I’ve just finished reading Pavel’s Fictional Worlds, and apart from giving me a better grounding in possible world theory, particularly the logic of the philosophical model than I was previously aware from reading Van Looy’s application of the theory to videogames, Pavel makes several points about the boundaries between the fictional and actual world that are of interest to my own research.

More specifically Pavel writes on page 89 –

“In order to make fiction function smoothly, the reader and the author must pretend that there was no suspension of disbelief, that travel to the fictional land did not occur, and that the fictional egos have in a sense always been there, since phenomenologically they came to life together with the imaginary realm.”

I think this short quote raises an interesting question on the problem of immersion, or at least its garden variety suspension of disbelief form. To paraphrase Pavel, he is essentially arguing that the player and the game author(s) have to pretend that they didn’t pretend to be transported into the game-world. Leaving aside the figure of the ‘fictional ego’, might it be that the player, rather than performing these mental acrobatics, experiences this phenomena of transportation or presence as the result of some process other than immersion? Undoubtedly, many players do feel drawn into the fictional world of the game that they are playing – its an interesting problem that I may include in my thesis chapter that expands on my IE2007 paper.

While there sounds like some interesting papers at the International Conference for Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) which was held last month in the Canary Islands, i’m particularly interested in the Tangible Play Workshop from last years conference in Honolulu (what is it with HCI conferences and island paradises?).

I’ve only had a brief look through the proceedings thus far, but there seems to be a strong emphasis on collaborative games, often based around interactive tables such as Philip’s Entertaible. Lots of good examples of, and articles about tangible games that for some reason have not found much prominence the more general game studies literature.

IGF 2008 is on next week and if like me, you’re not going to be in San Francisco, you can still peruse the 173 entries, as well as the 125 student entries .

I’m Intrigued by one entry simply called Sumo, a two player game played on a single keyboard, where the aim is to get your opponent to stop pressing three keys on the keyboard by whatever means necessary. So its basically a computer game where the real action is taking place off-screen in the physical interaction between the two players.

CMP, publishers of Gamasutra, have also established a independent games focused site, the cleverly named Indiegames.

Some projects using the Wiimote with some software by Johnny Chung Lee. I particularly like the headtracking example, as rather than moving the Wiimote, it instead tracks your movement through a head-mounted sensor bar.

Phenomenologyonline.com appears to be a site authored by Max van Manen, which includes a bibliography of recommended readings, glossary, as well as a section of short biographies of a range of selected scholars.

Of particular interest is a section called Inquiry, a conceptual mapping of the various aspects of phenomenological inquiry. As someone getting into the area this is very useful, It seems sometimes that there are as many orientations and understandings of phenomenology as there are phenomenologists!