Game World Phenomenology

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 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...

 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 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'm doing a lot of teaching this time of the year, and there is Christmas t enjoy. And I need to produce a few new lectures. But I have also set myself a deadline for a seminar at the beginning of February and I need to write a good part of my chapters on experiencing gameworlds. On small problem here is that I need a lot of writing on the materiality/production of games tjat leads up to this - but for reasons I have decided to have a seminar on that part of my text in May.  I really need to test ut my most important ideas about phenomenology and games from the start. If that part is understandable and good then I can work out the rest from there. Christmas is (almost) over, or at least it's Monday, and i was going to start writing and I had nothing to say. So I sat down to read Sokolowskis Introduction to phenomenology some more and I was back in the flow of thinking about games. There are som many ways of disseminating the experience of being in another world ta get from...

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...

 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...

 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...