The Sting of Rejection

Seems the British Journal of Aesthetics rejected my recent submission, "Can a Rollercoaster Be Art?", and for quite bad reasons this time. There's no sign of the high quality peer review I received last time, indeed, no sign of any engagement with my argument at all. It's a shame as it's a great paper, and I don't have another home for it. It's strange to be told "I just don't think that this author is familiar with the BJA or the work that tends to be published in the journal" in a paper that cites the British Journal of Aesthetics no fewer than eight times. I'm afraid I am forced to conclude two things: that the reviewer did not understand my argument of the connection between 'game' and 'art' as aesthetic concepts, and that all the discussion of 'game' was therefore lost to them because it did not seem relevant. That smarts. But it's also a reminder that we have in no way won the battle over the artistic status of games: we just satisfied ourselves with the arguments we had.