Game engines, sound, music

 This week I did a lot of reading and wrote some important parts. I wrote more thorough descriptions of the gameplay in Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey for my introduction, since that was one of the things my reader wanted in the Gothenburg seminar. I started with the chapter on sound and music in games, and it's fascinating. There's so much technology in the texts I've read, and I can fit so little of it into my text, that I had to make a note telling myself to write only what was related to my main themes of experiencing the gaming world and not digress. I got a number of books from the library and use some of them to support arguments in what I have already written. Jesper Juul's "Half-real: video games between real rules and fictional worlds" was a great read, but it seems like everywhere I use it I have to argue against him. Well, I suppose it's good for me to do something different than well-known ludologists (he argues that he's not that deep into ludology, but I disagree, quelle suprise!). Anyway, he's a very good researcher, so it's a very useful book.

I originally wanted to look into game engines, especially Unity since it's free and there are many tutorials on youtube. I haven't done that yet, but when I was looking at what a "sound engine" is, I found the documentation for the Unreal engine and it seems very useful. I'll probably look at the documentation for Unity as well, just to see if there are any big and clear differences (my gut tells me there aren't). I'm about halfway through the amount of text I think I need. But the unwritten parts are now full of notations and references, so the work should go faster. 70 days left to write. Maybe I'll finish in time.