Now what I would really like to do would be to find some way to leverage high fantasy fiction and poetry to elevate high fantasy interactive entertainment to the same academic stature as the former.

What I find annoying about academia--and especially about academia at such schools as my alma mater--is an implicit but persistent insistence to allow high fantasy fiction and poetry, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene, but not high fantasy interactive entertainment, such as Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls Online, or The Lord of the Rings Online.

One of my dreams in college (back at Yale) was to find some way to convince the college president to allow creation of a Department of Narratology and a corresponding Department of Ludology--the former to study plots in high fantasy interactive entertainment, and the latter to study the mechanics of high fantasy interactive entertainment.

However, in order to achieve this, it is essential to raise to overall quality of high fantasy interactive entertainment from being focused on gore and violence to being focused on beauty, intricacy, and subtlety in plots and settings. In other words, less DOOM and Quake, and more Myst and Skyrim.

Fortunately, finally, some recent titles do seem somewhat promising: Alan Wake, Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls Online, and The Lord of the Rings Online all seem to offer deep, intricate plots with abstract symbolism.

Now, when most titles in the entire field of high fantasy interactive entertainment become similar to such titles, the ground becomes ripe for creating a Department of Narratology at some accredited university.

That Department of Narratology can then serve as a stepping-stone for other Departments of Narratology at other universities, and eventually, at schools of the caliber of my alma mater across the world.

That is when a Department of Narratology at Yale University (my alma mater) might finally be realized.