From Susana Pajares Tosca, on the understanding of "ludology".
As one of the Gamestudies editors, I have to say that it is really disappointing how an attempt at actually making games into a serious academic discipline has been confused with colonisation from a certain perspective that everybody calls "ludology". When we asked that games be treated as games, it was a call for people to stop considering them as a subset of another academic discipline (literature, psychology, sociology, you name it). This is not to mean that we cannot use the tools of all these sciences, and others, to look at a multifaceted object that is so fascinating from so many points of view. We want integration, but games should be the focus, not the excuse. That was the whole point.
And now I find that a lot of the papers dealing with games at DAC feel the need to position themselves in the ludology-narratology debate (which I personally consider terribly boring at this stage), and generally to speak against the "ludologists" of Game Studies. This is sad. Look at the journal (not only the varied academic board or editorial board, but specially the articles), you will find about everything, from genre questions to education to narrative questions to interactivity questions to ludology to interviews with designers to AI... I am sorry, but this is not a religion not a school of thought, what unites all the articles we publish is that the focus is games, not an affiliation to a weird sect.
And please send us your papers about all other sorts of stuff that we haven't had the chance to look into yet. As long as the focus is games, we certainly will be happy to consider them. :-)
Susana Pajares Tosca