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Dear all
As you may have noticed, there are no preparations underway for a new conference this year. This is partly because of a consensus that emerged under the discussion part of the conference in St. Petersburg. The plan is to use this year to work on funding and formal organization of the network. In addition to the plenary discussion after the last conference, this subject has so far been briefly discussed on an ad hoc basis between Sebastian, Anita, Olli, Daniel, Feng and myself.
In this post I outline a few thoughts for common discussion about the present status, and a plan of action for moving forward to help give the game philosophy network a more sustainable structure.
Status Quo
From being a minor addendum to game studies discourses, the initiative has established its own community, and we now have a small range of authors, as well as an emerging horizon of shared research problems. People are doing masters and PhDs within the field of game philosophy, and people are coming in from traditional philosophy as well. I know personally several master students that have been writing about our subject. The project has become a valuable addition to game studies proper in virtue of providing an outlet for theoretically minded scholars in this field. At this point we have a well respected conference series, a peer reviewed journal, and next year we will also have a handbook at a big publisher dedicated to our subject.
So there exists a potential for new research and for involving new students and scholars that we cannot adequately address at this point because it exceeds our organizational capacity. The problem is basically the complete lack of funding: The only option we have to involve new people or to produce new research papers is utilize the conference funding that the hosts provide for each conference. The last conference only received 1500 Euro in funding. There is very little we can achieve with volunteer contributions and financial resources such as these.
I would also like to mention that I have personally reached a limit for how much volunteer time I can allocate to the project. The work required in order to sustain the network has now become so specialized that I have completely run out of financing options. I presently have to spend the time to search and apply for funding for entirely different subjects, which means that I cannot spend that much time on game philosophy.
What should we do to move the game philosophy initiative forward, if we had the means to do it? Below, I’m listing some points for discussion.
First, I think we should stage active explorations into the philosophy of games. We should actively identify research questions in game studies, aesthetics, cognitive science, methodology, phenomenology, philosophy of language, and so on. We could establish a “write factory” series of workshops on issues such as existential artifacts, immersion, representation, fictional actions, ludic subjectivity, imagination, and so on. I think Pawel’s workshop with David Chalmers on virtuality is a good example of a good format for such workshops. It had position papers, a common premise and feedback-assignments. Arranging events with a format like this would speed up research on emerging issues significantly. In the absence of funding, we might even consider dropping the yearly conferences for concentrated workshops. SI’s for JPG is one outlet, but there are options as well.
Second, we should address the problem that the research community is too small. As Mathias Fuchs and David Myers both commented during the conference in St. Petersburg there is a slightly incestous feeling to our discussions, since we have a small number of authors that are frequently referencing each other. We see this both in the conference series and in the journal. So, we really need to organize an effort to actively include and engage more authors and groups, like e.g. Sebastian Ostritsch and Markus Rautzenberg, The British Society of Aesthetics, Philosophy of Sport, or the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. I strongly suspect that it would be possible to involve many interesting traditional philosophers with relevant research interests, like Julet Floyd in Boston, James Conant in Leipzig, Stefano Predelli in Nottingham and even David Chalmers. With a bit of funding we could reach out to individuals and departments to organize common events. Furthermore, we could organize e.g. Ph.D. workshops to reach out to students.
Third, we need to publicize the initiative much better than we do now. We presently have a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and an email list. However, these are not used very much. We should have a strategy to involve the network members much more actively, to use other email lists, to reach out to conferences and departments, and especially important: we should have a plan for playing the social media game. Again, with some financial resources, we could pursue these options much more efficiently.
Fourth, we would ideally need a bibliography of existing research on our topic, since people are often not aware of work that has been done on a subject. One idea here is to engage a master student in library science to make one for us. Again, with a bit of funding, this could easily be done.
Plan of Action
In order to address issues such as these, I think that we should address the following intertwined tasks:
* Establish a formal affiliation with an institution
* Find a formalization scheme for the organization and the decision processes.
* Apply for funding.Originally, we were located at the philosophy department in Oslo, but after our project lead Olav Asheim retired a couple of years ago, the network has had no formal institutional affiliation. That affiliation was not very ideal anyway, since this department never took any interest in the initiative. So, what we really need is an institution that has a genuine use for game philosophy for their own research and that would benefit from the work and connections that we can offer.
An attempt to formalize the network should primarily be framed in terms of a funding strategy. One very natural place to start may be to prepare an application for a COST-research network in the EU: https://www.cost.eu/cost-actions/what-are-cost-actions/
COST is a EU-funded program that has as its main goal to create science networks that foster academic innovation. It requires common signing by 7 institutions in EU-countries, but can also include members from “Near Neighbour Countries” (such as Russia) and International Partner Countries (such as USA and India). The COST program offers funding to research seminars, reports/evaluations and educational activities. The program appears to be practically tailor-made for our needs.
The program has an open call with a “collection date” October 1, 2020.
https://www.cost.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/COST-004-18-REV-COST_Open_Call_SESA_guidelines.pdfThere are also other funding models available to us. I’m presently involved in a proposal for a 4 year research program on the topic of immersion. A research proposal directed at a game philosophical theme might well have the network included. If it happens to fit with the plans of any of the members in the steering group, we might in fact start to work on such a proposal in parallel with the COST-application.
As Olli and I have talked about, an alternative, down-scaled option might be to ask for collaborating departments to allocate contributions and resources towards a shared initiative. There are a lot of research networks like ours, and we should investigate how they are usually funded and organized.
One idea is that once we decide on a plan of action, we can broadcast an announcement on our webpages and on relevant email lists with a title like “The Game Philosophy Network is Searching for Institutional Partners” where we specify our plans and ask for collaborating members. This will serve to communicate our intent when we approach individuals and departments.
To discuss these ideas, and to start a process towards formalizing the network, Sebastian and I think we should commence with a Skype/Zoom meeting. Unless there are objections to this initiative, we should try to schedule a meeting fairly soon. Sebastian has offered to host a Zoom meeting, for example on June 25.
Best,
John
Got a notice about an online info meeting about COST next Tuesday. I’m going to check it out, in case we decide move in that direction:
Hi all, before we have the Zoom meeting we should agree on a date. I have set up a doodle for this Thursday, June 25 only: https://doodle.com/poll/xa8rmfb4zm732uw4. The time zone refers to GMT+1 or CET but it may adapt to your time zones automatically. As John said, we’d suggest this Thursday, June 25th for a meeting. So please fill in the doodle asap so that we can arrange for our meeting to happen.
Great, thanks for this! I just filled in my dates. Note that the options goes all the way to July 4.
Btw, consider watching the COST-info-meeting tomorrow. It last one hour and thirty minutes. There is no sign-up as far as I can see. It is just a streaming-event, but I believe it is possible to ask questions via a text interface.
Thanks for setting up the Zoom poll. I intended to write a response to John’s points, but I will postpone it till the meeting.
@Pawel you can still keep your response and we can discuss in the zoom meeting. So far 6 people have replied to the Doodle and so far Thursday, June 25, 5-6 pm is the most preferred date.
Hi,
I’m on a train from Oslo to Trondheim with very bad internet connection at that time. I can try to log on, but I fear I might not be able to get a stable connection.Hi all,
Sorry I’ve been lax in responding. Because of COVID and the fact that my spouse is medical personnel, I’ve been mostly doing childcare for most of my life. I will try to attend tomorrow’s meeting, but, again, I’m in charge of childcare for the period. (I may be able to play the meeting in the background and occasionally interject as I take care of kids.)
I have a lot to say about the relationship between GPN and the philosophy of sport, British Society of Aesthetics and American Society of Aesthetics, and analytic philosophy in general. Since I first attended GPN events, the philosophy of games has really taken off in the Anglo-American scene, and there’s a lot we can do to connect the two scenes. However, we’d first have to repair a perception of insider-ness and insularity that the Anglo-American scene has towards GPN. Some of this involves being clearer about the norms of interdisiciplinarity. I have become an organizer for both the ASA and the BSA, and it would also be easy for me to get people from the GPN scene invited to events, integrated into special panels, etc. for those societies.
I agree with John strongly about the workshops. One possibility, in the COVID era, with lack of funding: is simply to stage zoom conferences. Two worlds with which I am involved, the Social Epistemology Network and the Aesthetics for Birds group, have started weekly or biweekly zoom conferences. Attendance is excellent (50-200 people!), there’s been lots of interchange of ideas, and it is free to set-up, as long as somebody involved has an institutional Zoom account.
Finally, on the topic of introductory materials: a while back, I wrote and published, and am planning to update, an introductory literature review of analytic philosophy and analytic aesthetics work on games. I’ve gotten lots of feedback that this has helped new people get into this terrain. I’d be happy to make that content available for any GPN effort. I think it would be invaluable for there to be a similar review for the Game Studies side of things, as well as the continental philosophy side of things. But I am absolutely not the person to put together that review.
yes, I believe Sebastian is setting up a meeting for the 5pm slot. The zoom link should be posted soon.
Dear all,
I wish to share my experience with running an organization that, at least in some respects, is similar to the Game Philosophy Network. The organization in question is the Centre for Philosophical Research. We aim to organize conferences and publish books that popularize philosophy. The method that we used to keep us afloat is that we function as an official Polish NGO. This means that, while we are not affiliated with any university we can apply for funds from the government or even the private sector.The main conference we organize is similar to the PCG conference in that it changes the host every year (the difference is that it changes cities and not countries). This is how we finance these conferences:
We function as a host organization that has the right to the name and the right to veto any of the decisions of the local organization committee. Since we are already recognized it is fairly easy for us to apply for funds for the conference and we get them almost every year.At the same time, the local committee is obliged to apply for funds in their city. We do not care where the money comes from as long as it does not affect the integrity of the conference. For example – during some of the editions we got money from the private sector in exchange for the advertisement of their publications. Since the publications were well regarded academic books, we did not have a problem with this. Still, typically the local money comes from the university or local government.
On top of that, the conference has a fee. It is always fairly low – currently, only 40 euros which is low even for Polish standards. Using these three sources of financing we are typically really well off. To the point where sometimes we had to think hard how to spend the money (as a non-gov organization we cannot turn a profit, additionally no one in the organization gets salaries).
I am not sure if this experience will be easily transferable to the PCG scenario, but I will be happy to provide more details if needed.
My thinking is that affiliating with a particular university is not the only option. Maybe affiliation with a particular country and gaining legal personality in this country could be a better solution for the PCG network. In other words, maybe, instead of affiliating with existing institutions it might be better to become an institution itself?
Many thanks for these comments. (I’m posting this mostly to check if the forum really is working again!)
I’ve also thought about the option of having a self-standing organization. We even made statutes for such an organization (Based on the statutes for the Nordic Society for Phenomenology). The problem I have encountered is that at this level, we really need funding towards research-type events. Other types of events distract from our main needs. However, it might well be possible to do both, and I noticed that e.g. COST is open to applications from all sorts of organizations.
Thanks, everyone. I am posting mainly to check if it is only who cannot post to the forum. Looking forward to meeting you in a bit.
Apologies for not being able to join today. This a great initiative. Though not having thought long and hard about these issues, it seems to me the best option is to go for separate Association sooner rather than later, and then try Cost or/and similar. The process of setting up a new organisational framework could also be a step towards de-insulating and establishing stronger contacts.
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