Game World Phenomenology

 This week there's major maintenance on the rail line I usually ride to work, so I've decided to stay home and write instead. It's a bit of a retreat, although I do enjoy going to Lund and meeting people. Now I wake up, have breakfast, go to my desk and start working. It's been a long time since I've talked to anyone about how I write, so I'll share it here. I've a clear outline in Scrivener so I can see where I need to write. Right now it's the middle part of my thesis, which is about phenomenology and how you think about experiences with art and games. Some days I can just sit down and write, other days I've to do a lot of reading. A day of reading is usually followed by a day of writing, frantically backtracking my reading, checking sources to make sure I understand them, and adding proper footnotes. I usually need breaks to eat lunch, take a walk, or go to the gym. A normal day would include both. And in the evenings, when I'm too tired to wr...

 Day after day I edit texts that I have already written. It takes so long, mainly because I have to add many perspectives. I am glad that most of the time I can remember where the ideas came from and that I have the books in my library at home. I spent some time today reading parts from these books while editing: Gombrich, EH,  Art and illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation .6. ed, London, Phaidon Press, 2002. Flusser, V,  En filosofi för fotografin .trans. Jan-Erik Lundström, Göteborg, Korpen, 1988. Flusser, V,  Into the universe of technical images .Electronic Mediations, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Bolter, JD, & R Grusin,  Remediation : understanding new media .Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999. Good thing is that it all gets better, and it comes together. I'm feeling fine about this book.

I've been writing, mostly technical stuff about how games work. I have an interesting problem, which is how to explain games to art historians and the art historical theory of visuality to gamers without boring them. Anyway, it feels like I'm writing and writing and doing nothing. I'm still mostly concerned with phenomenology and haven't yet connected it to everything else, except for some thoughts on perception and perspective. I've read a lot of books and thought a lot about play worlds, visual storytelling, and image experiences, but it's hard to connect them. I did a very rough revision of parts of my text, including some hastily compiled texts that I sent to a national seminar for doctoral students in art history to read aloud in early October. I didn't put much effort into making the revision a coherent text, because that would be a big waste of time. I have 101 days left to write, and I still think it will work. But sometimes I feel the stress of ...