Game World Phenomenology

So I have this countdown web thing that keeps track of my self-imposed deadline, and it tells me that I have 300 days left today to read, think, play, and write. When I look at my manuscript in Scrivener, I see that I have written 8456 words (that's 18%!) of the 46,000 words I set as my goal. Neither the time nor the word count are set in stone, and the deadline refers to when I want to have the manuscript ready for a final seminar, so there may be more to do. It may look like a lot of text, but it's only the first draft and needs work. But I know I really enjoy rewriting, so I want to have a good chunk written in rough draft format before my fall of uninterrupted writing time begins.

 I had some time to myself at work today so I started the first part of my book, which involves explaining the technique of creating games for art historians. It's a bit complicated to hit the right tone and level of detail in these explanations. Polygons, skyboxes, shaders, models, assets, and all of that is such a familiar part of gaming culture. It's well known to many young people fighting their partens ion order to get a new graphics card. And yet, it's completely unknown to many academics in the humanities. So I want to explain how the images are constructed without sounding too much like a beginners textbook. In the end I want to show similarities and differences between traditional painting and game world building. Visually a game can  look so much like a painting, drawing or photograph and yet it is another beast alltogether But I am off with another part of the book and that feels great; it seems like I am in control of the process so far.

Two things happened. 1. my seminar with my art history colleagues here in Lund has taken place. It was good, and I got some valuable ideas to work on. The schedule is getting a little tight here; I need to use the input and work on a completely different part of my text for a seminar in May. And during that time I will be on two field trips, first to Berlin and then to France, which has nothing to do with my work. But I'll get it done, because I have to have it done before the writing semester starts in the fall. 2. We had a two-day writing retreat in Båstad in my department, not to work on our own stuff, but to write texts for an anthology on "art and response" I am not sure if I should participate (due to time constraints), but I have 1500 words as the beginning of an essay on perception and bodily response to playing Mario Kart, so I probably will. I need a little more time to write, and I still need to read up a bit on the response side of my thesis here, but that...

 Back to writing and editing! In a week I will present something written for the first time in a seminar at my faculty. So I am working on the text I have written so far to make it better and more readable. A colleague gave me a tip about Instatext ( https://instatext.io/ ) and I think it is a very useful tool to improve my written language skills. It's not possible to integrate it with Scrivener, and it's not very good at handling footnotes - but it's good for editing my text. I also need to read some phenomenological readings to show where I am going, so a first pass with two scenes, one from Zelda and one from Mario, and three basic structures of phenomenology from Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology. Every time I feel lost or do not know what to do next, I sit down and read something by Sokolowski or Gladden for an hour, and then my mind starts working again. They are very good books that make me think in the direction I want.