Game World Phenomenology

 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...

I got some new hardware, and it's pretty much focused on Nintendo. And thats because Nintendo makes the kind of games I enjoy (Zelda, Mario). So at home I have a Wii U and a Switch, and at my office I have a Switch and a PS3. I also play on my iPhone, iPad and Mac. But no PS5, no Xbox and no gaming PC (so none of the major platforms). This might be a problem and then I might have to get some more hardware, but I'm planning to compensate that with Twitch. Twitch is a livestreaming platform for (mostly) gamers playing game and talking. It makes it really easy to see games in action, and by not playing myself I can see more and take notes although I miss some central aspects of gaming itself. I'm a viewer and not a player.  I am thinking about this now; I do not plan to write about playing but about being in the game world. There is a difference. But perhaps I need to play more varied games. On the other hand I feel very little difference considering the "being-in-the-gam...