Three academic practices
1) Cultural Studies, the Birmingham School (Today: department of Cultural Studies and Sociology). My main inspiration from this area is the eclectic relationship to methodology, and the choice of more than one, and the interest in the commonplace and the non-glamourous.

2) Reader-response theory: I view the user's activity as meaningful, and study how the players relate to the gameand how the game relates to the players. Perhaps decontructivism is of the past, but there are still useful points here for me.

3) Ethnographic studies: This is more about methodology than about theory. but I still need to relate to Ethnography as well as Action Research, to understand the pitfalls in my approach to information-gathering.