Flow and Wölfflin

 The seminar with the musicologists went very well, it's good to get perspectives from outside. I was warned about some dichotomies in my text (which I had taken from the literature I had read), which was actually much less binary and more on a scale, so I was able to adjust that. Some of my concerns about the descriptions of music and sounds were brushed aside, they work well here. And some of the discussion ran down rabbit holes beyond what I will be writing about. But even that made me realise one thing: the two games I chose are special; they're examples of exceptional game design with an emphasis on world-building, and not all games are, and not all players play those kinds of games. The types I'm avoiding here, namely FPS and indie games with artistic aspirations, were more popular with some participants. I have to mention that in my introduction.

Another outcome of the discussion with Max was that I read Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception with regard to the idea of the body schema, which was very helpful, and that I read Henrich Wölfflin's 1889 thesis Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture. The latter book provided me with the comment from a rather game-oriented friend: "Oh yes, 1886, that was a great year in gaming".

Finally, the phenomenon of flow was mentioned several times in the seminar with the musicologists. I hadn't even thought about it before, even though I had seen it in many game books. Flow is mainly concerned with the design of games and I thought that it was of less interest to my studies, as I am concerned with experiences of the gameworld. This is still true, but I had to write a short chapter to explain this, including explaining the different levels of game reception by the player: a narrative level, a game level and a phenomenological level. This soon resulted in three modalities of the game experience: a modality of storytelling, one of play and one of place. And this in turn led to a simplification of the last part of my book, the part about space, time and narrative structures. Things fell into place. Great.

So what I take away from all of this is: 1. It's complicated to write about things across subject borders, you will lack a proper research environment (this is the problem of mixing game studies and art history). That shouldn't stop you. And 2. present parts of your unfinished text to as many people and different places as possible, that will have a positive effect.