Game World Phenomenology

  In the last few days I have turned 59 and have spent some time slowly reading my dissertation in the printed version, sitting in my armchair with the book in my hand and a cup of coffee and some cookies nearby. It has been a very rewarding and enjoyable experience; I am very happy with my book and its contents, but I have yet to see how my defense goes and what others have understood from it. Today is Wednesday and I have just finished reading it, tomorrow I have a lot of work to do and on Friday I will see if I pass and become a Doctor of Art History.   There are a few passages I wish I had written more clearly, but not many. There are a few mistakes, especially ones that I should have noticed while proofreading. I have made a list of errors, which follows. Only one item in that list is a real error in my opinion, which is the lack of a proper page reference in a footnote. Most of the other errors I probably would have noticed if I had hired a proofreader. So I’m a little p...

 You can now download my dissertation through the Lund University research portal:  https://portal.research.lu.se/sv/publications/experiencing-gameworlds-understanding-zelda-and-mario-through-the I will defend it on May 16, 13.15 at LUX (Allhelgonavägen 3, Lund, Sweden) room C121.

I'm doing my own proofreading, it's a bit disconcerting but it seems to be working well. I do it in three steps: First I looked at the manuscript using InstaText (for spelling, grammar, and tone), then I slowly read a hard copy, and today I read a new, revised hard copy in a way that's new to me. I loaded it into a screen reader (I use Microsoft's Immersive Reader through Canvas because I'm so used to Canvas). It's amazingly effective at catching small errors in spelling and wording - and I notice inconsistencies in the use of some terms. I listen with headphones and follow the manuscript with a red pen in my hand. I highly recommend this method, though not as a main proofreading method, but as a comfort when the need to reread the damn manuscript feels like a burden. In less than a week the manuscript goes to the printers, I'm on track!

 The final seminar is an opportunity for an external reader to review as much of the dissertation text as possible. I had a more or less complete manuscript, although a few of the later sections are still unfinished but at least there’s a clear direction for where they’re headed. It turned out to be a very productive seminar. Robert Willim, who reviewed my text, was a highly insightful reader and gave me plenty of constructive feedback on how to improve it. Several other colleagues also contributed valuable comments. Overall, this final seminar was extremely helpful in guiding me toward the finishing touches of my dissertation. I’m hoping for a defense in the spring, but for that to happen, I need to revise and write quite a bit over the next two months. I’ll have to carve out the time amidst my other responsibilities. Although having a final seminar can be stressful, this one was very rewarding. I’m grateful to all my colleagues who attended, and to those who couldn’t make it but ...

I am approaching an important milestone on the way to my defense and completing my dissertation. In six days, I will hold my final seminar, where a competent reviewer will go through my text and provide a public critique. This serves as a kind of dress rehearsal for the actual defense. I have a reliable reader, so I feel relatively confident. However, the goal of the seminar is to identify issues that can be addressed before everything is finalized. In addition to my main reader, I also have a professional philosopher reviewing the sections of my dissertation that deal with phenomenology, ensuring I receive solid criticism from that perspective as well. These past few days, I’ve been reading through my manuscript from beginning to end. I’m finding numerous errors—typos, changes that weren’t made correctly, missing images and illustrations—small things that can be fixed. But larger concerns about the overall structure and my reasoning trouble me more. For instance, I discuss a specific ...

 The vacations have begun, and that means I have to get back into full swing with my dissertation. It's not easy, because I'm still hesitating to produce a final version. I think this has to do with two things: firstly, the need to stop expanding and instead link all the pieces together, and secondly, self-doubt, which leads to procrastination. I am consciously working against both. So my main goal this week is to reread some parts of the key texts I've been using and start revising and rewriting by Friday. I've also made a final backup copy of my text so that I have a copy to look through for things I may have deleted too quickly. These strategies are aimed at med confidence and a good restart on full-time writing.

 So I had my last seminar for this semester and yesterday I had a check-in with my supervisor Max. There are two conclusions from this: First, that my text is slowly coming together and I have a handle on my work, and second, that there is still a lot of work to be done, including revising the immersion/flow chapter, which needs a better structure than what I presented at the seminar. Looking at my numbers, I still have 16 days until the first draft should be finished, and I've written 75% of the planned text. That's a good standing; there are two short and planned chapters I want to write in those 16 days, but the rest of the unwritten text needs to be finished when I'm a good bit into the revising and rewriting phase. So I maintain that I've almost reached my goals for this semester of writing and that I can finish the manuscript in a couple of months while working full time. Right now I'm reading Martin Jay's 1988 essay "Scoptic Regimes" in Hal Fost...

  The seminar went well. I took the first hour to explain the thesis and how the pieces I sent fit into a bigger picture, and I took another five minutes to show videos of the games so that everyone had my material ready. The criticism of my text was then quite extensive, but very well-intentioned. It was not clear and not structured properly. I had already received this in writing from my supervisor, so I was not surprised. At the same time, there were several good suggestions as to how I should structure the material. One participant was particularly knowledgeable about Lefebvre and de Certeau and had a lot of good insights that I can benefit from, and overall there were a lot of good suggestions from everyone present. Restructuring the text and writing it again should take a few days. Tying together all the threads that are in the script takes weeks, but it can be done. One thing I have realized with alarming clarity: It's difficult to accept written criticism. When I received t...

 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...

 This week there's major maintenance on the rail line I usually ride to work, so I've decided to stay home and write instead. It's a bit of a retreat, although I do enjoy going to Lund and meeting people. Now I wake up, have breakfast, go to my desk and start working. It's been a long time since I've talked to anyone about how I write, so I'll share it here. I've a clear outline in Scrivener so I can see where I need to write. Right now it's the middle part of my thesis, which is about phenomenology and how you think about experiences with art and games. Some days I can just sit down and write, other days I've to do a lot of reading. A day of reading is usually followed by a day of writing, frantically backtracking my reading, checking sources to make sure I understand them, and adding proper footnotes. I usually need breaks to eat lunch, take a walk, or go to the gym. A normal day would include both. And in the evenings, when I'm too tired to wr...

 Day after day I edit texts that I have already written. It takes so long, mainly because I have to add many perspectives. I am glad that most of the time I can remember where the ideas came from and that I have the books in my library at home. I spent some time today reading parts from these books while editing: Gombrich, EH,  Art and illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation .6. ed, London, Phaidon Press, 2002. Flusser, V,  En filosofi för fotografin .trans. Jan-Erik Lundström, Göteborg, Korpen, 1988. Flusser, V,  Into the universe of technical images .Electronic Mediations, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Bolter, JD, & R Grusin,  Remediation : understanding new media .Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999. Good thing is that it all gets better, and it comes together. I'm feeling fine about this book.

Summer vacation is over and now the really intense writing semester begins. In 129 days I should have a manuscript ready for a final seminar. If the seminar goes well, it will be on to the final adjustment and production of the book and for the dissertation. I am very much looking forward to this and have started the work by doing a lot of reading. Mostly Martin Kemp's The Science of Art , but also some phenomenology and Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat and Pixels on game development processes. I plan to spend this week reading (there's a two-day kick-off event at work that I also have to attend) and next week going over what I have written so far. Then there will be new material again. Almost everything I read, or at least everything I notice about what I read, makes a connection that makes these game worlds more understandable, it's like I am seeing little pieces of a bigger picture but can not yet grasp it all. About a week ago I came up with a good title for the book,...

 Back to writing and editing! In a week I will present something written for the first time in a seminar at my faculty. So I am working on the text I have written so far to make it better and more readable. A colleague gave me a tip about Instatext ( https://instatext.io/ ) and I think it is a very useful tool to improve my written language skills. It's not possible to integrate it with Scrivener, and it's not very good at handling footnotes - but it's good for editing my text. I also need to read some phenomenological readings to show where I am going, so a first pass with two scenes, one from Zelda and one from Mario, and three basic structures of phenomenology from Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology. Every time I feel lost or do not know what to do next, I sit down and read something by Sokolowski or Gladden for an hour, and then my mind starts working again. They are very good books that make me think in the direction I want.

 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...

Very soon I will begin a very busy couple of weeks teaching Art History. But today I had an opportunity to spend some time reading Matthew Gladden's Phenomenology of the Gameworld and it is a very rewarding read. I'm not going to review it here, I will need to work may way through it and use what I find i writing instead. But I was struck by one early thought. A lot of writing on games describes them as stories or journeys, and a journey in a game is usually a story along a distance of gameworld paths. Gladden makes this a lot more complicated an interesting by talking about this from the standpoint of both game developer and game player. And he writes that the understanding of a complex combination of a lot of different parts of a game's construction and the perception of it distills down to one smooth easily graspable picture (p. 34). And that's where I begin, and where my thinking about gameworlds differ from almost all the writers I've read this far. I see a pi...

I did the most simple thing yesterday, I entered "Game World Phenomenology" first into Google and then into LUBsearch (the search engine of my university library in Lund). Google had one interesting hit; there is a book about game design with the title Phenomenology of the Gameworld: A Philosophical Toolbox for Video Game Developers by Matthew E. Gladden. Not available at any libraries I have access to, so I have ordered it from a bookstore. Not really sure it will be all that useful, since I already am reading and using Salen & Zimmermans Rules of play : game design fundamentals which seems to be one of the most quoted books on game design fundamentals. Google also had a few other hits I will look into, mostly on methodology of game studies. LUBsearch on the other hand provided more interesting results, but many of them have a heavy sociological focus and that is far outside the scope of my reading/writing. But I have a few articles at hand in Zotero for reading later...

 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 ...