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Thinking about gaming:
Did some reading on game design this morning, and a bit of thinking back on my relationship with video games. A day or two ago, I considered myself not a gamer at all. But then I thought more about it.
Growing up with a dad who was a software engineer, we were privy to the internet and computers at an early age. I distinctly remember play Myst and other games on CD-rom as a kid. Around grades 6-8, around the same time I got in to geocities and early blogging, I also took an interest in making basic RPG games. Pretty sure I even made one for a class project (oh the joy of being in the “gifted” program, lol).
Growing up, we were always a generation or two or three of consoles behind our friends. But no matter, we had a hell of a time playing them, mostly at our friends. I was definitely a Nintendo guy. NES, N64, GameCube. I remember some of my favourite console games that we had being Super Mario 3, Super Mario 64, Perfect Dark (GoldenEye was good too), Smash Bros and SSX Tricky. I remember spending hours and hours in friends basements competing against each other.
My most memorable christmas gift as a kid was when I got the translucent purple GameBoy colour. It came with Pokemon yellow, which I played the shit out of, and then I got Zelda: Links Awakening, which I also played the shit out of. I remember late nights, under the covers, exploring the expansive fantasy worlds and trying to level myself up. I remember heartbreak when I tried to hack Pokemon to get Mewtwo, but instead accidentally overwrote all my progress.
I feel like since somewhere in highschool, or at least university, I stopped gaming and seemingly took up the mindset that its a time sink and something I should avoid doing. That’s a shame, and I’m thinking it’s a stance I should reconsider.
Thinking about my research:
I also took a workshop this morning on “Strategic Scholarly Reading”. I’m really glad I did. I’ve been having a lot of anxiety about my directed studies and research path. The reading list I cobbled together felt too immense to tackle and very, very broad in content.
Now, I’ve realized that I need to hone in my research topic and focus my initial reading on peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. Rather than surveying the whole digital art landscape, I’m going to focus on interactive art. Rather than digging into all sorts of disparate theory, I’m going to focus on critical theory (although that is still very broad and needs to hone in). And rather than reading full chapters from books, I’m going to focus on shorter articles, at least until I better grasp of my direction and a decent lit review.
I spent an hour or two on OMNI, just seeking out peer-reviewed scholarly articles on the topic of interactive digital art, and put together a folder on Zotero that feels much more directed and manageable. Anxiety has greatly reduced, yay!