Autumn – Mid-Semester
As expected, the study semester is taking a toll on time, energy and focus. It seems easier, and more relevant, than last semester. Especially a course at the Université de Lausanne (UNIL) gives me plenty of chances to elaborate, collaborate and exchange on topics regarding my dissertation and video game studies in general. The UNIL has a joint GameLab together with the EPFL, and they are established and experienced. The course I’m visiting is given by our team in Lausanne, Yannick Rochat, Pierre-Yves Hurel and Sophie Bémelmans, and is called ”# Histoire et préservation du jeu vidéo : état des lieux en Suisse”.
Last week I was invited to speak about team Bern’s analysis of Ball Raider (1987) and the approached we had, the [aa10bab3977e71da75fbc7c006e36525_MD5.svg|[notes/Horror Game Politics Method]], and are in French. Here is a Mastodon post on my lecture. It was actually quite fun, and I’m happy to practice my academic French.
Besides that, I feel that the productivity from the summer came to a halt. There are probably two reasons. One, I’m doing more collaborative things now, and those just feel different. Two, I’m done with my exposé (more or less) and the necessary pre-case studies. There is just not much reading, researching or writing that I do only for my dissertation, and hence, not a feeling of advancing much for my own project. I’m looking forward to next year, when I’ll be able to get dead bored doing actual research and working on Excel sheets and ontologies for month on end :)
Nonetheless, things are happening. I feel ready with my exposé so far. If it is seen as a rough guide for the next three years. This week I’ll be able to discuss it with the design research people. I have no clue if I can communicate them my intent. Their opinion will be valuable nonetheless. I also was able to work on three posts for the Ludens blog. One is already published and on working academically with Amiga floppies. I’m discussing a bit my experience and thoughts of working with Greaseweazle and dumping/writing floppies. Here is an archived version of the post: Working with Amiga Floppy Disks in Historical Video Game Research – Confoederatio Ludens. The second one is a review of the Games&Literature conference in Marbach and should be published soonish.
The last of the three posts is a bigger article on hypermasculinity and violence in 1980s’ video games. I collaborated with Aurelia Brandenburg on that text, and I liked a lot working with her on that subject. I was able to gain some insights into her methodology, which is valuable for me. But I will discuss it once it’s through our internal review and published. We plan to use the post as a base for a lecture we two give for the lecture series here in the digital humanities at the University of Berne.
I haven’t advanced too much in the direction of design research and video games. But, I’ve been given the chance to write a review of Björn Blankenheim’s book Die Kunst des Computer Game Design. I had the chance to briefly chat with him in Marbach, but didn’t know of his book back then. I hope it will give me some insights into this topic. I was also asked by my exchange colleague Tao Fan to write a summary of our research project from the perspective of the digital humanities. It will be published in a Chinese journal, and he’ll provide a translation of the text. I’m looking forward to writing that text, since it will serve as a good chance to reflect on the project and my approach to it.