Critical Evaluation

While choosing the topic I went quickly through the list of the topics and from the start I liked the idea of dramatic elements and their relevance to video games. Before I even started chasing the topic and researching into it I had a few conceptions about different types of narratives in games. However I would never guess that this is such a broad topic to uncover, and so much has been written about it, though it's not even a fraction of what is there to state and research. I found this topic very interesting and certainly I will keep up to date with new works that are going to come out about the issue.

When I started researching the topic I realized my former misconception. On the beginning I thought of researching different types of narrations in games and role playing and story telling aspects in video games for I have a significant back ground in role playing games, and they naturally drew me to the topic. Also I am a story/plot lover and take every opportunity to play games with interesting narratives. Hence my initial concept of the topic was concentrated around game plots. Instead of that I found after a brief search on google scholar plenty of the material about game theorists struggle with narrativists, and vice versa. I counted to find some more essential writing about actual issue in games. Even if that was not exactly what I was thinking of it came to be a great help and progress in my work. I was mainly influenced by convincing essays of Jesper Juul and Markku Eskelinen. Later I went to check books such as Aristotle’s The Poetics, Jesper Juul’s Half Real, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature by Espen J. Aarseth, Story and discourse by Seymour Chatman and Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray.

During progression of my blog I found out that amount of resources I went through was uncontrollably piling up. I could spend a day just researching an issue of some article that was vaguely relevant to my topic, such as; why there are little games with experimental narratives. Whereas, experimental narratives in video games would be much better idea to cover. In the future I need to discipline myself and improve my time management and focus on my main idea, not to drift away from it.

I think I got on the right track after reading some other blogs and found perfect topic to write about after reading "Rules of Play". I appreciate the input of this book into my research for the clear explanations of the ideas the authors had to share. This was in a particular way a breakthrough in the progression of my blog. Still I was forcing myself to push my work into something even more academic than it was possible for me, so I kept discarding things that didn't fulfil my demands. I think initially I reckon I sought for my own opinion about dramatic elements in video games than just research of other theorists.

On the other hand I found outlet of my brainstorm producing in a way my own ideas and observations of different games. Also I felt that It is much easier to state some theory and then give an example of a game that is relevant to the idea. This was most comforting way of recording new posts in my blog.

Even though in a way I avoided to write about narratology and ludology, because I thought it wasn’t as relevant to my blog as the concept of narratives in video games I included contradictory ideas of both fronts. I found that the whole idea of researching the narratives and actual attempting to improve it are stuck in a place because of struggles of the theorists trying to prove one or other idea, and have upper hand in the discussion. Therefore, I found little of the material that was relevant to the sheer topic, and how it interrelates with other game aspects, such as interaction, genre or play. I selected one fairly big quote for my task, and a few smaller although I didn’t interlinkedthem together, what I should have done.

I found use of the blog very convenient for its features such as possibility of embedding videos and images that support my written work and serve as an medium to clear out my explanations. Also watching others progress was a very motivating to keep to date and search for new websites and articles.

In my opinion this task opened a new field of more academic knowledge in front of me. I feel it also improved my academic skills of articulating my thoughts in a more scholar way. I felt though that when I was starting with my writing the topic was expanding in a completely natural manner.

In future I will try to keep posting more consistently new messages. I would like to improve the structure of the blog, and research the core topic first and then add more subtopics that would add the depth to the research. Even though I went through works done by theorists I had problems with extracting relevant quotes and articulating the importance to my blog. In future I hope to perform better in research, to improve the relevance of my posts to my chosen topic.