I’m not so sure how it happened, but while writing my thesis today I somehow ended up arguing that primarily the prevailing visualist approach to understanding the experience of gameplay is in a sense an embodied account, in the wider sense that it pertains to how we experience our lifeworld, i.e. that we primarily think about our interaction with videogames as being about what’s on-screen. Not really sure if it will still make sense to me tomorrow though, not that it does particularly now really. Freaked myself out a bit actually.

Also unexpected, but pleasantly so, was the discovery that my DiGRA 2007 paper Notes Towards a Sense of Embodied Gameplay was used as an optional reading for a MSc (Media Technology and Games) course on Game Culture at IT University of Copenhagen taught by T.L. Taylor. Not that I’m bragging mind, it was just nice to think that my work is being used to teach students at arguably the best university for game studies in Europe.

I’ve used the phrase ‘intentional stance’ a few times in the chapter I’ve been writing, and I wasn’t really sure of where I had gotten it from, or if it was something I had come up with. So i decided to google it, and it seems like it was a lucky thing I did, seeing how its the name of a “theory of mental content proposed by Daniel C. Dennett” according to wikipedia.

Anyway a clarifying footnote later, the actual theory itself piqued my interest, as it seems to have some fleeting resonance with the layered model of the interface I developed in my DiGRA 07 conference paper . The crux of the theory is that things can be explained firstly by anthropomorphising them, in the sense of treating them as a rational agent, and then considering it at different levels of abstraction, from the most concrete physical stance, through the function and purpose orientated design stance, to the titular intentional stance that is concerned with thinking and intent.

Whilst the theory seems, at least from what I can glean from its wikipedia entry, to be concerned with things work, i.e. make predictions, rather than the with the different levels at which we actually interact with things, in the case of my paper, the interface, there is something to the most abstract layer, the intentional stance, which I think may help we elucidate the most abstract level of my model, which I termed the conceptual level for lack of anything more effectively descriptive. Perhaps what I was trying to get at with that layer is that our use of the interface, both in its physical and software manifestations, is not just arbitrary but directed and meaningful at a higher level, that it is intentional. Might be some lucky timing as I will probably need to revisit the paper in my thesis writing sometime soon.

Its been far too long since I’ve written a post. In my defence I started teaching again last week, and of course there was the kind of small preparations and problems to take care off that always end up taking more time than they have any right to. Also in my defence I’ve been re-experiencing the strange cadence of thesis writing. A day or two ago I was trying to think of inventive ways to represent the thesis in a videogame mod so I could thus shoot the damn thing or something; today I’ve been quite enjoying sorting out (hopefully) some of the problems I had. Or maybe I’m just moody from not sleeping well.

Whilst doing a google to check what accessories are available for my new phone (note: not actual size) last week, I found out that it also has an accelerometer that I didn’t know about. Of course I did the first thing any reasonable person would have done, and downloaded an application that makes lightsabre sounds as you swing the phone around. Yes its naff.