Frustration, Conferences and Ludemes
I had some things on the plate and obviously, I got stressed. And, as always, it somehow turned out quite ok. There were two conference presentations, and a self-imposed paper deadline to deal with, next to keeping several (too many) side projects running.
The deadline was me wanting to finish a shareable draft of my first paper (or second if I manage to get Intersecting video game studies and digital humanities published somewhere1). In my original schedule, I wanted to finish a paper each semester in 2024 and 2025, leaving a buffer of 1 year to bring it all together. Having thwarted that schedule by 2 months sufficed to throw me into disarray and induce anxiety. The final deadline was then for the end of August, and I was able to send something to my supervisor a week later, who gave me 👍 after briefly skimming the text. So I guess it’s at least not utter crap I’ve produced.
On the bright side, I got accepted to the Born-Digital Collections, Archives and Memory conference with my proposal Preserving Situated Practices. That’s great and could potentially lead to another paper for my dissertation, where the focus lies on outlining programming as a meaningful activity, through the perspective of preservation. It felt especially good since I decided to apply and write the proposal on my own accord.
Then, last weekend, I had the enormous pleasure to give a play-conference2 with Pierre-Yves. We played and talked about Poizone, a game by Paolo Baerlocher and Marc Andreoli. We wanted to highlight an early video game from Switzerland and to talk a little bit about this case in particular. Pierre-Yves and I interviewed the programmer, and we grew fond about research and discussing the material. Some more information on the event can be found on Le GameLab au Festival des jeux de La Tour-de-Peilz. The whole thing made me way more nervous than I anticipated, and it was absolutely not necessary to be stressed about it. At one hand I felt I didn’t prepare enough, and the event was also in French and maybe that made me very insecure.
Frustration
Let’s briefly talk about frustration before continuing. Since I had several more or less urgent things to do, I envisioned the fantastic idea of a ✨ writing retreat ✨. By happen chance the sister of my partner, living in Geneva, went on vacation. She was more than welcoming and happy that somebody took care of the plants. Deal, and I descended upon the Zürich of the Romandie to seriously get some stuff done. I wanted to finish the paper draft and prepare the Digital History presentation, not more and not less.
And then ADHD hit, anxiety crept in, I felt lost, depressed, and lonely. It was a mix between not being able to have my usual routines and rhythms, being socially isolated, and having the realization hit me in the head, that although medicated, I still can be a mess. Especially the latter sucked a lot, and I got reminded to last year, when I there was a medicament shortage (From despair to relieve – Dealing with an ADHD meds fallout). The only reason I got some stuff done that week, was because I worked until late night. Much frustration and not what I needed before two public engagements.
I was wondering how honest I am to myself about my condition. Being properly medicated doesn’t mean that the ADHD is gone. Not being honest to myself also means that I’m not properly handling and communicating this situation. Some lessons learned, especially that there is still work, reflecting and work to do.
Digital History and Ludemes
The Digital History 2024 conference was cute and comfy. At first, I was a bit nervous because I’m not a historian at all and the event seemed huge. That was mainly because it was very well organized and had two panel-tracks. But eventually I quite a few people present and everybody was really cordially. The conference committee also made sure, that the conference was inclusive and a safe space. My favorite presentation was by Moritz Feichtinger on From Source-Criticism to System-Criticism, Born Digital Objects, Forensic Methods, and Digital Literacy for All. Many of the papers concentrated on using computational methods on historic material, or being “classic” historians looking at digital matter, neither applying to me. Feichtiger questioned what it actually means to be a digital historian and raised questions regarding the Technicity of the field.
I presented A handful of pixels of blood, in which I shared parts of my ongoing research. That included the FAVR+ Ontology as well as the VHS-Dataset. For the longest time, I struggled how to talk about Video Game Images as a specific type of interface. This is a crucial point that I wanted to further develop before the conference. Luckily, my colleague Pierre-Yves Hurel mentioned the concept of Ludeme, on which he relied in his dissertation. The thing fascinated me completely, and I have a hunch that it could be of use to me. For now, it’s the best way of conceptualizing the specific aspects that I want to highlight in the video game code to image trajectory. A discussion with Pierre-Yves yielded the following bit, which I must preserve for now.
The subtitle of my dissertation reads “tracing the early history of video game programming practices”, and visuality is the socio-cultural construction of what and how we see. In terms of video game dev. History and ludemes we can take that linguist’s perspective of devs. Struggling with not having a vocabulary and conceptualization for video game design. Paolo, for example, did not have the capacities or interests in working on that vocabulary; he rather repeated (re-told) what he already knows in terms of ludemes and rather concentrated on the technical aspects. This translation of technological underpinnings into a playable experience, and being able to innovate on the playing part, needs other skills and interests. An interesting spin on this are demakes because they often introduce newer ludemes and game mechanics to older systems. The problem was not, that newer games were not possible on the old systems, but that game devs/designers did not have a conceptual vocabulary to come up with them.
Also
- Reorganized a lot of the wiki structure
- Added an entry on Cumbia
- KDE Neon with Plasma 6 was neat but rolling updates and lots of bugs made put me at unease. Hopped to Debian 12 and a good friend told me this to be my forever home now.
- Setup Neovim with the obsidian.nvim plugin in order to stay in the terminal when writing. Also started to use kitty, which is pretty neat.