Terra Nova: Terra Nova Welcomes Mia Consalvo

Oct 14, 2005

Terra Nova Welcomes Mia Consalvo

Here at Terra Nova, we're concerned about quality, and we've maintained a facade of it by regularly inviting new authors whose erudition and skills are great enough to distract the uncareful reader from the obvious inadequacies of the founders. That is the case once again as we welcome Mia Consalvo to our happy band. She is an associate professor in the School of Telecommunications at Ohio University as well as the director of Graduate Studies for the School (for which, as a fellow DGS, I must extend my heartfelt sympathies). She is also Director of Research for Ohio's new GRID Lab (Game Research and Immersive Design) which will have a public arcade and an academic space for the study of games; we suspect her primary duties in that capacity are to make sure all of the games are playing properly, all the time. Mia is unlike the most recent spate of Nobel recipients in that she got tenure for writing about television (Star Trek) and videogames - a very good thing indeed. This just in from the Where is Mia Now Department: She has resisted the siren song of WoW, opting instead to remain in Final Fantasy XI, where you may have seen her for the past year and a few months. She's done research in Japan (this past spring) on Japanese game players, research which still stubbornly refuses to write itself up. And other than Ren, there's probably no one here who has spent more thinking and writing about cheating in games. She's got a piece forthcoming (later this year) in New Media & Society called "Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture" (of cheating??), and she's on the steering committee of the group Women in Games International (wigi.org). What a great day for TN. Welcome Mia!

ecastronova on Oct 14, 2005 in Blatant Self-Promotion | Permalink