[Jason Thompson speaking]: Though I worked on Aristotle’s Assassins initially—this was the kind of educational game, and they were trying to compress, what, a year’s worth of humanities coursework into one game? I think that was the main idea.  And someone had found out that I spoke Greek and I don’t think anyone had or I think Ken was the closest they could get, which was very good. So I think that was kind of the invitation. And I love Aristotle. I’m going to be talking about Aristotle today. Love Aristotle. And I was intrigued, so I …. But I actually never thought about games as objects for serious study, I never considered the rhetoric of videogames, I never made a game outside of a basic fake Zork I had made on my Atari, what, 800? So it was kind of all new and then the main contribution I did past that was working on the archive just a little bit. 

So that, once I got my job in Wyoming, I started my own. And started collecting and archiving and buying and assembling, disassembling and cleaning. And now I have my own lab where students work on games, graduate students mainly. And my undergraduate courses on rhetoric and video games, and senior … it’s a literary theory class and film, and another class on adaptation. So it’s kind of a lab space where they get to, yeah, play the games but from a scholarly persp… vantage. And my theory is that, yeah, how can you not … how can you study when you can’t have a viable … way to interact with it. So I stay away from emulation; everything’s original. And right now the library’s small, but it’s got about a thousand games and I’ve got about 35 consoles. So that’s the kind of lab space. 

And beyond that I collaborated on their edited collection, the Computer Culture Reader, on an essay I wrote with Ken and Judd on digital archiving, their challenges of it, on this themed issue of … what was it? Media and Culture journal, M/C Journal. We wrote on the idea of obsolescence and theorizing obsolescence, which was fun. I invited … they answered our … anyway, they’re in Marc and … our collection; they wrote a piece on pedagogy, kind of how your … how difficult pedagogical applications are of video games and that they shouldn’t be used, really.