Academics without borders

Abstract

Games research is a growing interdisciplinary field. As with many interdisciplinary fields, early career faculty often confront many questions concerning the tenure process and evaluation of their interdisciplinary work. While there have been several publications on guidelines or best practices for evaluating interdisciplinary research, addressing Tenure and Promotion policies and processes for faculty as well as units and chairs, none specifically discusses tenure and promotion practices and guidelines for games research. Wardrip---Fruin and Mateas, in a report dating back to 2014 [17], outlined some challenges and recommendations for supporting work within the area of computational media. This report was the first to unpack some issues faced by computational media researchers with some recommendations to the community, funding agencies and institutions, to support this growing and evolving research area. However, this report did not target the tenure and promotion process, specifically. Now that the community is maturing with many faculty already undergoing or have undergone tenure and promotion, more publications and discussions are needed to support the diverse nature of this research area and its junior faculty. This workshop is then a first step to address this issue within the community. This article contributes to this discussion by outlining previous publications' recommendations and guidelines for inter-disciplinary research that are also applicable to the games research area. Additionally, the article also outlines specific unique aspects for games research with some take-aways of challenges and action items that we can take as a community to address these challenges.