Had an interesting adventure taking our cat over to a friend’s house before we had a rental inspection this morning. We never actually applied for permission to have a pet, largely because we didn’t plan on having one. A lost cat walked into our house late one night last winter, and in the end it turned out that for whatever reason his owners didn’t want him anymore. Yes, my housemate and I were essentially adopted by a cat – I question his judgement. = )

Unfortunately its disrupted my writing today. I tend to write better in the mornings, so I’ve been trying to get into the office a bit earlier and getting stuck into the old word processor, which is a bit difficult when you have to play ‘cat courier’. Luckily I got a bit extra done yesterday morning, so I’m not too far behind finishing the draft of the first section of my ‘literature review’ chapter, which is sort of an overview of Dourish’s framework for embodied interaction. Its been a pretty boring thing to write, as its primary role is too identify the actual meat of the chapter, phenomenology and ecological psychology, so it’ll be good to move on.

Anyway, the key lesson I learned today is that taking a cat onto a bus results in fielding a lot of questions from old ladies. And a confused cat.

Reflecting on the difficulties I’ve had writing this week last night, I realised that at least one of my problems is that I didn’t have an audience in mind. Potentially that audience will be the select club of myself, my supervisor, my examiners, and my mum, but the examiners are the ones I’m pretty sure I should focus on, at least that’s my hunch. I don’t know why this didn’t cross my mind earlier, but my writing practice is somewhat, I’d like to think ‘naturalistic’ or words to that effect, but really lazy is most likely a more suitable adjective.

Another problem is that I’m not really sure who my examiners might be. Quite aside from the fact that I’m not supposed to know anyway, there are two problems as I see it. Firstly, videogame studies is relatively new, so there isn’t a large pool to start with. Second, it’s a pretty diverse field so suitable scholars within the pool are even fewer, particularly as there aren’t any experts on videogames and phenomenology or embodiment that I’m aware of, and those who do study the body and videogames are often early career researchers.

Anyway, hopefully going to ACMI’s GameOn exhibition this weekend, hopefully a lot of people have gone during the school holidays this week so there won’t be too many cues to play some of the games. Even though there are a million clones of Computer Space online it will be cool to use the original cabinet with its complex controls.

I haven’t been too happy with some of my writing this week, maybe its because i’m in the early part of the literature review and the different points i’m trying to make are all a little tangled up at the moment. Maybe it was even just that the delayed start to the week following the easter long weekend has dulled my brain a little bit, I was finding it easier going today than the last two. In anycase there’s always editing, which I often find more enjoyable anyway.

I was emailed a CFP for IE2008 at QUT last week (go acronyms!), but they don’t seem to have a page up yet. I’m thinking about submitting a long paper again this year, which have grown to a maximum of ten pages, based on a chapter i’m planning to write on applying phenomenological methods to the study of videogames but it depends mainly on how i’m going with the thesis writing leading up to the submission date towards the end of June.

I hate chewing gum, it makes my jaws hurt, and people leave it in annoying locations that my clothes come into contact with. As the Oompha Loompha song in Willie Wonka goes “its revolting, disgusting and wrong”. Unfortunately the song also points out that “It stops you from smoking and brightens your smile”. Well its helping to a degree, and it is marginally cheaper than smoking. In retrospect deciding to quit smoking a year out from my thesis being due, just as I was about to start writting it, was perhaps not the wisest move from a tatical standpoint given the stress that is likely to ensue!

I started writing on Monday and had a bit of the dreaded ‘blank screen madness’. Luckily I got past that without too much trouble, but i’ve noticed that not having done any serious writing since last august or so has had some interesting effects on my writing ability. For instance, i keep leaving out conjoining words and even entire phrases as I type, they just seem to get lost somewhere between my brain and my fingers, maybe they’ve been misdirected to my toes. My vocabularly seems a bit flat as well, though hopefully it will pick up again with more writing.

Worst case scenario: At least i’ll have an excuse to start smoking again.

I’ve never had a problem with powerpoint presentations before until today. I was supposed to do a presentation for my tutorial students as an example of how they should go about doing their group presentations after the mid semester break. Firstly, I’d copied the wrong file onto my USB stick, so thank goodness for wireless internet and remote access storage. All well and good, disaster avoided, presentation ready to go, I thought. I’d planned to open with a Media watch story, and embeded a link within screen cap which seemed to do nothing except freeze Powerpoint. Kind of annoying when you’ve just told a class that using a short video or other media object is a useful way of priming the audience and starting a presentation.

So in the end we skipped that video and the others examples i’d embedded links for – I was hoping that Monica Attard would carry some of the load, being more persuasive than I am. What would have been fairly snazzy became something of a shambles, you can’t really ask students questions about a video clip you can’t show them. ‘Giving them the gist of it’ just isn’t the same.

I’ve become increasingly aware over the last few months about the differences between the different tendencies in phenomenology thanks to Max van Manen’s Phenomenology Online and Sobchack’s overview as I mentioned in an earlier post. The problem now is more a question of how to draw them together within my thesis, for instance Merleau-Ponty’s embodied body-subject and Heidegger’s accounts of tool use. Though Merleau-Ponty does use the example of the blind man’s walking stick at several points in “The Phenomenology of Perception”, he characterises the example as one of bodily extension, of the body increasing its contact with the world. Conversely, for Heidegger the hammer is something we relate to in our course of action upon the world, though not strictly an ‘object’ (unless broken), it has a meaning for us. Furthermore many artefacts can be used ‘to hammer’, why does the specific tool take our attention first, preceding, say, a flat rock?

Differentiating between microperception and macroperception, Don Ihde provides a possible solution in “Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context” (p.74). Simply put, Ihde describes the microperceptual as referring to bodily dimensions of perception (i.e. motility, synaesthesic relationship of sensory modalities), while the macroperceptual relates to hermeneutic and cultural dimensions (i.e. meaning, knowledge, and interpretation). I like the way he characterises this as a kind of gestalt, that is, as a figure-ground relationship:

“there is no bare or isolated microperception except in its field of a hermenuetic or macroperceptual surrounding; nor may macroperception have any focus without its fulfillment in microperceptual (bodily-sensory) experience”(p77)

I’ve been a bit distracted today, there’s live music and DJs on campus for orientation week or whatever it is, though at least the music has been turned down now. As its a bit difficult to concentrate on reading with the noise instead i’ve been thinking about the structure of my thesis, and while I have a fairly clear idea about the content I want to include, at least in a general sense, mapping out how the different conceptual areas relate to each other so far hasn’t led to an immanent structure emerging, but rather the question of what theme to emphasise and as a result inform the structure. At the moment I think the concept of the interface, widely defined, is probably the best choice. It can elucidate the relationship between the body and the word, the player and the videogame, videogame space and actual space, and between players. The problem of course is that if the concept becomes too widely defined it may lose some of it meaningfulness.

Just finished teaching my first tutorial class for an introductory media and communications class and they seem like a good group, mostly journalism and professional communication students. Hopefully i haven’t confused them on what they need to do for their tutorial presentations, we’ll see next next week when each group reports on their approach and focus.

I’ve been reading Sobchack’s “The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. The first chapter has a useful discussion of the phenomenological method, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s ‘radical reflection’. Thankfully she sets it out much more clearly than Merleau-Ponty does in the preface to “Phenomenology of Perception”, which lost me at first with its untranslated german philosophy terms such as the “Wortbedeutung of conciousness” (xvii).

Sobchack’s differentiation between the transcendental and the existential and hermeneutic variants of phenomenology are also quite helpful. Though my thesis uses phenomenological concepts somewhat heuristically as part of a wider theoretical framework my research method seems to tend towards its process somewhat, and I feel that i’ll need to include a section on what type of phenomenology is primarily informing the process behind my writing.