Welcome to Scholarly Gamers!
I’d like start by taking this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for visiting our site and embarking on this grand adventure with us. Through horrors untold and dungeons numerous, we’ve fought our way here so that we could undertake an even more epic odyssey with all of you.
Scholarly Gamers was initially an idea that came to me four years ago when I was just starting to blog about video games. I found that many of the people I was writing alongside had a penchant for looking at video games in an academic way, with an analytical lens that was not often seen on the front pages of gaming publications. After being exposed to so many new ways of looking at the games that I loved, it became my immediate goal to find an avenue through which to showcase those views.
It was years later before I was able to team up with a small group of like-minded individuals, each of whom shared my passion for creating an academic community where gamers could come to explore new ideas, to learn, and to thrive together. A “Gaming University” where all schools of thought converged into a nexus of higher learning, brought together through a deep respect for game studies as a multidisciplinary field of study.
We will explore video games through academic disciplines including political science, history, and cultural studies, with a focus on analytical arguments that will attempt to advance overarching discussions in gaming communities. Articles will range from structured papers to more casual discussions, but they will always be tied together with a thread of analysis.
Scholarly Gamers has diversified from a small group of analytical writers, into a team of streamers, YouTubers, journalists, academics, and people who want to give something back to gaming communities. Scholarly Gamers is a lot of things, and it will continue to grow and evolve as a gathering place for people to spend time and hold engaging discussions with other gamers and enthusiasts.
Through all of this, Scholarly Gamers will always be, at its core, a community-centered project with the primary goal of creating an environment which encourages open and constructive discourse among people. We plan to achieve this through engaging with the community on themes which are important to gamers, through a multimedia approach including journal articles, live streams, and recorded videos. Each of us has been lucky enough to be part of amazing and supportive gaming communities in the past, and this is our opportunity to give that same experience to others.
So from all of us here at scholarlygamers.com, thank you for stopping by and welcome to the discussion!
Matt Ferguson
Scholar at Large
