[Judd Ruggill speaking]: I’ll be a little bit selfish and say that I would recommend that you come to the Albuquerque conference that we do. We have a great group of folks who’ve been coming for years and years from a wide variety of fields. We have scholars but we also have designers that come.   
[Ken McAllister speaking]: This is the American Culture Association Popular Culture Association conference.  
[Judd Ruggill speaking]: SW … PA … PACA. Southwest Popular and American Culture Association. And it’s a … a very collegial and supportive group of folks, very welcoming, We have a range of people from beginning graduate students to deans, and everyone in between. And folks are … not only collaborative and  convivial, but they really are committed so everybody goes to everybody’s session and everybody works hard collectively to have a dialogue. It’s a fantastically productive, productive group. All kinds of scholarship just emerges from one year to the next. So that’s the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association. I’ll also put in a word for the Game Studies Special Interest Group at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. It’s a great group. It’s another area where you can, you know, rub shoulders with folks that are, are sort of the elder statesmen and women of the field like Mark Wolf is sort of the main organizer but you can also see graduate students delivering papers for the first time. It’s a nice mix, like the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association, and everybody’s just interested is all.
[Ken McAllister speaking]: Um, kind of along those lines but more on the professional side I’d recommend, if you can find one near you, a chapter, a student chapter, say, of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). That’s a great connection to make because Judd mentioned the study, teach, build kind of philosophy we have at LGI. The IGDA is a place where you can definitely get the build part and you'll have people in that chapter … you’ll have guests, special guests, who are professional developers, artists, engineers, lawyers, who all come and talk to you about being in the industry. But they'll also have student designers and faculty who are in those areas too so you’ll really get a sense of what it means to build a game which is actually a very different thing than from studying a game. Those are two very different experiences of the very same thing so I’s highly recommend that. The other thing is, and I think we would probably agree with this, is that you should play games. One of the things that we see, … when we are editors of journals and we’re reading a lot manuscripts that have come in, or we’re reviewing grant applications or we’re hiring interns or at conferences is that there is a very discernible sort of level or set of levels of people who are here, including faculty. And the ones who are almost … who are always at the top, the top tier, the best performers, the most interesting research, the best teachers are the ones who come in and they say, “I play games. I don't apologize. I play a lot of games.” And I think that’s probably the best and maybe even the easiest way to begin a career or at least a period of your professional life as a game scholar is actually to play a lot of games. Get a sense of the diversity. Maybe you’ve always played RPGs. Great, you’re good at RPGs. Go play some resource management games, play some business games, serious games, platformers...
[Judd Ruggill speaking]: Shooter…
[Ken McAllister speaking]: Build up your experience. That’s what we do, that’s how we learn about what’s out there.