Tag Archives: writing

Book Chapters

I have recently (by which I mean this year – what even is time anymore) had two book chapters published!

The first is a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers. The chapter is called “Semiotics in Game Music”, perhaps unsurprisingly! I really enjoyed writing this one, as the brief was to write for an undergraduate audience and I took that as affording a slightly less formal tone. The subject is essentially what it says on the tin: a slightly simplified version of my theory of ludomusicological semiotics. The case study of the themes of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim was particularly fun to write, as I observed a link I hadn’t noticed before between the Morrowind and Skyrim themes (which was probably obvious to every other fan of the Elder Scrolls games).

The second is a chapter in Women’s Music for the Screen, edited by Felicity Wilcox, on the career and works of Winifred Phillips. The case study of the chapter is on the music of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, which is a fantastic score. Phillips wove together several geographical and sociocultural influences to create a musical experience that makes the game world more real than real. I found this particularly impressive given the game was originally developed for mobile phones, a platform where music (and, indeed, sound) has often been regarded as optional (though I hasten to note that this is now even less accurate than it would have been when Liberation was developed).

It has been an absolute honour for my writing to become a part of these two volumes. Please go and have a read if you can!

The Finish Line, But For Real This Time

My PhD is done.

Like, proper done.

Actually finished.

Nothing left to do (except graduate).

Fin.

Game over.

The last six months have been a roller-coaster. My initial comprehension of the new-found freedom following thesis submission didn’t take into account the three months of revisions that would follow examination. I have played Civilization IV, PUBG, and very little else (music included, unfortunately). I have (nearly) finished reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. I have been taking lots of photos. Ultimately, though, most of my post-thesis to-do list remains undone. In its stead, I compiled responses and completed revisions based on 231 points raised in the examination reports.

I’m very grateful to my examiners for their feedback. I can’t say that I agreed with all of the points raised, and addressing so many points in three months tested various limits of mental and physical endurance. Ultimately, though, my thesis is now much stronger. Responding to the feedback allowed me to patch up a lot of the problems that I knew were there. I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was notified that the university had accepted my revisions, and then I received a completion letter. So, that’s that. Along with a gradually-getting-stronger sense of relief, I’m starting to understand that I have some time for other projects now, and finally (after a decent amount of time imitating a zombie, and the standard post-examination bout of sickness) feeling like I might have some energy with which to take them on.

What’s next? Not sure, but that’s fine for now.

 

P.S. If you’d like to read my thesis, Ludomusicological Semiotics: Theory, Implications, and Case Studies, there is a link on the “Bibliography” page of this site.

The Finish Line Is Back There a Bit

I submitted my PhD thesis the other day.

This is a rather excellent development.

I think I’m happy with how it turned out. Though, of course, I’m not really willing to re-open it and check just yet. I’ll wait and see what the examiners say, and in the meantime, I will try to recover from the final stretch. I took six weeks off work to finish the thesis—a time period in which I took about three days off thesis work, not including the time I spent preparing and presenting a paper at the Games Research Methods Symposium at Sydney Uni (a really interesting conference, but from a timing perspective it wasn’t my greatest decision). I worked myself beyond exhaustion, lost track of the day several times, and still had to make compromises on several aspects and processes. I had to avoid Twitter to keep my mental health above water. I had to employ several fine-toothed combs, including one to remove spaces around em-dashes (a bad habit), one to ensure the use of Oxford commas (easy things to miss, it turns out), and one to switch out the singular ‘they’ (a good habit, but a PhD thesis isn’t the time to fight that battle). EndNote caused a day of intense frustration when it started changing citations of its own volition. And while most aspects of the formatting style I’d previously used for my honours thesis could be re-used to save trouble, I did have to switch the font in the end. But all told, I think it turned out well.

My initial plan, going into this PhD, was to study the intersection of thematic and gameplay genres. However, I soon found semiotics to be a more interesting and less well-trod path. My thesis ended up being a very substantial development of the work I started in my “Meaningful Play” article: a semiotic framework capable of analysing the initial composition and interactive configuration of game music separately (because there are some quite different processes going on in each). I was quite impressed by the idea of the player’s authorship of their experience—a concept which is not new in studies of games, but which had yet to be fully applied to game music, and which gets really interesting when comparing gameplay to other forms of play. With the exception of some work on Microsoft Flight, all of the analysis and writing I’ve done over the last five and a half years has made it into the thesis in some way. However, there are several avenues of investigation that came up during my study that I didn’t have time or space to pursue. I dropped four potential chapters, and still nearly hit my word limit.

In between afternoon naps, I’ve been trying to think of things to do with my reacquired freedom. I’m presenting a conference paper in December, but I’ve decided not to do any academic work until September to give myself a break. I’ve been reading for leisure again, which is nice. I’ve got time for photography, including astro and analogue. And there’s a mountain of unplayed games in my Steam library to play through. But I’ve also completed my strategy of encouraging thesis progress through self-bribery. I found that I was much more likely to write when I set myself goals with tangible rewards, and for the ultimate reward I decided to aim for a MIDI controller. I’ve been itching to make music, to play some piano, and even to compose. So I’ve bought a device with plenty of scope for productivity and experimentation, and am having quite a lot of fun playing around with music again. I might even try my hand at making some game music—coming at my object of study from the other direction, as it were.

Anyway, thanks for reading up to this point. I plan to keep writing (who knows? I might even do so more frequently), because games and music are excellent things. Somehow, writing my thesis hasn’t crippled my ability to enjoy either. I think that must be some kind of miracle.

Literally a Long, Long Time

Last night I finished the first complete draft of the literature review chapter of my thesis. It’s 10,455 words long, and according to my versioning system it’s the 20th draft file. The first draft file is dated 26 August 2014.

Writing a literature review is an interesting exercise. In my experience at least, there’s not a great deal of official information out there about what a literature review is, or what it should contain. I’ve found it a constant challenge to find out what’s required of me throughout this PhD adventure (pro tip: try not to be left off the mailing list when you start a new degree), but even accounting for that there’s a dearth of information on literature review formats or expectations. Perhaps it’s the relatively self-explanatory title of the concept. “A literature review is… a review… of the literature…? Duh.”

Anyway, early on I was dreading the thought of the anomalous excercise of writing the lit review. And when I started, I kept getting hung up on it. So many times I’d start doing work on it, then flounder so completely that work on the whole thesis would stagnate. This is my excuse for the chapter taking almost three years to complete. Three to four years is the regular timeframe for a full-time PhD in Australia, and while I’ve been part-time since early 2015 this chapter has still been an excruciatingly long endeavour. When something is repeatedly difficult, it becomes difficult to even pick up your work on it, let alone to get it finished.

Something changed this year, though. Or started to change last year. I took some time off work mid-2016 so that I could get deeper into the study mindset for a while, and wrote 20,000 words in a month. So, I did it again late-2016 and it didn’t work quite so well (not sure why). I tried it again over Easter and got sick twice in two weeks, the frustration of which seems to have extended my fervour for thesis work beyond the typical pattern (finally!). But something that did happen in these attempts was that for some bizarre reason I was kind of having fun.* There is an art to collecting, collating, and presenting information concisely. It requires a certain amount of creativity to determine what to include, how to include it, and how to relate it to everything else that’s included. Ludomusicological semiotics draws on a lot of fields — semiotics, musicology and game studies at the very least. The process of diving into each of these fields, threshing the salient points from the gritty details, weaving them into a coherent representation within 2,000 words or so, then dashing on to do the same thing for another entire body of work, is kind of a rush when it’s done at the pace of the final stages of a PhD.

But I think I also just enjoyed seeing a snapshot of the full context of my work. In a young field, it’s easy to feel as though you need to justify your choice of study before you can even discuss it. Reviewing the literature gave me a perspective on my work that relates it not only to the ludomusicological literature of the last decade and a half, but to the literature of several well-established fields that go back much further. The most encouraging part of that is to see that my work is not an outlandish endeavour; similar things have been done before, in similar ways and for similar reasons.

But, said work is not finished yet. There’s still a fair bit to do before my submission date (early August), and I’ve no doubt it will not be fun. Bloggings may well be as sparse as they have been lately. But hey, the end is now certainly in sight, and there’s one less seemingly insurmountable hurdle in the way.

 

*This statement is possibly the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written.

Formatting for Fun and Profit

One of the most valuable writing techniques I’ve picked up from my supervisor (there are several) is the habit of using simple and obvious formatting to mark out what needs editing. These are basic things that are simple to implement in Word, but which let you see immediately what needs doing to a block of text. While it’s sometimes convenient to use comments or similar markup, comments a) require more work to add, and b) require you to read them to know what’s going on. The simplest method I’ve found is to use colour.

My editing markup consists of a few main colours:

  • I use orange when I don’t know if I want to keep some text because it’s silly or whatever. This is the best one, because you can just write stuff, mark it as questionable, and keep writing. Allows increasing the efficiency of your word count gains.
  • I use red when something msut be canhged beacuse its worng.
  • I use red in square brackets for:
    • Referencing at the end of sentences when I’m lazy.[reference Hart, 2016]
    • Telling myself what to do because [finish this sentence when you’re less lazy]
  • I use bold blue for headings that I’m not 100% sure on
  • I use purple for text that I’m adapting and need to revise (e.g. when I’m adapting a paper into a thesis chapter)

It’s simple stuff, but it stands out immediately. It’s also a good way to remind yourself that you’ll be editing things later and the important thing right now is to just write already.

Anyway, what techniques do you use to help you get words on the page?