This is going to take time— a long, long time. For gaming to become a respectable field of academic study, it will require a generation of academics raised in a cultural setting in which gaming was acceptable. That is, the students just entering (or leaving) grad school now, who will be the tenured faculty…

@Coquiton: "Black racism" is not a hot topic. We're not talking about black people being racist. We're talking about racist representations of black people. They're two different things. The latter, to which I think you're referring, has been quite a "hot topic" for 400 years.

@teamr: Agreed. Clearly nobody read N'Gai's piece. What they "read" was: black man criticizes game for racist representations.

You say "culture-with-a-small-c" as if it's still ok to use "Culture-with-a-big-C."

He's holding a Fender Strat. He always played a Fender Strat. Who has the license to make Strat replicas for rhythm games? MTV, Harmonix, and Rock Band. Oops.

Tsk tsk. The Reagan-Gorbachev Summit was '86.

@Shiryu: I think you've nailed it: you want history, go read a book.

Donning my professional historian's hat: I have _zero_ interest in playing games that make some sort of pretenses toward being "historical." It's pretty clear that they're interesting not for teaching us something about "real history," but showing us how popular memory is produced and consumed. And that's exactly…

Owen: thanks for pointing out the gun-culture connection. Keep in mind that when you drive through Fayetteville (or near it) on I-95, the road is littered with billboards proclaiming— no, boasting— the place to be "America's most military-friendly city." I don't believe I ever saw the billboard bragging of its…

@Quivx: Woh, like, totally the same answer.

Five years! No kidding. From about the fall of 1998 to roughly the summer of 2003. That was my entire college experience and my first year of graduate school.