It’s summer-time: readings, corpora and other updates
It’s summer and I can finally concentrate on all things related to my dissertation project. On the agenda is playing video games, working on a representation of masculinity in old games’ subproject, working on my Assembling a Video Game Screenshots Corpus, and, of course, getting some reading is done. The reading is insofar important as next semester, from the middle of September to the end of December, I’ll be busy with course work.
On my reading list I have some essentials, like Espen Aarseth’ Cybertext and Mark Marino’s Critical code studies, but also some shorter texts regarding digital games, their visuality, their materiality and meaning-making. I started reading Cybertext last week, and I am pleased to get my mind finally on it.
Cybertext is such a loaded concept in game studies, and it’s really worth going into all the details and thoughts that the author put into it. This is not the moment to write about the book – I’m halfway through and already have so many notes and thoughts of my own… So another post on that topic will follow.
Update on Assembling a Video Game Screenshots Corpus
I worked on my image corpus. The thoughts that went into it can be followed by reading through the note on Assembling a Video Game Screenshots Corpus. An important aspect I’ve done these days was to start building an ontology, which I can use in Tropy. I’ve contacted the people behind the FAVR model and asked for review or feedback. I hope they can help me regarding the model. After that, I plan to communicate this work as a pre-release to get feedback on the ontology itself. I already started working with in Tropy and it’s quite handy.
Update on research question
After considering a few points in last talk with my supervisor as well as the conference on Games & Literature in Marbach, I decided to centre on the complexity of ascribing nationality to digital games. The focus on the materiality of the visuality in digital games will move into the methodological part as one of the approaches within discourse analysis. I haven’t spoken to my supervisors about this decision yet, but I believe it’s meaningful. I wrote an updated Dissertation that goes into that direction. More work is needed to flesh out this approach and work it into the expose.
Update on CEEGS 2023
My proposal for a contribution for the CEEGS this year got rejected. You can read my application filed under Source code, visuality, and power structures: A critical reading of video games’ code to image transformation. The reviews were fair and very constructive, and I’ll incorporate their main points into developing my expose.