What am I writing about?

 There is a pleasure in being in a game world, an escapist pleasure of being somewhere else, in a more interesting world where you have more agency and more capabilities. This pleasure is not new, nor specific to games, on the contrary most art has this potential for escapism; paintings, novels, theatre, opera and cinema have all been mediaforms where other worlds have been crafted. Games have one more thing than the predecessors; games are interactive and can at times provide a very open structure for how to perceive oneself to be inside these other worlds. A painted world is static but lets the viewer wander over it's surface. A narrative story is linear and we must walk through it on the path given by it's creator. Games can be very open and allow for many different paths through a world, and the gamer has agency in it. 

So I will look at the effect of being in the game world with a phenomenological eye and comparing it to ways of being in worlds made through painting, scenography and simliar visual arts. This far I have two ways into this; Mikel Dufrenne The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience and some selected essays by Gernot Böhme on the phenomenology of atmospheres. I am thinking about how a gamer is sitting in front of a screen and still experience the effect of being and acting in another world. It is a strange position that begs for exploration and discussion.

This discussion needs to be bookended by two other takes on the gameworld experience. Before it I will write about games as technical images. This gives me an opportunity to explore how the world is built and how we can understad it in comparison to other kinds of images. Vilém Flusser is my main inspiration here; Into the Universe of Technical Images.

The other bookend is about narrative structures, on time in games and how it too is part of the building of a gameworld. This will start with the idea of the Chronotope as formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin in the essay Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel. 

Image - World - Time seems a resonable division of the phenomena of Gameworlds to me right now. So I'm going for it. There is som much more written about games, narration, worldbuilding etc and I will need to incorporate more ideas here. But the theoretical skeleton is Flusser - Böhme - Bakhtin. 

A preliminary research question would be something like "how can we write about and make sense of ways of being in a game world"? Is that good enough? Time will tell.