Bold statements

I had the chance to talk about my Dissertation Expose with EP. He gave me some valuable inputs regarding formal aspects and in terms of writing styles. We also looked at the plan of my dissertation project, and he approved it. That was the moment I decided to stop working on this document. TH mentioned that it could be the base for the text I have to produce that accompanies the four dissertation papers. So I made a copy and started to work on the ✨ phd-synopse ✨

This new document is already massively restructured. I threw out a lot of the expose stuff and reprioritised some parts, according to the input from EP. After that, I started to add new parts. One of the most intriguing inputs by EP was, to always start with some bold statements. So that’s what I did …

My bold statement is, that since Espen Aarseth, little insight has been produced about the essence of video games, the thing that makes them them and not, say, a film.

It’s a hunch that I have carried with me for a while. A lot has been said about video games, but, in my opinion, always through some other disciplines’ perspective. The base critique of FAVR, for example, is that the vocabulary to describe video game graphics came from film studies. Mela Kocher also feared (fears) that video game studies will reproduce the same kind of knowledge over and over again, and I believe this is linked to outside perspectives inquiring what video games are. Video game studies don’t really seem to have their own kind of unique epistemologies and methodologies. Except for Espen Aarseth who really dug into the structures of video games, and what makes them different from other media.

So I transformed that hunch into a bold statement and link it to my dissertation subject, and now let’s see what happens.

I’m in a book 🥹

At the beginning of last year I co-authored a text on our work on the DACH-Spieledatenbank together with Eugen Pfister, Aurelia Brandenburg and Lukas Daniel Klausner. This week, I finally got a copy of the hard-cover book! I’m a bit proud of that … 

Warum wir es für eine gute Idee gehalten haben, eine DACH-Spieledatenbank aufzubauen | SpringerLink

Log 24-03

• Worked on the Wikidata metadata corpus; was able to update the current list with missing entries from the DACH-Spieledatenbank as well as Swiss Games Garden. I also added the developing organizations to Wikidata and linked them and the games
• Shifted from working on the Dissertation Expose to the phd-synopse
• Continued working on the article for the Renmin University of China, although less productive than last week
• I spontaneously decided to hand in a proposal for the conference on Leisure electronics and the emergence of video games, wrote that and waiting for feedback on the draft now
• Re-furbished our temporary gamelab at the University of Bern together with AM. Move some books and furniture, made some decisions what else we need
• Read There is no Software by Kittler, in German and English and found some base material in the text, but also some ranting going on