Game World Phenomenology

Very soon I will begin a very busy couple of weeks teaching Art History. But today I had an opportunity to spend some time reading Matthew Gladden's Phenomenology of the Gameworld and it is a very rewarding read. I'm not going to review it here, I will need to work may way through it and use what I find i writing instead. But I was struck by one early thought. A lot of writing on games describes them as stories or journeys, and a journey in a game is usually a story along a distance of gameworld paths. Gladden makes this a lot more complicated an interesting by talking about this from the standpoint of both game developer and game player. And he writes that the understanding of a complex combination of a lot of different parts of a game's construction and the perception of it distills down to one smooth easily graspable picture (p. 34). And that's where I begin, and where my thinking about gameworlds differ from almost all the writers I've read this far. I see a pi...

 Had a good talk with my colleague and supervisor about my plans for my thesis, and we made a tight schedule to get things going. And he came with some good input, and most important was that I need to decide what my empirical material will be, and to do that fast. So what games do I want to write about and how should I think about these choices? I have a short-list of possible games, but it's too varied in many ways. Some are on consoles, others on computers, some are old other are new. And I realised that I will need to write about my chosen games a lot. It's not a good idea to compare and talk about many different games all through the text. So right now my list is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey . Two recent and very well received mainstream Nintendo games. One open-world exploration, the other level-based and almost linear but full of references to various types of gameplay, very meta at times. Two games aimed at kids but with a large adult...

 So I had to make an outline for my thesis and send to my supervisor, who also is my colleague, and I might just as well put it here too. So I can go back and compare to what it became when done. That is to say, this is all very much a preliminary outline. 1.       Frontmatter: a.        Introduction b.        Goals and aim c.        Previous research d.        Theory e.        Method f.         Limitations 2.        Thesis: a.        Games as technical images i.       Perspective   and 3d rendering ii.       Procedural   images iii.       Game   production iv.       Flusser’s   technical images b.        To be in the gameworld i.       Experiencing   vs. playing ii.      ...

I got some new hardware, and it's pretty much focused on Nintendo. And thats because Nintendo makes the kind of games I enjoy (Zelda, Mario). So at home I have a Wii U and a Switch, and at my office I have a Switch and a PS3. I also play on my iPhone, iPad and Mac. But no PS5, no Xbox and no gaming PC (so none of the major platforms). This might be a problem and then I might have to get some more hardware, but I'm planning to compensate that with Twitch. Twitch is a livestreaming platform for (mostly) gamers playing game and talking. It makes it really easy to see games in action, and by not playing myself I can see more and take notes although I miss some central aspects of gaming itself. I'm a viewer and not a player.  I am thinking about this now; I do not plan to write about playing but about being in the game world. There is a difference. But perhaps I need to play more varied games. On the other hand I feel very little difference considering the "being-in-the-gam...

I did the most simple thing yesterday, I entered "Game World Phenomenology" first into Google and then into LUBsearch (the search engine of my university library in Lund). Google had one interesting hit; there is a book about game design with the title Phenomenology of the Gameworld: A Philosophical Toolbox for Video Game Developers by Matthew E. Gladden. Not available at any libraries I have access to, so I have ordered it from a bookstore. Not really sure it will be all that useful, since I already am reading and using Salen & Zimmermans Rules of play : game design fundamentals which seems to be one of the most quoted books on game design fundamentals. Google also had a few other hits I will look into, mostly on methodology of game studies. LUBsearch on the other hand provided more interesting results, but many of them have a heavy sociological focus and that is far outside the scope of my reading/writing. But I have a few articles at hand in Zotero for reading later...