Game World Phenomenology

This is not the actual book, but a dummy for a final check before the printers start production. There were no errors that needed to be corrected. So there will be typos (a heading slipped down a line, for example), and while that's annoying, it's not relevant enough to stop the process and delay everything. I'm sending out the invitations for the defense and the party and hope everyone gets them. I can't do anything more with the book, it will be frozen in time with ink on paper. My opponent and the committee have already received an advance PDF copy, a public one will be available in Lucris shortly and I'll post a link to it here. 3-4 years of work is now behind me, it's hard to say when it actually started, two years of actual writing. Not bad.

 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 no...

 So I had my seminar, with a short text (9 pages) on the technical side of images; from renaissance perspective to film editing to interactivity in games; my three main stations. It was about creating three-dimensional worlds where the viewer wants to be present in one way or another, and trying to sort out all the different technical aspects that have been taken from whence into the visual machine that is games. It's a bit complicated to write a text that should be understandable to both gamers and art historians without being too basic for either of them. Hopefully I will be able to write something that makes the field a little more understandable for both. The seminar went very well, with lots of good feedback, from details to inconsistencies that found their way into the text. For some reason, I do not always manage to maintain a stable terminology, so now I need to revise the manuscript to use player, gamer, and viewer in a coherent way. Anyway, I am ready to keep writing beca...

After Reading a lot of Harden, who is great at writing about games and gameworld from a player and developer point of view, I decided to read some basic phenomenology. And In Hardens introduction he recommended Robert Sokolowskis Introduction to Phenomenology. So I've been reading that too and it is a great tool; I'm starting to get a grasp of what I can and can't do with phenomenology and it's clear to me that as a method it is what I need but at the same time it's just the beginning of an interpretive process.  It has given me a clear perspective on one aspect of my two chosen games right from the start; Zelda BotW is an open world and the gameworld seems limitless, it spreads out en embraces me as a player inviting me to walk or ride long distances. In Mario Odyssey each little part of the world is clearly limited like a small intricate construction (a building, a cabinet, a piece of jewelry?). Mario Odyssey is a large world too - but in a very different way. I...

 Had a good talk with my colleague and supervisor about my plans for my thesis, and we made a tight schedule to get things going. And he came with some good input, and most important was that I need to decide what my empirical material will be, and to do that fast. So what games do I want to write about and how should I think about these choices? I have a short-list of possible games, but it's too varied in many ways. Some are on consoles, others on computers, some are old other are new. And I realised that I will need to write about my chosen games a lot. It's not a good idea to compare and talk about many different games all through the text. So right now my list is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey . Two recent and very well received mainstream Nintendo games. One open-world exploration, the other level-based and almost linear but full of references to various types of gameplay, very meta at times. Two games aimed at kids but with a large adult...

 Today I had some spare time from other obligations so I could do some thinking and reading. Even with just an hour to spare I read and sorted som essays on Atmospheres edited by Tonino Griffero. There i found a few good notations on the historical development of atmospheres as a subject within phenomenology as well as notes on when the term gets useful in writing. I also found a few essays in the collection that I really don't need to read; after a few pages it was clear to me that I had no use for them. That too is work. I also read the introduction and a few short chapters in Monroe C. Beardsley's Aesthetics  and while I will read more there I think it's way to much philosophy to be useful for anything but background knowledge. There's really not a lot of time in this process for deep background reading. I also spent ca 15 minutes playing Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar, 2001), remembering what a joy that game is. Driving around in a small low-res city and listening ...