Academe is a closed circuit process. You have to qualify for the club, and club members decide who is in the club. The club is not always open to alternative voices but if you are an academic you should remain open to creative impulses. Those creative impulsive are often first noticed and expressed by outsiders because they are outside the club. They notice things that the club members miss.
The blog in this particular effort is one that is apropos for the book itself. Outsiders, gamers, and Internet savvy persons are some of the best and creative minds who have applied themselves to the topic. They should be involved.
I wish the author well.
The professor is working on a book about digital fiction and video games and many of these people are outside academia but they have intriguing insights into the subject matter.
It is in this vein then that Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California San Diego, announced plans to post portions of his forthcoming book, Expressive Processing, on the Grand Text Auto blog to seek peer review and before the book is published by MIT Press.