Our lecturer Maddy led us through a series of preparation exercises and presentations to help us formulate our research question for this paper. The first was a mind map of areas of interest.
As you can see, my initial areas of interest included:
- VR Theatre (towards emotional / expressive inputs for actors and audiences)
- Tabletop games (authorship in solo / journalling games)
- Narrative (towards alternative narrative models, inspired by the operatic game OIKOS (A Dog Opera) and the cinematic game 30 Flights of Loving)
- Dialogue (towards alternative dialogue systems, or looking at representations of internal voice in dialogue)
I felt like alternative dialogue systems might be a useful avenue for thesis work, but also that the area interested me the most. I resolved to crunch down on this area and formulate a much narrower field of investigation – if it remained as interesting to me as I expected, I could use the work as foundation for a wider-ranging thesis.
I sharpened my enquiry into a specific genre (narrative card games), gave it a specific lens (Stanislavskian actor theory – something I have a decade of experience with) and identified two case studies to support my investigation (Griftlands and Signs of the Sojourner). Maddy encouraged us to identify the keywords of our paper, as well as singular texts that would support defining those keywords. As you can see, I landed on Uncertainty and Game Research Methods for my analytic work, The Game Narrative Toolbox for understanding narrative, and An Actor Prepares for referencing theatrical concepts.
The above presentation constitutes my early research, drafting and analytic work on the paper. My research question went through various drafts to make it more specific; even here I don’t think it’s quite at its sharpest. The Stanislavski quote about ‘conscious technique’ was a great find, and helped to frame my arguments about theatrical work being central to deeper understanding of player character. The quote from Robert Yang – ‘gamers have been trained specifically to ignore subtext’ – would turn out to be central to my paper, pointing me to an accessible and oft-discussed term that a reader could relate to throughout. The graphs are examples of gameplay flowcharts, with moments of Stanislavskian ‘technique’ marked with yellow stickers.
All in all, Maddy’s provocations were extremely useful in preparing for this paper. I look forward to repeating the process for my thesis.