Posted on 2023-01-08.
A new year’s update
I found much pleasure lately in hanging around Mastodon. There is a lot of gentle and interesting encounters to be had. Besides that I started to gently prepare for changes in my professional focus as well as being a phd-student. I’m reading a lot into how to analyse video games, as well as how to do research on visual material.
So I worked myself through, or am still on it, the following books
- Fernández-Vara, C. (2014). Introduction to Game Analysis. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203794777
- Lankoski, P., & Björk, S. (2015). Game research methods: An overview. ETC Press.
- Rose, G. (2016). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials (4th edition). SAGE Publications Ltd. http://study.sagepub.com/rose4e
- Pfister, E. (n.d.). How to analyse a Video game from a historical, source-critical perspective: The HGP-Method [Billet]. Horror - Game - Politics. Retrieved 17 September 2022, from https://hgp.hypotheses.org/1754
In december I also started to look into one game of our research corpus, Ball Raider. The game fascinated me pretty quickly. In comparision to many other game, the artwork is pretty decent, especially for a Breakout clone. The effect is hightened through the fact, that it is a pretty bad clone, partially buggy and not a very joyful experience. This dissonance between game functions (code) and game design (artwork) raises interesting questions. I’d love to look into the games production and especially what the artworks can tell us. I collected the visual material that I could find under Ball Raider.
Fallow Zine 1
Last but not least, I finally finished “designing” a small zine I was tinkering around with. I enjoyed doing it, but like somebody would enjoy going to the gym. There is not much fun in being there, but there is joy in showing up, having it done. I had a lot of fun using Hotglue for a webproject. Being a webdeveloper, using such a messy tool is actually kind of funny.
- Raw version: https://jache.re/fp1
- Fancy version: https://thgie.hotglue.me/?Fallow%20Zine%201
Other things.
- My isopod cultures are developing fantastically. I might start to post a bit or two on them over at https://jache.re/notes/isopods.html. Both colonies have babies and they are hella cute!
- I started to collect smol site generators. There is a lot of them floating around my community. smol site generators are cute, experimental, hacky, unfinished, personal, personalised, generous, sustainable, lo-fi, low-footprint-ish attempts at software and scripts in order to produce websites.