Hi all,

Today we were talking about gaming communities in IMS211 (Game
Studies), and one of the students made the argument that the world of
game development and game fandom is highly blurred these days due to
the rise of the internet and the low barriers for entry into
conversation with game devs, journalists, scholars.  I thought I'd be
Mr. Clever and, while he was speaking, tweeted this to my followers:

http://twitter.com/#!/scd/status/55271465460838401

I said: "Hey, if you work in games, can you tweet hi to my class
(#ims211)? I wanna make a point about Twitter and the game dev world."
 The point being that everyone is highly connected via Twitter within
this industry, and that fans and creatives have an unprecedented means
of interaction within Twitter.  One or two people tweeted back on that
hashtag immediately, but over the course of the past hour it's...
exploded.  Check out this hashtag search:

http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23ims211

As I write this, probably 100 tweets within just past hour, from folks
ranging from San Francisco to Germany to Brazil, from the president of
the International Game Developer's Association to BioWare to game
design faculty elsewhere.  From folks just saying hi, to folks
advertising that they're hiring game design students.  I'm dumbfounded
and humbled that my little tweet got this kind of response -- it's
quite amazing.  I've gathered a new 20-30 followers in the past hour.

I don't know if others experience this kind of community using social
media in their own branches of interactive media, but there's no
reason why they can't.  My students were amazed by this, and it's
something that we can easily use to connect students -- on the fly! --
with practitioners and scholars out there.  And job opportunities,
potentially.  So, consider this a plea to get on Twitter and try this
out yourself, if you're not already on it, it can be an amazing way to
connect our students with the larger world.

--sean

Sean C. Duncan
   Armstrong Professor of Interactive Media Studies
   Assistant Professor, School of Education, Health, and Society &
   Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies
   Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056
   [log in to unmask] / se4n.org