too much information

This week I'm attempting to expand my IASPM conference paper into an article to send off to a journal. It's not easy, because I have much too much to say and an ever-growing collection of fascinating source material. I've had well over 400 responses to my survey on the gameplay experience (plus follow-up correspondence with a sample of respondents). I've held many gameplay observation and interview sessions on campus this summer, each of which yielded a 30-45 minute recording of a player saying insightful things about Guitar Hero and Rock Band. My wonderful summer research assistant, Kate, has tagged dozens and dozens of relevant online articles, messageboard posts, and YouTube videos. And now I need to write a 10,000-word article, not much more than twice the word count of the conference paper. (And less than the word count of the transcript of my interview with Harmonix's Rob Kay.) I wish I could just publish everything in my files with a big tag cloud and leave the interpretation to each reader. Sadly, that's not the path to tenure.

So, apologies for my infrequent posts. A few links to chew on: a new high-end drum controller designed to work with Rock Band 2; yet another newspaper article insisting that players aren't making music (the NY Times doth protest too much?); and a piece about my research in the Providence Journal (headline not of my devising).