Thesis Writing Update/Summary: Table of Contents, Scrivener, and Bibliography Sample... Onwards and Upwards!

Sunday February 21

Whoa, time to blow the dust off of this blog... I feel awful that I haven't been keeping this updated the last 1.5 months, but things have been very busy. I've been trying to fill in the glaring gaps of research thus far in the thesis, and have specifically spent the last week (Carleton's reading week, incidentally, leaving me with some much needed off-time/time to write) putting together a sort-of first draft of the thesis. To be fair, it's more of a barf draft: Dr. Graham suggested I just open up my work, look at the sections I've carved out as a framework, grab one and just barf out whatever rhetoric I can. Surprisingly, it worked out fairly well. The purpose of this blogpost is to basically put where I'm at in this thesis out there for the people following this blog, for two reasons. One, the community of scholars somewhat interested in my work can know I haven't fallen of the face of the earth and I've started to engage in the actual writing process, and two, so that I can keep myself moving as school picks back up and I get distracted with life and all its obstacles.

To anyone reading this blog on a regular basis, I'm sure my infrequent updates and jumping back and forth between topics has been keeping you on your toes as to what this thesis will actually entail as an academic paper. Thus, one exercise I put myself through (also at the recommendation of Dr. Graham) was to create myself a table of contents from what material I have already written from this research blog. In doing so, I began to see the holes in my theoretical framework and how to fill them. That table of contents has gone through many changes as Dr. Graham and I have interrogated my information thus far, but I think through a process of gathering all my sources, finding new ones to fill the holes, and realizing how the natural flow of information should go, I have figured out a fairly effective table of contents that I would like to share. It goes as follows:

  1. Introduction
  2. Dwarf Fortress and its Community - An Introduction and Apologia
  3. Narratives, Simulation and Microhistory in Dwarf Fortress
  4. Historical Thinking Concepts: An Introduction
  5. The Concepts as Applied to Dwarf Fortress Narratives (it is here where the bulk of analysis will be)
  6. Implications for both Games and History: A Conclusion

These categories are not monographs unto themselves, and indeed are split up into different subsections and subheadings as well. I just thought this list was a nice preview to the whole project as it will one day stand. Right now, I have the introduction to Dwarf Fortress/community finished, the section on narrative finished, and am almost finished summarizing higher order thinking and Seixas' specific methods. Unfortunately, the section that feels the most intellectually daunting, applying the concepts to DF narratives, hasn't been touched yet, but writing everything else has really helped flesh out the framework in which I'm going to engage this stuff. The last section as a sort of conclusion has obviously not been approached yet - I find it a lot more helpful to be able to write a conclusion knowing everything that's going into the paper first. Same thing with the introduction - having an intro that paints a beautiful flow between the upcoming sections is always easier to do when those sections are already built.

The sections written thus far, if I include the extra 500 words not written but easy to eventually put onto the page, make up just under 10,000 words, which, if we take 300 words per page as the general rule of thumb when translated over to Word, that works out to be about 33 pages. YIKES - that is a hell of a lot of material, moreso than I thought I had in me... and that's even without the real meat of the project, where I'll most likely get another at least 6,000! I'm sure when Dr. Graham takes a look at that framework stuff he'll recommend cutting a lot of it out and shortening things I tend to expound upon a bit much, but even so, it's a nice feeling to be able to recognize I must have some base of knowledge in this material to be able to churn out that much writing that doesn't feel immediately shallow to me.

Speaking of Word, I have to say that if I were trying to write this thesis in a regular word processing program, or (god forbid) on paper, I would be completely and utterly lost. What has saved me throughout this last week writing bits and pieces in different sections at a time has been Scrivener, the writing application Dr. Graham recommended to my class back in second year. The functionality of it to allow for drafts, subdocuments, notation, importing PDFs, splitscreen use, and the like has been CRAZY helpful. I'm glad I got some work in with this software now as (possible) prep for grad school, as this stuff would not have been possible without the organizational structure of Scrivener.

In terms of bibliography, the vast amount of literature I'm engaging with really makes me feel like this is a legit endeavour. So many scholars have written on things I am drawing in, and while I only have one peer-reviewed piece talking about Dwarf Fortress - the piece by Boluk and LeMieux I have written about previously - they all fit together in fascianting ways to talk about education, simulation, historiography, microhistory, wikis, and so much more. Here is a list, not formatted in any proper way or annotated (though I might come back and do that later), of sources I've pulled some great stuff from, as both a) a hint to what I'll be discussing throughout the paper, and b) to possibly inspire people in the community to suggest some other pieces to pull from.

  • Matthew Barr - Learning through collaboration: video game wikis
  • Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux - Dwarven Epitaphs: Procedural Histories in Dwarf Fortress
  • Jerremie Clyde, Howard Hopkins, Glenn Wilkinson - Beyond the "Historical" Simulation: Using Thoeries of History to Inform Scholarly Game Design
  • Claudio Fogu - Digitalizing Historical Consciousness
  • Gonzalo Frasca - Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology
  • Kevin Kee, Shawn Graham, et al. - Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming
  • Giovanni Levi - On Microhistory
  • Arthur Lewis and David Smith - Defining Higher Order Thinking
  • John Rice - Assessing Higher Order Thinking in Video Games
  • Peter Seixas and Carla Peck - Teaching Historical Thinking
  • István Szijárto - Four Arguments for Microhistory
  • William Uricchio - Simulation, History, and Computer Games

Alongside all of this, I have numerous non-academic sources on Dwarf Fortress procedure, mechanics, community, and narrative that will be explored extensively throughout the piece.

Well, since it is getting very late where I am right now, I think I will call it for this blog post. Like I just said above regarding new sources, if anyone in the community has any suggestions for this piece while it's still in the writing process, please do not hesitate to engage with me on it through here or on my Twitter, @rapickering. Thank you for keeping up with this blog since September - it is a really good feeling to know people are interested in the work I'm doing and what I'm working on is interesting and worth it, at least to some people. Keep an eye on my Twitter to see what new developments are going on in my thesis - if any crazy new devleopments happen I will hopefully get a chance to write on them here. Thank you and goodnight!