Building a Community of Participants

In considering issues with recruitment in participants for present (and future) games studies ethnographies we began considering our emerging community Wednesday 5a7 symposium. How can we draw on this community effectively? What are the implications of developing, maintaining and mediating this group for/with the 9at least partial)intent of gathering participants? How would this method of recruitment effect studies? What are the implications in anthropology/with ethnographic methods of building a community to study? What advantages and disadvantages are there? Could this ever be considered ethnography? Does what we are doing need to be ethnography? What are the limitations in setting up this pool of self-reflexive participatory/collaborative subjects?

We have started the process of establishing a grad student association to build the Wednesday game night community and will continue to consider these questions as well as others related to the field of games studies as we play and discuss.