Yet there's undeniably a weird nest of dogmas lurking deep in game studies, and peer review's self-reaffirming echo chamber only intensifies this blindness.

It's not just a problem in game studies - listen to @babette_babich on academic philosophy and find the same issues.

Despite the title, Wikipedia Knows Nothing isn't so much an attack on the Wikipedia as it is a challenge to academics. The Wikipedia's problem is precisely that it is a horde of non-academics pretending to be academics. The problem in both spheres is the academic status quo.

The question of knowledge becomes the question of what the point of a university is. I don't believe we know any more. Which is why we increasingly justify universities as job preparation... how else to explain the money being milked from the young folks?

I feel a deep malaise about all of this... I love the game studies community, and the play studies community, and the philosophy community - but I worry about their narrowing of purpose, and our complicity in destroying the very purpose of a university education.

But I have made myself an outsider. And I suppose I have relished being an outsider, I've taken it on as part of my 'brand' (for all the good it has done me)!

It's hard, as a lifelong nerd master, not to paint yourself always on the outside, one way or another.

If I had one piece of advice for every scholar, it would be to question what it is you're committed to, how you know what you are doing is good (rather than 'useful').

To the extent we can answer this question, we have a reason to keep the university as a social institution.