Top 5 Mailing Lists Every Game Researcher Should Know

by The Acagamic

Murder She Wrote
Photo by chefran­den (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

What Are Mailing Lists Good For?
Why should you care about Mailing lists? Have you ever missed a con­fer­ence dead­line or won­dered what could be inter­est­ing areas of research related to gam­ing? Heck, maybe you have just started study­ing in higher edu­ca­tion and won­dered whether all those pro­fes­sors do is play games. No time to waste, because if you want to find out what is going on inside the com­mu­nity and get a good feel­ing of gam­ing Zeitgeist, you have found the right place to start.

Wouldn’t You Like To Know The Inside Scoop
A (mod­er­ated) dis­cus­sion mail­ing list usu­ally has neti­quette guide­lines (e.g. “read first, post later”, “remem­ber you are talk­ing to a human being”), but the value you get out of a list once you are on it for a while, is tremen­dous. Game researchers on those lists are usu­ally very open-minded, friendly, mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary and sci­en­tific peo­ple. They will keep you up to date with con­fer­ence calls, job adverts and hot research top­ics (poten­tially for grant pro­pos­als or other things). All you need to do is sub­scribe with your email address to the list and after con­fir­ma­tion this whole new world opens up to you. The only thing left to do is to fil­ter your email inbox, so it does not become crammed as some lists can have high traf­fic at times. And remem­ber, the list are run by pro­fes­sion­als, so you can always opt out at any time with­out any need for justification.

The Top Five Mailing Lists

  1. Gamesnetwork DiGRA Email List. The Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) has its own mail­ing list, filled mostly with peo­ple from a game stud­ies back­ground. Most dis­cus­sion related to DiGRA take place here. Regular announce­ments include aca­d­e­mic job offers and call for papers (Cfps).
  2. Entertainment Computing Community Mailing List. The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) pro­vides this news and announce­ment ser­vice to all researchers inter­ested in the area of enter­tain­ment com­put­ing. The com­mu­nity is prob­a­bly a bit more tech­ni­cal than on the DiGRA list.
  3. IGDA’s Game Education SIG Mailing List. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has a spe­cial inter­est group deal­ing with all things related to game edu­ca­tion. List mem­ber­ship is mas­sive and if you are liv­ing on the American con­ti­nent and do game edu­ca­tion, there is no excuse not to be on that list. Topics are how­ever more related to teach­ing than to researcher, but you do get indus­try and acad­e­mia Cfps as well as aca­d­e­mic job offerings.
  4. CHI-WEB Mailing List. Organized by the ACM spe­cial inter­est group on Computer-Human Interaction, this is a rather large resource, not just focused on inter­ac­tion and enter­tain­ment, but on all facets of HCI. If you pre­fer more focused lists, the ACM SIGCHI also offers CHI-Resources, CHI-Jobs, and CHI-Announcements.
  5. Serious Games Discussion Listserv. Serious games is a big topic for pro­fes­sion­als and aca­d­e­mics alike and this is the offi­cial list.

Is This Really It?

Think that I might have missed a good dis­cus­sion place? Feel free to add a comment!

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