Hi, everyone.

First Person Scholar is going on hiatus. What you’re reading right now is the final posting until we establish its future directions. FPS will remain available as an archive for everyone to access and use.

The publication, which has succeeded wildly over its twelve-year existence, has reached the point where rethinking and restrategizing have become inevitable and where a break in the schedule is needed.

I am the originator of FPS and the faculty member at Waterloo responsible for it as part of my role as Executive Director of The Games Institute (of which FPS is a publication).

I am deeply proud of the legacy that FPS has built and in complete awe of the dedication, drive, and effort of the Editors-in-Chief under which FPS has thrived. Steve Wilcox, Emma Vossen, Alexandra Orlando, Betsy Brey, Chris Lawrence, Patrick Dolan, and Sabrina Sgandurra: thank you for the enormous and brilliant job you all did.

Thank you to the numerous people who have worked with the EICs over the years. I applaud your productivity and, even more, your insistence on very high quality. You have amazed me. Please refer to the “People” page on this website for a comprehensive list of FPS Alumni who have contributed to the publication over the years.

Thank you to both Jen Whitson and Gerald Voorhees, who both served as FPS faculty advisors for many years.

I am also proud that FPS proceeded and succeeded almost entirely without my input: this was a PhD student publication sans pareil, and it is all the better for it.

Over the past few years, FPS has come up against a variety of difficult restraints. Money is always one of them, of course, and likely always will be. But the major one has to do with the simple fact that student-run things at universities depend entirely on having students to run them.

First Person Scholar has relied almost entirely on graduate students (mostly PhD student) enrolled in Waterloo’s English Language and Literature department, and, like many universities, applications for our grad programs have dropped. More importantly, applications for PhD students wanting to immerse themselves in game studies have dropped significantly. Most of this kind of trend is cyclical, but currently at Waterloo we just don’t have the number of students we need to keep going as we were. So it seems a good time to take that break and reconsider.

Thank you all for reading FPS, for contributing to it, for putting it on your syllabi, and for spreading the word about the strong work it’s been showcasing.

I look forward to letting you all know when we’re back up and running, and the form that the publication will take at that time.

So let’s consider this the end of FPS 1.0, not the final end of a great publication. FPS 2.0 will be different, but it will carry on the already rich tradition.

Neil Randall
Executive Director
The Games Institute
University of Waterloo
https://uwaterloo.ca/games-institute/
nrandall@uwaterloo.ca