What games?

 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 fanbase. Both from long series of games.

The pros are many, they are easy to play, they are well known, they are typical for their kind of game, they are "classics" for a lack of a better word. They are also examples on two different game worlds. Similar enough to make for good comparisons and dissimilar enough to cover a lot of game design choices.

The cons are also many. I have to choose not to talk about game history or historical development of technique. I don't write about what is often seen as "serious gaming"; the big titels for PS5, Xbox or PC; no Read Dead Redemption, Witcher, Fortnight, Minecraft, FIFA etc. I can do that another time. There are of course more thing in games than in the ones I'm thinking about choosing, but I can't really write one book about everything.

The main concern here is the question "Will this choice produce an interesting and useful investigation?" and I think it will. It's easy to explain why I compare these two games (same company, platform, audience and time), whereas a comparison between say Mario Cart 8 (Nintendo Switch and Wii U 2009-) and Doom II (PC 1994) would be a very troubled one - there is no reason for why those two specific games from all of game history should be my subject.

In art historical terms I think of it like comparing works from two artists working in the same time and place. It's a more robust starting point.

But I need to play a lot of Super Mario Odyssey now, I'm not at all as far into it as I am after many years with BotW. And perhaps there is an article about Mario Cart 8 somewhere in me.

Super Mario Odyssey


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