Princeton holding a conference on video game studies?
"The conference provided a compressed picture of some of the intellectual activity going on in video game studies today. In a short summary, it was clear that early attempts to define the discipline or argue against a sort of 'academic colonization' were hopeless. The ideas flowing into the area of video game studies from all quarters hold great promise to energize the notion of studying something as banal as video games. The literary critics were not going to leave our beloved game world, I discovered. Then again, neither were the musicians, lawyers, cultural studies folk, computer science departments or anyone else.
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What the conference stood for, and what it signaled, were credibility, quality, momentum and clarity of the field of video game studies. Borrowing the prestige of Princeton's ivy, game's studies took another step away from the dubious shadows of the arcade and parent's basement."
Rest of the article <A HREF="http://www.buzzcut.com/article.php?story=20040309220912691">here</A>. The article talks about a close-playing of Super Mario Brothers, the attraction to Lara Croft, and a bunch of other interesting stuff. What do you guys think about this? Are video games scholarly? Is there anything worthwhile to this?