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Ken S. McAllister: Innovation, Collaboration, Humanities? Yes!

Chapter of: Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be(pp. 273–290)

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Metadata
TitleKen S. McAllister
SubtitleInnovation, Collaboration, Humanities? Yes!
ContributorJudd Ethan Ruggill(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.12
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/historiographies-of-game-studies-what-it-has-been-what-it-could-be/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightJudd Ethan Ruggill
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2025-07-25
Long abstractIn this interview, game studies pioneer Ken S. McAllister recounts coming to study games for a living, and how a career-threatening technology failure that wiped out a book project on miniaturization was actually a gift, creating the opportunity for him to write the first English-language book on the rhetoric of video games. In so doing, he recalls the inhospitable institutional and professional culture game studies scholars often encountered in the early days of the field, and the ways in which that culture provoked praxical and occasionally outlandish experiments in response. One of McAllister’s signature experiments from that era is the Learning Games Initiative, a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group he co-founded in 1999 to study, teach with, and build games. McAllister shares the origins of the group and highlights its longest running project, the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive. The Archive has since become one of the largest working collections of video game-related artifacts in the world and a laboratory for the theory and practice of electronic game collection, preservation, and conservation. McAllister draws on the collaborative, collegial, and international approaches he has explored through the Initiative and its Archive to speak to current and future game researchers.
Page rangepp. 273–290
Print length28 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Judd Ethan Ruggill

(author)
Associate Dean of Academic Services at University of Arizona
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7554-9346

Judd Ethan Ruggill (he/him) is Associate Dean of Academic Services in the Graduate College at the University of Arizona. He primarily researches play and the technologies, industries, and sociocultural phenomena that enable it. He has published and presented on topics ranging from archiving to xenolinguistics, and is currently working on a book with colleague Ken McAllister about collecting and preserving games.