interviews bringing people together and sharing ideas, and we’ll keep it going.
Understandably, this is already asking a lot. All I can say is, quoting Ben again, “Fires bring people together…In the fire, we were neighbors…We are in the fire now. We are always in the fire, especially when we cannot see the flames.” And this is fine.
Video Game Academy 