And other things that take me away from blogging.
The last few weeks has been filled with alot of reading (re: my last post) and writing (I am supposed to be working on my last paper of the semester as we speak – it is due tomorrow!). Along with schoolwork, like most other people, I have been preparing for the holidays; frantically gift shopping for my family who live 1,000km’s away; preparing for my now past annual holiday pot-luck – which was a success I am happy to say; and preparing the house for my mother-in-laws stay with us for a few nights.
All that being said, while working on my paper today, I read Diane Carr’s chapter on Space, Navigation and Affect in the collection “Computer Games: Text, Narrative & Play” (polity press, 2006). It was a nice, quick read that gave me some useful terms to attach to some of the things I have been describing in my object materiality in virtual reality paper. What I liked the most about this chapter, is that it talks about cinematic identification, but pipes up that we must not get trapped into thinking that it is transferrable unto gameplay as is. I have been working on ideas that follow this line of thinking.
It is always nice to be able to point to a reference and say ‘see, this is what I mean, I am not making this up’. Sure it is nice to invent new things; to be the first one to utter what everyone has been thinking. But I live (and work) in a field that, as many of my colleagues have stated more than once, stands on the backs of giants. In order to build our case, we must always point out to what has been done before us, how it leads to what we are thinking/working on, and then we can say a few original words hoping to push the knowledge train a little step forward.
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