Play Smarter Not Harder: Developing Your Scholarly Meta

Abstract

Publication medium is a choice that is always made and often forgotten. This game makes its arguments through interactivity and play, stressing that no medium is neutral and that medium choice shapes knowledge production. You play as a scholar submitting an article for publication: choosing your medium, researching, writing, and revising. Through successive plays the game develops the concepts of crunch and flow and explains how to develop a new scholarly meta (an e-sports term for strategy) that makes research more productive. The game takes roughly twenty minutes to win, unlocking a debug mode that makes its arguments more explicit.