Game World Phenomenology

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 ...

 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.

 Next Thursday it's time once again for a seminar on a part of my doctoral thesis. This time I have a slightly more theory-heavy text to hand out, so that I can also see my colleagues' reactions to that. I'm not going to publish the text here, mainly because I don't want Google to swallow up an early draft and spit it out again at some point. So I won't publish anything until the book is finished, but then it will be available under a very permissive Creative Commons license (CC BY, if all goes according to plan) and as both a printed book and a downloadable pdf (or maybe ePub, or both). There's not much to say about the content of the seminar text, it's all about immersion, flow, space and game modalities. All the fun stuff. I hope to write a report on the seminar afterwards.

 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...

 I wasn't feeling so well a week ago, maybe it was a cold or just writing fatigue, so I took 4 days off from writing. It was worth it. I finished the location and immersion chapters and had to rearrange them. Immersion went from the first part that is about the materiality of games to the second part that is about phenomenology, the thirds part is about narration and time. The divisions between them is getting clearer and clearer. And I have the feeling that the quality of what I'm writing is increasing. There are more overviews and a back and forth between the different chapters, but there's still a lot to do. Some of the chapters I wrote first need to be thoroughly reworked in connection to what I'm writing now. But that's planned for later. Right now I want to finish a first draft of the entire text, for which I've set December 21 as my deadline and which still seems doable. Today it's time for another seminar, which is about the first draft of the chap...

 This idea of Christmas writing is working! I'm usually spending 1-4 hours each day, usually early on, reading and writing. I get 500-1000 words a day this way and thats good. When I don't know where to take my text next I go back to reading. At the moment it's all phenomenology; Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology , Gladden's Phenomenology of the Gameworld and Norberg-Schulz's Fenomenet plats (no idea what that is called in English). All three gives me so much to think about and to try to explain in writing. This is my first attempt at writing through this material so it is probably a bit disjointed an lacks coherence, but I know from experience that I need to get my ideas down first and that re-reading and editing, deleting and rewriting in parts is what will make the text work in the end. I have set myself a deadline for this part of the text to the beginning of February, I have a seminar on it planned February 10th, and I need to write and edit a bit...

 So I had to make an outline for my thesis and send to my supervisor, who also is my colleague, and I might just as well put it here too. So I can go back and compare to what it became when done. That is to say, this is all very much a preliminary outline. 1.       Frontmatter: a.        Introduction b.        Goals and aim c.        Previous research d.        Theory e.        Method f.         Limitations 2.        Thesis: a.        Games as technical images i.       Perspective   and 3d rendering ii.       Procedural   images iii.       Game   production iv.       Flusser’s   technical images b.        To be in the gameworld i.       Experiencing   vs. playing ii.      ...

 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...