After what feels like ages, I was finally able to identify my discomfort with parts of this book as I read Larry Beason’s “Grammar Interventions in Gaming Forums”: it comes down to a matter of ethos, I think, or can at least partly be categorized in that way. I was excited to read this chapter, having been an active member of dozens of communities over the past few decades, both as editor/writer/moderator and forum user, and the setup for the chapter made me think I might see more comparison between the way errors are perceived in writing in the classroom and in online forums (a connection that is made here, but thinly). But I was immediately distracted by some things, such as the reference to the comment sections of Joystiq and other sites as forums (they are not), and comments such as the rarity of locking threads (where? Some forums have heavy mod hands and there are locked threads, multiple, daily). These loose generalizations seem to have been made for an academic audience, one who may not be as familiar with the intricacies of gaming forums, but there doesn’t seem to be enough explanation here for an audience completely unfamiliar, and there’s too much generalization and in fact incorrect information for anyone who is familiar. I also felt like there was little difference between what he considered a “moderate” intervention (which was insulting but not directly so) and a more severe intervention (which was more directly insulting), and that seemed to derail the spectrum of his argument for me, as there was no real range presented (as I read it). This could also be due to the fact that I have seen and even participated in hundreds of these interactions over the years.  In the end, I found myself questioning then nearly everything Beason said; I could not concentrate on his conclusions or opinions because I did not find him particularly credible. How well did he know forums? Gaming communities? Did he only use the examples listed? Because Gamespot’s forums are notoriously terrible examples of community, which would really skew results, I fear.

I wonder now, thinking back over this book, if I’ve felt that way about many of the chapters, if they exist in some gray space that isn’t quite deep enough to really talk about gaming, and isn’t quite presentation of solid scholarship. It feels odd for me to critique something in the latter sense, as I am so early in my career, but when compared to many of the other pieces I’ve read even in this class, not to mention others, this seems very thin in places, with research that often doesn’t cut broadly or deeply. But could it be that I’m in that place “gamers” so often occupy, where slight errors or misrepresentations or disagreements are used to upend an entire argument that is otherwise well-researched? Can I just not get past Beason’s reference to a comment section as a forum? Was it indeed a forum in which every article served as the first post? As a former contributor and editor for Joystiq, I can say that in my time there, we never referred to them as such (though there was discussion at one point of developing forums). But does my own background too heavily influence the way I read these pieces?