Game World Phenomenology

I am approaching an important milestone on the way to my defense and completing my dissertation. In six days, I will hold my final seminar, where a competent reviewer will go through my text and provide a public critique. This serves as a kind of dress rehearsal for the actual defense. I have a reliable reader, so I feel relatively confident. However, the goal of the seminar is to identify issues that can be addressed before everything is finalized. In addition to my main reader, I also have a professional philosopher reviewing the sections of my dissertation that deal with phenomenology, ensuring I receive solid criticism from that perspective as well. These past few days, I’ve been reading through my manuscript from beginning to end. I’m finding numerous errors—typos, changes that weren’t made correctly, missing images and illustrations—small things that can be fixed. But larger concerns about the overall structure and my reasoning trouble me more. For instance, I discuss a specific ...

 I just sent off a complete 1:st version of my thesis for my final seminar on October 2. I have written at least a first draft of each chapter and I have all the screenshots of the games I need. That's actually only 4 days after my intended deadline (and I did send out a version without the discussion , conclusion and usability parts in time!). To get the images, I played for 8 hours straight yesterday. It was not as easy to play for that long as it used to be, but I had fun. I am not going to post this draft here, it's just for the seminar.

 The vacations have begun, and that means I have to get back into full swing with my dissertation. It's not easy, because I'm still hesitating to produce a final version. I think this has to do with two things: firstly, the need to stop expanding and instead link all the pieces together, and secondly, self-doubt, which leads to procrastination. I am consciously working against both. So my main goal this week is to reread some parts of the key texts I've been using and start revising and rewriting by Friday. I've also made a final backup copy of my text so that I have a copy to look through for things I may have deleted too quickly. These strategies are aimed at med confidence and a good restart on full-time writing.

 The editing has begun, I have spent most of the day getting started. My work consists of five parts, the first is the obligatory preamble (method and theory and stuff), the second is about images, the third about experience and the fourth about time and space in games, the last is end stuff (conclusion, bibliography etc). Today I've revised the introductions to parts two and three (part four is next) to remove a lot of superfluous stuff that just makes everything more confusing. So not only have I revised a few pages and finished two introductions, I've also clearly delineated what will be cut from the rest of the manuscript over the next few weeks. Great start. I've seen that Riven is getting a remake. If it comes to the Nintendo Switch, I'll play it again, because I really liked it the first time.

Now there is a date for my final seminar, October 2, and a reader. So I just set a day to send him my manuscript and it gives me 100 days to finish writing and editing my book. I think that's doable.

 Today it was time to report to my doctoral supervisor Max. He asked me to summarize the three main parts of my text, and we talked about them and some more specific problems in some chapters, as well as writing techniques. All in all, it was a very good conversation. I wish I'd had more time to revise now, especially since I'd taken the whole Easter week off to do it, but unfortunately I was tired for a few days so I didn't really rewrite much. But I did have time to read my text and think about its structure and how to get a better flow in the argument. And this check-in was a continuation of that, so I'm hoping to get back on track with rewriting. We're also planning the date and opponent for my final seminar in the fall, so the goal is getting a little closer. I'm pretty sure I'll have to spend a lot of the summer rewriting, but that's to be expected.

 So I took a break for a while because I had to teach art history full time. But now I'm back on the dissertation track, and I'am currently reading my manuscript (most of it is actually written now) and planning some thorough revisions. Before I started rereading it, I thought it was all awful and useless. Such thoughts are common for anyone who really needs to sriously. But on re-reading, I found that my ideas were good and interesting enough. However, they are somewhat disorganized and need to be reworked to make my arguments clearer and hopefully stronger. There is also a lot of feedback to take into consideration. That's what I need to do this spring, you better work .

Some writing fatigue. After many months of writing and editing, I'm in a bit of a dip. I'm reading a lot and looking at my manuscript, but writing very little at the moment. I'm not panicking, I'm on schedule, so I'm really in no rush. It might even be good to slow down for a few weeks.

 So I had my last seminar for this semester and yesterday I had a check-in with my supervisor Max. There are two conclusions from this: First, that my text is slowly coming together and I have a handle on my work, and second, that there is still a lot of work to be done, including revising the immersion/flow chapter, which needs a better structure than what I presented at the seminar. Looking at my numbers, I still have 16 days until the first draft should be finished, and I've written 75% of the planned text. That's a good standing; there are two short and planned chapters I want to write in those 16 days, but the rest of the unwritten text needs to be finished when I'm a good bit into the revising and rewriting phase. So I maintain that I've almost reached my goals for this semester of writing and that I can finish the manuscript in a couple of months while working full time. Right now I'm reading Martin Jay's 1988 essay "Scoptic Regimes" in Hal Fost...

  The seminar went well. I took the first hour to explain the thesis and how the pieces I sent fit into a bigger picture, and I took another five minutes to show videos of the games so that everyone had my material ready. The criticism of my text was then quite extensive, but very well-intentioned. It was not clear and not structured properly. I had already received this in writing from my supervisor, so I was not surprised. At the same time, there were several good suggestions as to how I should structure the material. One participant was particularly knowledgeable about Lefebvre and de Certeau and had a lot of good insights that I can benefit from, and overall there were a lot of good suggestions from everyone present. Restructuring the text and writing it again should take a few days. Tying together all the threads that are in the script takes weeks, but it can be done. One thing I have realized with alarming clarity: It's difficult to accept written criticism. When I received t...

 Next Thursday it's time once again for a seminar on a part of my doctoral thesis. This time I have a slightly more theory-heavy text to hand out, so that I can also see my colleagues' reactions to that. I'm not going to publish the text here, mainly because I don't want Google to swallow up an early draft and spit it out again at some point. So I won't publish anything until the book is finished, but then it will be available under a very permissive Creative Commons license (CC BY, if all goes according to plan) and as both a printed book and a downloadable pdf (or maybe ePub, or both). There's not much to say about the content of the seminar text, it's all about immersion, flow, space and game modalities. All the fun stuff. I hope to write a report on the seminar afterwards.

 The seminar with the musicologists went very well, it's good to get perspectives from outside. I was warned about some dichotomies in my text (which I had taken from the literature I had read), which was actually much less binary and more on a scale, so I was able to adjust that. Some of my concerns about the descriptions of music and sounds were brushed aside, they work well here. And some of the discussion ran down rabbit holes beyond what I will be writing about. But even that made me realise one thing: the two games I chose are special; they're examples of exceptional game design with an emphasis on world-building, and not all games are, and not all players play those kinds of games. The types I'm avoiding here, namely FPS and indie games with artistic aspirations, were more popular with some participants. I have to mention that in my introduction. Another outcome of the discussion with Max was that I read Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception with regard to...

 I wasn't feeling so well a week ago, maybe it was a cold or just writing fatigue, so I took 4 days off from writing. It was worth it. I finished the location and immersion chapters and had to rearrange them. Immersion went from the first part that is about the materiality of games to the second part that is about phenomenology, the thirds part is about narration and time. The divisions between them is getting clearer and clearer. And I have the feeling that the quality of what I'm writing is increasing. There are more overviews and a back and forth between the different chapters, but there's still a lot to do. Some of the chapters I wrote first need to be thoroughly reworked in connection to what I'm writing now. But that's planned for later. Right now I want to finish a first draft of the entire text, for which I've set December 21 as my deadline and which still seems doable. Today it's time for another seminar, which is about the first draft of the chap...

 I just had a meeting with my supervisor, who had read my manuscript to this point, and it went very well. I do not know why, but I always think that meetings like that end in disaster, along the lines of "This is terrible, what the hell are you doing?" but that never happens. I got good feedback and it was great to see how well he understood my text so far. He had a few points that I really need to address. One of them is my tendency to use a lot of empty intensifiers that just need to be edited out. No problem, I know they are there, but they always seem so reasonable when I first write them, and then I see later that they do not do anything or even weaken my text. Another thing is two long paragraphs describing my game examples, which are too long and need to be closer to my arguments. This is more difficult; I wrote them because I know art historians do not play games, so I wanted to do a thorough introduction early on; but he's right and there must be a way to shor...