Game World Phenomenology

 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...

 I just had a meeting with my supervisor, who had read my manuscript to this point, and it went very well. I do not know why, but I always think that meetings like that end in disaster, along the lines of "This is terrible, what the hell are you doing?" but that never happens. I got good feedback and it was great to see how well he understood my text so far. He had a few points that I really need to address. One of them is my tendency to use a lot of empty intensifiers that just need to be edited out. No problem, I know they are there, but they always seem so reasonable when I first write them, and then I see later that they do not do anything or even weaken my text. Another thing is two long paragraphs describing my game examples, which are too long and need to be closer to my arguments. This is more difficult; I wrote them because I know art historians do not play games, so I wanted to do a thorough introduction early on; but he's right and there must be a way to shor...

 Things are coming together. I am going to have to stop reading more new books, but I think it's a good time to stop with that kind of input anyway. I now have notes for almost every little part of my text and lots of references to work with. Today I spent much of the day with Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck, a book I have been aware of for a long time. It's strange compared to my own writing. She sees everything from a perspective guided by literature and narrative. So in many ways she's "wrong" to me, and then again she's not. I have to reconcile that perspective with my own and with all the others. Many ways into the material supposedly make for better research, now I will find out if that is true. This Friday I am meeting with my thesis advisor to discuss the shape of my work so far. That should be exciting. 65 more days of uninterrupted writing.

 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...

 I went to a graduate student meeting in Gothenburg and had my text read by a couple of people outside my department as well as fellow students. One thing was very clear: it's difficult for art historians to write about games, because they do not play. I have to do a lot more explaining. I also have to structure my text much more. More work, but I already know what I have to do!

 Today was a great day for writing, I got so much done and it's still not over. Right now I'm figuring out how to get the part on phenomenology in shape so I can ask my supervisor to read it. I'll probably save the part on atmospheres for later, but the rest should be done shortly. Then it's time to get into sound and music and immersion. And I really need to get started on the part on narration. There's so much to do, but I have the map and I know roughly where I want to go. It's fun. I think I'm still on schedule with my writing, but there's still a lot to do. I hope to have many more days like this one. Being old and having worked as an art history teacher for many years, I have some insight into the work process. When I was accepted as a graduate student, I shared a computer with other students in my department. Books had to be checked out through the university library, and most of the time they had to get them for me from other libraries. Journal a...

 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.

I've been writing, mostly technical stuff about how games work. I have an interesting problem, which is how to explain games to art historians and the art historical theory of visuality to gamers without boring them. Anyway, it feels like I'm writing and writing and doing nothing. I'm still mostly concerned with phenomenology and haven't yet connected it to everything else, except for some thoughts on perception and perspective. I've read a lot of books and thought a lot about play worlds, visual storytelling, and image experiences, but it's hard to connect them. I did a very rough revision of parts of my text, including some hastily compiled texts that I sent to a national seminar for doctoral students in art history to read aloud in early October. I didn't put much effort into making the revision a coherent text, because that would be a big waste of time. I have 101 days left to write, and I still think it will work. But sometimes I feel the stress of ...

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,...

 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.