Gaming the Field: The International Journal of Learning and Media

Katie Salen

The launch of a new MIT Press journal focused on advanced research in digital media and learning is imminent, and the voices of games, learning, and society scholars need to be heard! This fireside chat is intended to outline the mission of The International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM), solicit ideas on ways to best exploit its rich-media, online format for those doing work with games and virtual worlds, and to discuss ways the journal can help support GLS work and research. This is a rare opportunity to help shape a publication that will play a role in advancing the state of the games and learning field, and will likely become a key resource for those looking for evidence of just where this field is headed.

The International Journal of Learning and Media provides a forum for scholars, researchers and practitioners to examine the changing relationships between learning, games, and other media across a wide range of forms and settings. Its focus is particularly, but by no means exclusively, on young people; and the editors understand learning in broad terms, to include informal and everyday contexts as well as institutions such as schools. IJLM is especially interested in the broader social and cultural dimensions of these issues, and in new and emerging media technologies, forms, and practices. As this implies, it is particularly keen to promote international and intercultural exchange and dialogue in the field and encourage contributions from a variety of academic disciplines and perspectives, including papers from practitioners and policy-makers.

Through scholarly articles, editorials, case studies, and an active online network, IJLM seeks to provide a premier forum for emerging interdisciplinary research and debate, and to help shape the development of the field around the world. IJLM will publish contributions that address the theoretical, textual, historical, and sociological dimensions of media, games, and learning, as well as the practical and political issues at stake. While retaining the peer review process of a traditional academic journal, it also provides opportunities for more topical and polemical writing, for visual and multi-media presentations, and for online dialogues. This includes the publication of work in non-traditional, media-rich formats that might embed games, video, audio, and non-linear reading.

The journal is supported through the MacArthur Foundation’s program on Digital Media and Learning, and will be published by MIT Press. The journal builds on six ‘state of the art’ volumes of research in the field to be published shortly by MIT Press and will begin publication in online form (with print copies of articles on demand) in early 2009. All submissions will be peer reviewed and evaluated based on originality, technical and/or research content/depth, correctness, relevance, and readability.