IDR1 Colloquium Feedback on Exposé
I had the chance to discuss my exposé within the context of the IDR colloquium, which is a format where all PhD students of the institute can hand in their things. Since I had plenty of opportunities to discuss my project with people from the digital humanities and video games studies, I needed to have feedback from the design research crowd. In the following, I clustered some takeaways from the session.
Cumulative dissertation
A generally vague problem is my dissertation style, which takes form through four peer-reviewed journal-papers and a synopsis, which should contextualize them. Since this form leads to an upside-down research agenda, planning is different and not so many people around me have a lot of experience with it.
A nice analogy that was applied is the shift from a map to a pathway. Instead of drawing out a map that is to be traversed later, a cumulative dissertation is more like drawing a pathway through territory to be reflected after, something that unfolds with each step. Somebody also mentioned going about it like a detective story, where I go for clues in all the un-inquired corners.
There is also the danger of overloading the dissertation with too much to do, since each paper can stand on its own and has its own research agenda. I was warned that I have already like three or four mini-dissertation crammed into this one. I’ll take that to heart and will redo my working packages accordingly.
General direction
The overall approach of looking into the materiality of video game graphics as well as how designing and coding graphics relate to each other was understood by the people present at the colloquium. That made me pleased, because I didn’t know if I’m leaning too far out into the tech sphere. Means, I’ll stick with my subject.
The former point of overloading the dissertation applies here as well. I need to simplify my research question as well as the research gap. I could, as was proposed, simply state that the aesthetics and effects of video game graphics have not been thoroughly researched in regard to their relation to code. That would be the gap and question in one and could then be detailed in the four papers. Will be considered in the next exposé revision.
A question that I liked a lot and will take with was about where my crowd is. Who are the people who I share with, whom I create knowledge for? This one should actually be obvious, as it is one of the important questions for everything we create. But, sometimes it is easy to lose track of it.
A brief discussion revolved around the concept of techno-historic limits. Another feedback added that it is also important to look into code regarding means and relations, in the direction of a Marxist analysis. Then also looking into, how these power relations relate to aesthetics. What was formative for the aesthetic discourse (see for example the prevalence of shiny balls everywhere, since they were now easy to make)? This would add the dimension of power and politics, which I liked and will consider.
Also, once again, the description of the translation of code into graphics was pointed out to be beautiful, almost poetic. I still would love to make a kind of mapping of the whole process, from code and hardware to physics and the screen, ending with the visible image. Something similar to Anatomy of an AI System.
Formal elements and design rhetoric
In terms of rhetoric, especially, I got mainly feedback on staying close to the material at hand and approaching it by its formal aspects. A thing I noted down for myself is to have a good look at graphic modi, as this is a specific video game graphics thing from the 80ies. It would be interesting and important to look into those and how they were formative.
I’m not sure whether I see much meaning yet in doing a full-blown design rhetoric analysis yet. I definitely have to into more formal aspects through an Auslegeordnung™️. An interesting comparison was made between how printing colours were more expensive, which led to the experimentation of what is possible with just two of them. In the 80s, the stylistic means for video game graphics were equally limited, leading to the abuse of graphics modi, or other kinds of experimentations. So, what were these style-forming processes and elements in this tension between limitation and enabling.
Practical advice
- Stay in practice and don’t overthink things or make them overtly theoretical. Ergodicity or operational image might be fancy concepts, but they also bring their own baggage with them.
- Check regularly when the corpus has been saturated. Do I have enough samples, or already too much?
- Reflect also on the things that are lost in the process. What are the dimensions of a video game image I can research, which ones are lost?
- Criteria for corpus generation or models for analysis are allowed to develop over the course of the dissertation.
- Look at ports of the “same” game for different systems. I already noted this one down somewhere, as an interesting case study regarding the authenticity debate.
- Take care of not naturalizing technology as the one defining factor for how things are. Be open to other interpretations from sociology, politics, and other disciplines, which are closer to people.