There are also those who study games to make better games, vs those who study games to understand how games work externally, vs those who study the cultural place of games, and more.

And all of us talk to each other, but we’re not always speaking the same language.

I, for example, have an academic background in literary and narrative studies. But I do not have an academic background in game studies, or any of the overlapping fields in psychology, computer science, etc.

So a lot of times when I talk to folks with a different academic background, who are actually studying games anthropologically where I’m learning about them to get better at playing/making them….

Well, it doesn’t always go perfectly.