Post-Summer – Pre-semester
I was on a two weeks vacation in August and didn’t care much about my journal. Still, a lot of things continued to become and manifest.
- Preparing Ludens contribution to PlayBern 2023
- Working on a blog post with Aurelia for Ludens on the visuality and discourse of violence in digital games in the 80ies
- Finished summer readings
- Code - Friedrich Kittler
- Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature - Espen Aarseth
- The Conditional Cyberimage - Sebastian Möring
- Source Code and Formal Analysis - Ea Christina Willumsen
- Through the Ludic Glass - Sonia Fizek
- …and I was able to start Critical Code Analysis (2020) by Marino
- Started scraping images for my Assembling a Video Game Screenshots Corpus
- Got my text Choose your own Adventures in Source Code accepted without any changes 👀 and then continued to change it slightly after my summer readings, updating it with what I learned. Especially Willumsen’s text was important to include
- Guess I finished a first rough draft of my Dissertation Expose. At least it feels like all the parts are in place. But since it’s a larger document I need to rework it now, remove things I repeat to often, make it more concise and clear and remove not relevant leftovers from the beginning of writing – and then discuss it!
Readings
I’m happy I was able to go through Cybertext by Aarseth. It’s such an important piece, because he really though structurally on the medium, and not just about the content or reception, and what that makes out of the authors. But then again, Aarseth comes from literature studies and that is his lense, still today. That insight was also very important, since the book can bring me only that far. I’m super happy to have stumbled across the text by Möring and Fizek, because they reposition the digital game as image, and don’t only frame it on the narrative to ludic spectrum. In beginnings with Möring and very strong with Fizek, the digital game is thought through the lenses of image and visual design studies. I’m super happy that Fizek even refers to Vilém Flusser. Willumsen’s text was very important regarding critical code analysis and hermeneutically reading games’ source code. It helped me tremendously in understanding what kind of text source code is.
Output
I realised that I have been busy on that front as well, and I’m very happy with the output so far
- Collabed on a blog post for the analysis of a game
- Collabed on a text for a games and journalism handbook
- Had a contribution to a fantastic conference on Games&Literature
- Will do a proceedings text for said conference
- Had my text on analysing vice’s source code for a book accepted
- Started a collab on programming and procedural visuality
And now?
I’m super happy with how everything advanced so far, so are my supervisors. It’s a good start and I’m sure this will help me get through harder phases. I just need to remember then, how it was now and that such a state as now is possible. The summer helped me solidify everything and I feel pretty safe and secure with the position I have right now. I love the direction my dissertation is taking and I believe it relevant enough, a bit experimental, but also doable.
💖