Game World Phenomenology

 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 ...

 I just sent off a complete 1:st version of my thesis for my final seminar on October 2. I have written at least a first draft of each chapter and I have all the screenshots of the games I need. That's actually only 4 days after my intended deadline (and I did send out a version without the discussion , conclusion and usability parts in time!). To get the images, I played for 8 hours straight yesterday. It was not as easy to play for that long as it used to be, but I had fun. I am not going to post this draft here, it's just for the seminar.

 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...

 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 had my seminar, with a short text (9 pages) on the technical side of images; from renaissance perspective to film editing to interactivity in games; my three main stations. It was about creating three-dimensional worlds where the viewer wants to be present in one way or another, and trying to sort out all the different technical aspects that have been taken from whence into the visual machine that is games. It's a bit complicated to write a text that should be understandable to both gamers and art historians without being too basic for either of them. Hopefully I will be able to write something that makes the field a little more understandable for both. The seminar went very well, with lots of good feedback, from details to inconsistencies that found their way into the text. For some reason, I do not always manage to maintain a stable terminology, so now I need to revise the manuscript to use player, gamer, and viewer in a coherent way. Anyway, I am ready to keep writing beca...

Two things happened. 1. my seminar with my art history colleagues here in Lund has taken place. It was good, and I got some valuable ideas to work on. The schedule is getting a little tight here; I need to use the input and work on a completely different part of my text for a seminar in May. And during that time I will be on two field trips, first to Berlin and then to France, which has nothing to do with my work. But I'll get it done, because I have to have it done before the writing semester starts in the fall. 2. We had a two-day writing retreat in Båstad in my department, not to work on our own stuff, but to write texts for an anthology on "art and response" I am not sure if I should participate (due to time constraints), but I have 1500 words as the beginning of an essay on perception and bodily response to playing Mario Kart, so I probably will. I need a little more time to write, and I still need to read up a bit on the response side of my thesis here, but that...

 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.