Playtest

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.

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.

I didn’t get much writing done last week, as in addition to the public holiday on Monday, I was busy preparing for my candidature review on Friday. Returning to writing this morning it seems that I’ve completely forgotten the tack my argument was taking, though to be honest It had gotten bogged down last week as well. The crux is a synthesis between the concept of affordances and Merleau-Ponty’s conception of habits, but the argument itself seems to be stuck in a kind of vortex, spinning around repeating itself whilst being sucked into the void, or perhaps rather a knotted piece of string that needs untangling.

The review itself went well, though there were some important issues with structure and scope that were raised by the panel, so I’m not really sure if its worthwhile pushing on with the chapter I’m writing as it stands, as it will most likely have quite a different form within a few weeks, but move on to another area instead to at least get my thoughts clearer. Of course that might just add another string to the tangle as well.

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.

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.

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.