1. I should be more grateful for scholars like Leonard who are willing to call out the video game world and its inability (or specifically, fear?) to address race and gender in equitable ways.

2. I should be more grateful that people are willing to explore and contribute to rich conversations about games and to develop metagaming theories and articles.

3. I should try to remember that for some people (read hetero-cis white men–4Chan’s elite) the representation of intersectionality in games can be easily ignored and, when it is acknowledged, unappreciated for the designers’ efforts.

4. I should be more generous to articles published in 2006 that only had a handful of games to use in their examples because gaming had yet to become the universally recognized cultural artifacts worthy of quality production and interpretation.

5. I should be excited for the affordances that video games give to writing and to classrooms as texts, which unlike their literary, artistic, or musical counterparts, offer an excellent combination of various arts to allow for engagement and access to social/political/historical issues on several subversive levels.

Perhaps I didn’t know these things when I first began learning about video games in academic contexts with Dr. Sam, but now they are ingrained in my experience with and around games. Is the conversation still happening in our journals in the same ways it was almost 10 years ago? Has academia become fatigued with WoW (as Patrick feels) and we should just wait for the next wave of academic articles? Since I don’t know if recent games (2010-2015) are being discussed in academic contexts and since academia is SLOW, maybe I am just being knit picky. I’m sure Dr. Sam will tell me.