Happy New Year!

For the 7th time! Incredible to think that I started this blog during my bachelor’s degree, and here I am, in 2011, the year I am to graduate my PhD !! I am still stunned when I think about it. When I started this blog, I was muddling my way through academia – unsure of my future, hoping to simply complete a degree I had started several years prior. Amazingly, here I am. SSHRC funded, in the final year of my doctorate degree, with fingers crossed for postdoctoral funding in the fall….

That being said, the next few months will be hell. Self-inflicted, as 2010 seems to have escaped me with less written than I had anticipated, I am busting my butt to get a draft of my dissertation done for early March. In light of this, I am hoping to use my blog as a thought / writing outlet and a place to ease my angst when the going gets tough – and of course, for any distractions that I might find interesting enough to share . But I aim to keep my distractions minimal and at least related to my writing (for the next little while).

Hope the end of 2010 was well celebrated, and that 2011 brings you all that you hope for. I hope that I can finish my dissertation, and so, my tattoo!

CFP: AoIR 12 – Performance & Participation

The 12th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)

October 10-13, 2011

Renaissance Hotel, Seattle

Seattle, Washington, USA

People perform identities, worry about economic performance, expect better performance from technologies, and feel pressure to perform as employees or in other roles in life. We observe or participate in artistic performances, ritual performances, and the performance of experiments. Join us in considerations, analyses, and celebrations of the many types of performance and participation online and in blended online/offline contexts. We look forward to creative articulations of the many meanings of the term performance and to the many ways of considering types of participation.

To this end, we call for papers, panel and pre-conference workshop proposals from any discipline, methodology, community or a combination of them that address the conference themes, including, but not limited to, papers that intersect and/or interconnect with the following:

  • Creative performances and digital arts
  • Participatory culture and participatory design
  • Critical performance and political participation
  • Identity performance
  • Exclusion from participation
  • Economic performance of Internet-related industries
  • Game performance
  • Performance expectations (as workers, citizens, etc.)
  • Ritual performances and communal participation

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, legal, aesthetic, economic, and/or philosophical aspects of the Internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members. We particularly invite proposals from scholars in the areas of digital arts and digital humanities.

Continue reading “CFP: AoIR 12 – Performance & Participation”

CFP: The Philosophy of Computer Games 2011 [Player Identity]

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTER GAMES

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN ATHENS 2011

April 6th-9th, 2011

Call for Papers

We hereby invite scholars in any field of studies who take a professional interest in the phenomenon of computer games to submit papers to the international conference “The Philosophy of Computer Games 2011”, to be held in Athens, Greece, on April 6th-9th 2011.

Accepted papers will have a clear focus on philosophy and philosophical issues in relation to computer games. They will also attempt to use specific examples rather than merely invoke “computer games” in general terms. The over-arching theme of the conference is Player Identity. Papers are encouraged to explore one of the following topics and invited speakers will focus on this area.   On the other hand, this is not the sole domain the conference will cover and submissions dealing with other relevant aspects of game philosophy are also welcome.
Continue reading “CFP: The Philosophy of Computer Games 2011 [Player Identity]”

CFP: Canadian Game Studies Association 2011

The 2011 Canadian Game Studies Association’s (CGSA) annual conference will be held in Fredericton, New Brunswick from May 30-31, in conjunction with the Congress of the Social Sciences & Humanities. This year’s theme is “Coasts & Continents: Exploring People and Places.”

We invite both national and international paper proposals on digital games research, broadly defined. In keeping with this year’s Congress theme, we also encourage work that examines game and player boundaries and boarders, spaces and places, whether that be in Multiplayer Online Spaces or in the space and place of everyday lives, from couches in living rooms to massive gaming LANs or the furthest reaches of mobile augmented reality play.

Please send an extended abstract of no more than 500 words for paper proposals, or a summary of a proposed panel of no more than 1,000 words to your 2011 Conference Co-Chairs, either Suzanne de Castell or Nick Taylor by February 10, 2011.

Looking for Motivation

As I am working through the writing part of my dissertation (as opposed to the reading, note taking and game playing), I am finding it hard to stay on task. I have always been a last minute drama-panic type of writer, and up until this point, it has always worked for me (managed to get my MA done that way…). As I have been gearing up for writing, I realize that the “last minute” style might not work on a document of this magnitude (in depth and length), and have been trying (that is the operative word in all of this) to get a little bit done every day. However, I find myself writing a lot less that I would normally, and seem to be spending an unbalanced amount of time editing and tweaking the little bits I have done instead of working on the bulk of the writing.

Every time I sit down to write, I find myself facing a wall of mental block. Not that I don’t know what I am supposed to be writing, what I have been planning on writing, but every sentence I type, I tend to cut and paste into a “save for later” document, which always ends up getting deleted within a few hours… I know that I have something to say – something worth saying… but when I have in-depth conversations with people about my work, and they start asking me questions that I cannot answer, instead of being inspired to break through, I get discouraged and stare at my document in-progress. I have been actively working on the same research question (in various degrees of depth and scope) since 2004 – I love my research and feel that if it comes together, can be a valuable contribution (something I’m told grad students tell themselves to get them through the painful writing process), but I am hitting a wall where I am afraid what I am writing is bad. That it’s all be said before, or worse, it hasn’t been said yet, but nobody cares. That I am using the wrong references, quoting the wrong people and getting the little things wrong. I know this is all part of the stress and anxiety of writing your dissertation, but I find it debilitating, and quite honestly, I have not left myself that much time to get lost in the mud.

I have spent the last 2 weeks working on something that should have been done in one (based on my perception of my own abilities). Some days I think it’s fabulous and polished, other days I just want to hit delete on the whole thing. Why is knowing that this is ‘normal’ and ‘part of the process’ not helping me break through and just ‘get’er done’!?

On that note, I will alt-tab back to my open document that has been sitting there patiently, waiting for more pages to join them, and get back to writing either a masterpiece or an intellectual train wreck.

Redefining (my) Literature Review

I am working on the ‘lit review’ (and definitions) section of my dissertation this week, and it has been an interesting challenge so far. I come from Sociology, where a proper literature review – reviewing what has been written on a particular topic – usually framing the field or the range of perspectives before adding your own – is a formal process with a relatively homogeneous structure across the field.

In this case, for my dissertation, it is a bit different. I am in a field that does not require a lit review (or methods section for that matter!), but I cannot justify writing on a topic that has such an extensive background. It is also important for my readers to know where I am coming from, what I know about what I am writing about, and acknowledging the history of a topic. As it stands, seeing as I am not ‘required’ to include a literature review as defined by a social science structure, I have made a few decisions about its purpose within the context of my dissertation in my department. To be fair, the inspiration came from this book on dissertation writing. While some may have accused me of procrastination while reading it, it has helped me see the structure of my dissertation – and I don’t just mean chapter breakdown or anything – it really busts out what each bit of your diss should be accomplishing. In talking about the literature review, Dunleavy talks about good and bad lit reviews – the cumbersome review that includes everything under the sun ever written, and the good (read: functional) review that develops the literature in a ‘need to know’ structure for the reader. Since I am using a lot of literature from outside Film Studies, it is important for my committee to understand the ideas that frame my work (so that I can prove that the work I am doing is innovative in respect to what has been done already).

So, I spent the last four days hammering out my lit review, more unconsciously than I realized. I decided to roll my “definitions” bit into the same chapter, so the reader will know within which context I am talking about certain terms. So, I categorized my literature by ‘term’ in order of relevance to the content of my work. Starting with Identity (obviously), I realized I wrote a pretty classic lit review almost by second nature (I have written a few on identity in my academic career….). When it was all done, I broke it up into sections of what it is I want the reader to know about identity and its construction process – within a historical context. Instead of writing a full overview of the lit and situating my work within it, I am using it more as a definitional construct. What is it about identity construction that my reader needs to know so that they understand what it is I am proposing when I am talking about ‘hybrid identity’ construction in video game play? What are the key pieces of work that will demonstrate how thinking about identity construction has changed over the decades (centuries). Once decided, I was able to re-edit the literature to act more as a demonstration than a framing…. make sense?

While it might sound the same, the process (and outcome) is a bit different than what I am used to. It is hard to go against my trained nature of what a research paper (diss) looks like, what parts are necessary, and what are complementary – it is nice to finally be at this stage of my writing – that’s for sure!