I know I offered to talk about my experience, but I’m having trouble figuring out where to start because your assumptions about what “academic” is are so far off that they’re Not Even Wrong.

1) The resistance I see is not to actual academic treatment of role-playing. I’ve had enormously positive experiences doing academic research on RPGs with many different communities, including communities that are deeply hostile to online RPG “theorizing” (for, what I’ll add, are pretty good reasons).

2) There are a number of relationships between theory, design, and empirical work, depending on what intellectual tradition you are working in. None of them involve competitive bloviation.

3) One of the big ongoing debates in the field is about the “aca-fan” – the appropriate relationship between research and play. There are good theoretical and methodological reasons for a range of positions within the field, from my own (I play much less now that games are my job) to “I study my favorite games so I can spend more time with them.” What isn’t at stake is a sense of insecurity.

4) We do have insecurity about establishing our relationship with other disciplines. Where do we publish? What methodologies do we value? Whose terms do we engage with? As we’re forming a field, what will that field look like? And let’s be blunt: a lot of that insecurity is driven by access to resources, like students and money. We tend to try to justify ourselves to people we think can help us pay the bills.

5) Point 4 has a positive side effect: we spend a lot of time reading and thinking about prior work in other disciplines, and engaging with it seriously. We also work to make our work intelligible across disciplines. This is, to say the least, not what I see in pseudo-academic discussions of RPGs.

6) We care a lot about making our work actionable and accessible. In my field you can’t get a paper accepted unless the contributions to the field are clear to the point where someone else could pick up the work if need be.

6a) Contrary to stereotype, the more prestigious the program, the more emphasis is put on generalizability, accessibility, and clarity. Deliberate obscurity is seen as the last refuge of the incompetent. (One of my departments is ranked #1 worldwide, and the other does not participate in ranking programs but is known to be a top-notch place, so I have some insider insight into this.)

7) We make people get up to speed with knowledge, both in games and in other relevant disciplines, before we take their attempts to contribute to the conversation seriously. This avoids blowhard syndrome, or at least weeds it down to those blowhards willing to make a long-term commitment to engaging with other people’s work before they can posture about how smart they are.

Basically, the “heavy academic lifting” you’re describing isn’t.