Game World Phenomenology

 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...

 It's been a while since I have updated. There's been a lot of regukar work, and that takes all the time away from writing. But I have been working a little bit on the first chapter, where I want to combine technologies, art history and perspective drawing, film and editing, games and interactivity into a unified idea about coherently rendered three-dimensional spaces. It's far from finished, but I need to finish it this weekend because I am giving a seminar on it next week. I am also taking another 2-week course in research ethics; that's the last 3 Hp I need for the courses. It's working out in the end, but I wish I had a little more time this semester because after the summer, it's a long, fast run to the finish line. Oh yeah; new Zelda game tomorrow! Tears of the Kingdom :D

So I have this countdown web thing that keeps track of my self-imposed deadline, and it tells me that I have 300 days left today to read, think, play, and write. When I look at my manuscript in Scrivener, I see that I have written 8456 words (that's 18%!) of the 46,000 words I set as my goal. Neither the time nor the word count are set in stone, and the deadline refers to when I want to have the manuscript ready for a final seminar, so there may be more to do. It may look like a lot of text, but it's only the first draft and needs work. But I know I really enjoy rewriting, so I want to have a good chunk written in rough draft format before my fall of uninterrupted writing time begins.

 I had some time to myself at work today so I started the first part of my book, which involves explaining the technique of creating games for art historians. It's a bit complicated to hit the right tone and level of detail in these explanations. Polygons, skyboxes, shaders, models, assets, and all of that is such a familiar part of gaming culture. It's well known to many young people fighting their partens ion order to get a new graphics card. And yet, it's completely unknown to many academics in the humanities. So I want to explain how the images are constructed without sounding too much like a beginners textbook. In the end I want to show similarities and differences between traditional painting and game world building. Visually a game can  look so much like a painting, drawing or photograph and yet it is another beast alltogether But I am off with another part of the book and that feels great; it seems like I am in control of the process so far.

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.

 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'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...

After Reading a lot of Harden, who is great at writing about games and gameworld from a player and developer point of view, I decided to read some basic phenomenology. And In Hardens introduction he recommended Robert Sokolowskis Introduction to Phenomenology. So I've been reading that too and it is a great tool; I'm starting to get a grasp of what I can and can't do with phenomenology and it's clear to me that as a method it is what I need but at the same time it's just the beginning of an interpretive process.  It has given me a clear perspective on one aspect of my two chosen games right from the start; Zelda BotW is an open world and the gameworld seems limitless, it spreads out en embraces me as a player inviting me to walk or ride long distances. In Mario Odyssey each little part of the world is clearly limited like a small intricate construction (a building, a cabinet, a piece of jewelry?). Mario Odyssey is a large world too - but in a very different way. I...

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...

 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.      ...

I got some new hardware, and it's pretty much focused on Nintendo. And thats because Nintendo makes the kind of games I enjoy (Zelda, Mario). So at home I have a Wii U and a Switch, and at my office I have a Switch and a PS3. I also play on my iPhone, iPad and Mac. But no PS5, no Xbox and no gaming PC (so none of the major platforms). This might be a problem and then I might have to get some more hardware, but I'm planning to compensate that with Twitch. Twitch is a livestreaming platform for (mostly) gamers playing game and talking. It makes it really easy to see games in action, and by not playing myself I can see more and take notes although I miss some central aspects of gaming itself. I'm a viewer and not a player.  I am thinking about this now; I do not plan to write about playing but about being in the game world. There is a difference. But perhaps I need to play more varied games. On the other hand I feel very little difference considering the "being-in-the-gam...

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 ...