Everyday Life and Research

This summer something unexpected occurred. I experience working during summer always as very pleasant. Fewer working hours, going to the lake after hours, no meetings or urgent mails to respond to. It’s usually a time were I can set realistic goals and have a nice rhythm going after my things. This meant that, next to my ongoing side-quest on Everything is a Video Game if You Are Brave Enough¹, I had ample time to work on my first paper Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics². That project didn’t only include writing, but also working a lot on the Video Game History Screenshots dataset (VHS-D). Now, what was unexpected is the phenomenological experience of that kind of working rhythm, as it kind of normalized working on my Dissertation.

In a recent chat with Florence, I realized (once more), that I’m really at the very beginning of working in another setting. That means among other things that I’m missing the experience on how to handle difficult situations. After doing web- and software development for a good 20 years, practically nothing would make me break a sweat - from dealing with clients to fucking up productive systems - simply because I had to do these things more than once and survived it. Regarding doing research as a job, I have practically no such experience at all. I did a few conference presentations and wrote some texts which got published, but in terms of pragmatic everyday things, I’m still lacking. How do I know that I worked enough, that my research is of acceptable quality, when is corpus saturation reached, or what are the practical steps to Analysing Visual Clusterings? A lot of the pragmatic steps in humanities research are left vaguely, and have to be obtained through word of mouth or through experience. It’s almost as if academia still operates as that these things should occur naturally to the scientist.

Anyway, this summer I got the feeling, that I’m getting used to do researcherly things as a job. Having routine, knowing the people in the office, being able to outline and following a plan, making it actionable and measurable, doing boring things. That really helps me. It doesn’t lessen the stress, but it changes how I can handle it. It normalizes research as work and takes it of the anxietal pedestal. Likewise, it also helps to incorporate experiences, which in turn helps recognize future stressful situations as something that I already overcame in similar form. The beauty of research as an everyday activity.

Next to normalizing research, I also had the pleasure of finding the time and energy to binge-game The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap and a bunch of obscure indie-games. During playing Zelda, I sometimes wasn’t quite sure if I didn’t already play that game, déjà vus. But I also have no complete recollection that I actually played the game. It still was tremendous and easy fun, though. The list of indie-games included:

• starseed pilgrim by droqen
• NIGHT OF THE CONSUMERS by germfood
• Mendel by OwenTheBell
• little BEETLE bottle BATTLE by apthomson
• Curious Expedition by Maschinen-Mensch
• Let it Grow by OutdoorHawk, Yo You, Pakwac, Shushurikhin, Augenblick848, Aleksei Mizo
• MIDNIGHT ULTRA by Forward Instinct
• Picture Perfect by Incredulous Interactive for GMTK Game Jam 2024 - itch.io
• Kaiju Super Datetech by Powerhoof
• Terminal City by Powerhoof

Late August is also the beginning of the end of summer and with it comes a slight melancholia. NTS has a fantastic collection of listener playlists concerning summer and heat: Supporter Radio - Heatwave | NTS. One of my favorites capturing the upcoming late-summer melancholia is melt zone w/ Sinziana Velicescu 27th August 2024 | Listen on NTS.

Log

• 2024-08-26
  • Met and exchanged with YR, also regarding Confoederatio Ludens
  • Edited feedbacked Marbach Proceedings and sent the updated text back
  • Wrote proposal for title and short description of the exhibition
  • Re-tested importer and further developed to delete comments, lists and screening dates during import/update
• 2024-08-27
  • Exchanged with PYH regarding our play-conference on Poizone
  • Skimmed three papers on FAVR
  • Revisited the FAVR+ Ontology to remember where I left off and planned next steps in its development; i might need to figure out a concrete goal for this ontology
  • I need to reflect more concerning my Dissertation, not just the methods. How about…
    • the formative powers of 1980ies and -90ies programming practices on video game Visuality
    • the influence of Assembly and BASIC on the video game graphics landscape
• 2024-08-28
  • Finalized and handed in Mobility Grant application for the Montréal residency
  • Finalized and handed in the BFH Digitaltage exhibition texts
  • Started expanding outlined points in Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics into text
  • Resolved a problem in the VHS-Dataset with incorrect attribution of year as well as delete data points with years later than 1990; otherwise the visualization would have been completely skewed by a few entries
  • Exchanged with Max regarding the panel get together
  • Played Pengo and Poizoneas a preparation for a play-conference; both games are pretty tough and minimal in what one can do. I wonder if it’s fun to do that for 45 minutes …
• 2024-08-30
  • Doing organizational tasks for the SDN24 panel
  • Created plots for Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics paper and furthered expanding Create Text Outlines into text; I will definitely have way too much text at hand, even if omitting the whole reflection on Analysing Visual Clusterings

Footnotes

1. I don’t push the texts I’m writing into the website anymore, so some links will be broken online. ↩

2. Ditto… ↩