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 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...
Today it was time to report to my doctoral supervisor Max. He asked me to summarize the three main parts of my text, and we talked about them and some more specific problems in some chapters, as well as writing techniques. All in all, it was a very good conversation. I wish I'd had more time to revise now, especially since I'd taken the whole Easter week off to do it, but unfortunately I was tired for a few days so I didn't really rewrite much. But I did have time to read my text and think about its structure and how to get a better flow in the argument. And this check-in was a continuation of that, so I'm hoping to get back on track with rewriting. We're also planning the date and opponent for my final seminar in the fall, so the goal is getting a little closer. I'm pretty sure I'll have to spend a lot of the summer rewriting, but that's to be expected.
Comments
Post a Comment