Playtest

As a result of change with my thesis structure its been a little strange writing this week, going from a 70 odd page monster of a document to a fresh blank page. The new start is coming along well, though I did have some problems getting started with it, mostly due to the difficulty of deciding on what to start with. Looking over the various games I’ll be looking at, and at the themes I want to investigate, it was a little tough to work out how to disentangle the themes from each other, as they tend to overlap considerably. For instance, the notion of the interface is heavily connected with questions of spatiality, whilst there is a similar problem with notions of presence and spatiality. At the moment I’m thinking of using the game I’m writing about at the moment [giantJoystick] by Mary Flanagan as something of a test case, going over it in detail to flag the themes and different permutations of the themes that can then be examined in more details with the other games.

So far this approach seems to be falling into place relatively satisfactory, though I haven’t got as much work done today as I was hoping to due to a series of minor distractions. I had a meeting this morning with the lecturer and other tutors for the course I’m teaching in next semester, which went on for longer than I expected. Then, checking The Age website whilst eating lunch I noticed that they were about to start a live stream of a dissection of a giant squid at Melbourne Museum. Having finished my lunch I thought that it was too good an opportunity to miss seeing a 250kg mystery of the deep being cut apart, I guess I have an unhealthy curiosity in giant cephalopods, luckily I’m not alone.

A friend of mine recently got themselves a nice shiny new MacBook, well as shiny as a black matte finish can be in any case. Seeing how he didn’t need his old notebook any more, he kindly passed it on to me over the weekend, so thanks a bunch Alex. Its roughly twice as powerful as the crummy 5 year old desktop I have, so apart from being able to write whilst on the move, I can catch up on some of the games I’ve missed out on over the last couple of years that would have caused my poor old computer to have the digital equivalent of a nervous breakdown.

I received the results of the Course Experience Survey for my class last week at well. At first I was a bit disappointed until my coordinator assured me it was actually a decent score, but from the break down of the individual questions I think the key thing I need to work on is explaining things more effectively.

Time seems to be going by quite quickly at the moment. Suddenly its April, when it seemed quite recently that it was early February and I was a year out from submission. I’m guessing that it’s a combination of being busy, and the fairly repetitive activity of writing day after day. Everyday follows pretty much the same pattern, and they tend to go by quickly

My tutorial class started giving their presentations this week, and someone forgot to send marks to the students who presented on Tuesday afternoon until this morning (whoops). Though it was mostly due to absentmindedness, I think in part I was a little reluctant to finalise their marks. There wasn’t much in the way of specific marking criteria, and though I’ve been proof reading and editing for family and friends for years, and reviewed a conference paper once for a colleague who was in a bit of a bind, I’m pretty sure that I’ve never had to give anyone an actual mark before. It was mostly an issue with having room to move with the rest of the groups, of getting an idea of where they fit on the overall assessment scale.

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.

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.