Now there is a date for my final seminar, October 2, and a reader. So I just set a day to send him my manuscript and it gives me 100 days to finish writing and editing my book. I think that's doable.
I defended my dissertation on Friday, and it went great. I was incredibly nervous leading up to it, but once the discussion started, I relaxed and actually had a really good time. I got a lot of kind words, especially for bringing together art history and video games in the way I did. Of course, there was also some critique, and rightly so. While I naturally have my own views on these points, I’ll share a few reflections here. Just a heads-up: these are based on my own memory, and I didn’t take notes during the defense, so others might remember things a bit differently. That said: I passed, and the examining committee was unanimous in their approval. That’s what matters most! 1. The theory chapter is weak Yes, fair enough. A lot of the theory I work with shows up later in the book, rather than being neatly presented in the introductory chapter, as the traditional dissertation format dictates. Typically, you’re expected to lay out the theory first and then “apply” it in the analysis. I ...
I went to a graduate student meeting in Gothenburg and had my text read by a couple of people outside my department as well as fellow students. One thing was very clear: it's difficult for art historians to write about games, because they do not play. I have to do a lot more explaining. I also have to structure my text much more. More work, but I already know what I have to do!
There is a pleasure in being in a game world, an escapist pleasure of being somewhere else, in a more interesting world where you have more agency and more capabilities. This pleasure is not new, nor specific to games, on the contrary most art has this potential for escapism; paintings, novels, theatre, opera and cinema have all been mediaforms where other worlds have been crafted. Games have one more thing than the predecessors; games are interactive and can at times provide a very open structure for how to perceive oneself to be inside these other worlds. A painted world is static but lets the viewer wander over it's surface. A narrative story is linear and we must walk through it on the path given by it's creator. Games can be very open and allow for many different paths through a world, and the gamer has agency in it. So I will look at the effect of being in the game world with a phenomenological eye and comparing it to ways of being in worlds made through painting, scen...
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