Went to start writing about Ecological Psychology yesterday, only to realise my notes on Gibson’s “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception” were quite brief, missing much of the stuff I wanted to raise about his conception of the environment in terms of ground and medium to put the key concept of affordance into its wider context. Oh and both library copies are on loan until mid-June. Luckily I can start on the later part of the section, with the work of Norman, Gaver and other’s that have used affordances to talk about computers and videogames, but it seems a little backwards.

My paper, Playing for Keeps: A Game of Marbles and the Materiality of Gameplay has finally been published in Refractory’s special issue on Games and Metamateriality. Thanks to Christian McCrea, Darshana Jayemanne, and Tom Apperley for editing the issue.

I’m particularly interested in reading Eugenie Shinkle’s paper Digital Games and the Anamorphic which discusses the physical and embodied nature of videogame interfaces

Looking forward to this weekend, kind of stressed myself out a little this week trying to finally catch up with my writing schedule, but that’s almost done, and I’ve finished teaching for the semester (though I don’t know what’s going on with exam marking), so it might be a good time to let my hair down a bit, so to speak.

Its suddenly becoming quite a busy weekend, I’m having dinner tonight at a friend’s house before heading to the espy to see another friend’s friend’s band. Tomorrow I’m going to see an art project called Stranger of the Month, before going to the football that night. Then on Sunday I might be going to a forum that’s part of the Next Wave festival on ‘virtual communities’. Phew.

I’ve been struggling with my writing for the last couple of days, as I’ve gotten to a point of my introductory chapter where my arguments are supposed to congeal into a sort of ‘and so that is why I’m doing it this way’ kind of statement. I’ve kludged something together, and its not particularly strong at the moment, but I was getting bored of staring at the blinking cursor, so it’ll will have to do for now until I can bring myself to read back through this 9000 word chapter written almost as a stream of consciousness just like Kerouac, J., but with less references jazz, hitch hiking, and homo-social relationships.

Hopefully a book I ordered from Readings a month ago will turn up this week. Apparently they had to get it from US suppliers, but I was still a little bemused by how long they said it would take. I could have gotten it of Amazon, but I’m in no particular hurry to confuse myself with more phenomenology and existentialism anyway, I might already be approaching that limit =).

Well more accurately a stiff neck anyway. I think I might coin a new medical condition – DS neck! I’ve been wanting to get a Nintendo DS for quite a while, and it hasn’t disappointed, playing Zelda on the train to and from Uni is great. However I made the mistake of introducing my house-mate to Cooking Mama 2, and he’s probably played it at least an hour or two everyday since I got it on Saturday. I was looking forward to taking it online, but unfortunately it doesn’t support the quite ridiculous wireless setup that I have at home which forgoes using a router as a access point in favour of an aptly named ‘ad-hoc’ setting on my PC’s wireless card.

I’ve been doing ok with writing this week. I’ve got the backlog down to slightly more than 3 days worth, so with a bit of luck and effort hopefully I can knock that of by the end of the week. It’ll be interesting to go back through what I’ve been writing for the introduction chapter and see if it makes any sense, I’m a little bit apprehensive given that I had only a fairly loose idea of the progression of the argument in my head before I started, and as a result its probably a little bit unclear. I’ve been able to slot in sections of my DiGRA paper, and they seem to fit pretty well despite needing a bit of revision, which is encouraging – at least I’m still on more or less the same track.

The Guardian has a story today on the UK Ministry of Defence releasing reports on UFO sightings. I think this is probably the best part:

Other reports are more credible. At quarter past midnight on Christmas Day 1985, three police officers in Woking were surprised by a white light descending on the Horsell area. The officers were worried their report would not be taken seriously, because Horsell Common features in HG Wells’s War of the Worlds as the place where the first Martians land. The account reads: “Genuine report. Two competent officers slightly embarrassed.”

= )

Due to the vagaries of rotating rosters, yesterday was my housemate’s saturday, and, still having our friend’s PS3, he endeavoured to rent a copy of GTA4. Let it simply be said that I didn’t get much sleep last night and it took an extra coffee or two to get going this morning. Thesis writing and videogame auto mobile larceny really don’t mix, I was considering staying at home today to wring the most out of the overnight rental, until I realised that this was in fact a clever ploy to avoid getting out of bed for a few more hours.

The game itself is fairly hard to rate from only about 4 or 5 hours play, particularly when you don’t get the best out of the visual qualities due to your stunningly low quality TV, or having to endure your housemate’s constantly getting lost due to their poor eyesight and hard to read mini-map due to your low quality TV. But i’m just not sure its the giant leap forward suggested by the rave reviews its getting, or that its really that different in character from its predecessors. Its certainly an improvement, and a substantial one at that, over San Andreas, and it seems like the kind of game that requires a substantial exposure to until you start to appreciate it fully. I really have to get around to putting in an entry into Screenplay’s Your Turn competition, where readers submit blog entries, and the best one each month wins a PS3.

I’d decided to buy my mother a book for mother’s day, so on Saturday I visited a book shop run by a friend of a friend. Looking through the books I came across Camus’ ‘The Outsider’, and picked it up for myself. I was less than surprised when a book described as ‘a classic existentialist novel’ opened with the death of the protagonist’s mother, and no more surprised with the ending closing on the impending death of the protagonist himself. Even Google Books lists its subject as death. Its an interesting, if short, book, the indifference and aimless tone of the first person narration is very effective.

I’m trying to catch up with my thesis writing at the moment, I’m not doing too badly, but then again I just cut and pasted a chunk of text from one of my conference papers into the introduction, so it feels a little bit like cheating, though I will have to rewrite it slight;y to fit the flow of the chapter anyway.

Well I was going to start writing about phenomenology and the experience of videogame play this week, but then I read Thomas Malaby’s article “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games” from Games and Culture 2.2, and got an idea on how to frame the opening of my introduction chapter, so I’ve been working on that instead. Its not going too badly, I don’t think I’ve quite articulated the point I wanted to make to set up the rest of the introduction, but I think its getting there. Malaby makes a good point about play being a mode of experience rather than a particular activity, and I’m trying to extend that point towards embodiment.

I think I might have a bit of a busy weekend, a friend of my house-mate is coming down from Newcastle to stay for the weekend, and I think he’ll be working over the weekend so I might be called to play tour guide a little bit. Not that that’s terrible, we all used to work together and be friends, but she’s mad on clothes, so I might end up spending some time as a ‘retail assistant’. I could do with a new coat myself though since I gave mine to my brother when he went to Montreal about 18 months ago.