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.

 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...