I went to grad school with a cadre of guys who were like the subjects in this episode, so thanks for the flashbacks. I think they all washed out, since there's no evidence online of any of them defending a dissertation,
but if they did, I'd absolutely link them for you. never mind,
found one. Here's the table of contents, for the interested:
Relatively tame just seeing it on the page, but if you spent any time around these guys at all, that's all they would talk about - how they were totally going to turn gaming into a legitimate field of study for their academic careers. There's also a guy from my university who wrote
an entire dissertation about Bioshock, doing basically the same spiel.