Mini-Post: Mindmap Exercise, and Where Are We Headed?

Friday November 20th

Hello everybody! It's been about two weeks since my last post on the blog. I'm thinking I'm going to shoot two blog posts out this weekend to catch up a little: this short one, and a longer one on Sunday (knock on wood) about different examples of narrativization in Dwarf Fortress. I spent a couple hours playing Dwarf Fortress this morning, so I'm ready to get my head out of the game, and into... reading about the game. Ah well!

The purpose of this post is to share some insights I've come into through doing a quick mindmapping exercise earlier this week. This post is more for my benefit than anyone else's, but will hopefully still show a bit of my thought process at this point. As we come close to the end of the semester, I need to prepare for the large expanse of work on this thesis I'm going to take on during the break. In our last meeting, Dr. Graham suggested I create a map of all my ideas on the biggest sheet of paper I could find, make as many meaningful connections as I can, and reduce that 2-dimensional map into a 1-dimensional list. The map I came up with looks like this:

IF YOU'RE READING THIS IT'S TOO LATE

That in itself is not the most useful picture to understand where I'm heading, but it does give some clues I suppose. After spending probably a good hour doing this, I tried my best to condense it down to some sort of list, with varying success. From my notes:

Historical consciousness emerges from the narrativization of lore/game experience as a way of filling in the blanks

  • comes out of emergent cultures in game and COMMUNITY (forums)
  • historical thinking is needed to narrativize -> leads to historical consciousness
  • complexity theory comes into this, allows for it
  • situated/actuated in GAMEWORLD: drawing back to emergent culture and archival theory
    • narrativization/narrative as reordering archival pieces of gameplay
    • archaeogaming and the material culture of games
    • narrative structure as histoy.
  • lore is tied up in game experience, being optional. A connecting piece between AAA games and DF.
    • levels of engagement with material; Bartle test.
    • filling in the blanks
      • DF: fill in blanks of objective text/ASCII gameplay to construct compelling story (Proc. gen.)
      • AAA: understand obscured narratives through piecing together of material; fill in blanks of complex world
        • wikis as place for this as well.
  • Piecing together stories from experience: manipulation of game experience/material as organizing/drawing from the FONDS

Ta-da! Now, instead of a bunch of notes of material that didn't necessarily reference itself or seem related at all, I have a dense list of ideas that flow into and out of each other in a way that makes sense to me and gives some shape to my project. Before this exercise I was worried about the amount of material I had to work with, but now I'm feeling a lot more confident on a) what material I have at this point, and b) where this project is headed. Some important terms and ideas sort of emerged from this exercise, by coming up as important pieces of the project that I previously hadn't given much thought to, or just being the natural result of considering a lot of these ideas together.They are:

  1. Emergent cultures/Complexity theory: Dr. Graham and I have talked about this at different times in this project, but to this point I haven't done any substantial research or thought on the theories. These two seem like they'll be pretty essential to ideas of historical consciousness emerging: ideas of new cultures and ideas emerging from game processes is going to be a fascinating topic to explore.

  2. Gameworld: Especially after looking at ideas of a videgame and the gameworld in particular being a fonds or an archive in itself, looking specifically at ideas about the game space and gameworld are going to be important. Relating both to this and ideas of emergent cultures are two works Dr. Graham had suggested to me early on in September, that I also (yikes) haven't taken a substantial look at. They are Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds and McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory. I have the former, but haven't looked far into it: I'll hopefully finish reading it over my break and also find out if Gamer Theory is a good source to look at for this project.

  3. Archaeogaming: Archaeogaming is the name for, to overgeneralize, doing archaeology in videogame worlds. Archaegamers (I think that's the appropriate term) look at video game worlds, both for single- and multi-player games, and look at what we can learn about cultures within the gameworld. (You could represent this as the synthesis of the previous two terms perhaps?) I know Andrew Reinhard is someone doing really innovative work in this field, and I'm looking forward to sending him an email or something for some suggestions of sources and maybe some input, if he's not crazy busy.

  4. Community: This is an obvious one, and one I am in the process of looking at. This is essential for processes of narrativization which are done in community contexts, and my next blog post should be heavily reliant on ideas of community. Specifically, it will be examining the context of how Dwarf Fortress players are interacting in their community in regards to narrativization, alongside actual examples of this narrativization (ie. Boatmurdered!).

  5. Game experience as inclusive of lore: Ideas of "lore" need to be expanded when considering DF narrativization, which is based on game experience and in a way becomes the lore for specific gamess, worlds, etc. in lieu of game-controlled/created narrative. This can probably be extrapolated for AAA games as well: game-world, character interaction, archaeogaming ideas of environment, and the like.

Alongside all of that, there are some general ideas that need to be fleshed out further within this project. Without expanding on them in depth, they are:

  • Bartle test
  • Historical thinking/consciousness as concepts
  • More narrativization
  • Archival theory
  • What to do with AAA games

That's about all I'm going to talk about in this post, though. There are some great ideas here and some avenues for exploring new ideas that will really enhance the project as a whole. Hopefully there will be another, more focused blog post relating to narrativization while keeping a lot of these ideas in mind throughout.

As always, feel free to follow/contact me on Twitter at @rapickering, or open up a Github issue on sections in any of my blog posts if you have any questions, comments, etc. The point of this blog is not just to organize my thoughts and keep me moving on this project: it's to facilitate a bit of discussion with the larger digital humanities community that can hopefully move me closer towards a powerful project come March. Thank you for reading, and please keep checking back at my Twitter or this blog for more updates throughout the next couple weeks!