Emerging

Just a life update, as much for me as for any reader… I’m trying to do a little life-organization today.

The revised dissertation draft is now in the metaphorical hands of my supervisors, Dr. Newton and Dr. Slatin, both of whom have been absolutely fantastic throughout the project. Once I get the go-ahead from them, I can distribute it. I’m scheduled to defend on August 18.

I’ll post a decent abstract on the dissertation sometime soon, but, briefly, it’s meant to set up a theoretical framework and then perform some analysis on two target “fiction networks” — the DC Comics universe and Star Wars: Galaxies — based on that framework. It makes some hypotheses about the effects of persistence, proprietorship (branding), scale and intertextuality on a number of popular forms of fiction. There are, of course, plenty of distinctions made among the forms of representation and activity at play within these common phenomena. I’m not totalizing current games, film, and comics, just trying to understand contextual pressures that I think inform all of them.

Now that that work is winding down, I’m shifting my focus exclusively to persistent world games and virtual worlds for the remainder of the year. In the dissertation, I raise some questions and present some arguments on the position of fiction or genre conventions (the “story,” in essence, but I’m not talking necessarily about narrative: I’m targeting environment, events, embedded story or “lore,” and rule structures) in persistent world games, and I’m hoping to see how they play out in practice.

The case study work I’ve been advertising for involves interviews, participant journaling, and think-aloud protocols with gameplay: this research is intended to extend some of these arguments I make in the dissertation about immersion and perception of fiction, and to consider how player and developer experiences confirm, refute or complicate my assertions. (By the way, I’m still looking for Second Life residents in Austin).

I’ll be presenting this data separately from the dissertation, with a slightly less theoretical and slightly more pragmatic perspective, in whitepapers for the DMC, articles, and conference papers.

I’m also finishing all the books that I’ve subjected to “tactical dissertation strikes” but wanted to enjoy more thoroughly… Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds, Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play, Mulligan and Patrovsky’s Developing Online Games.

I’m also playing a lot of City of Heroes. I’ve never created as many characters for an MMOG as I have here, and after talking to other players I’ve concluded I’m not alone. Anyway, after a recent merciless culling my remaining characters are:

• Picture (lvl 7 Defender (Shadow), Freedom)
• Gates (lvl 8 Blaster (Fire), Freedom)
• The New Urbanist (lvl 2 Controller (Mind/Radiation), Freedom)
• The Big Shock (lvl 7 Blaster (Electric), Victory)

Feel free to send me a tell sometime.