Xian must’ve seen Stranger The Fiction and decided to write the inverse: the death of unworthy agents of capitalism, the gaming industry. Read a brilliant rambling blog post by someone who knows what they are talking about. So my question (if we’re doing inverses): How to make the gaming industry worthy of gamers?
I am playing my own game with my diss. I am on the home stretch. I have finished all the straight historical work (well Foucault croooked, but only history). Now I am on to the history that is also of my present. For example, I am currently writing about the ‘Fast Fours’ period before the Rise of the Imports but different to Street Machining (although arguably, as I do, of Street Machining) using magazines that includes some I brought from home that either my brother or I bought when brand new in the early 1990s. The translocal transmission of events (as elements: objects, cultures, practices, etc) from one scene to another is extremely clear in the pages of these early magazines. I am plotting the changing discourse in the magazine while plotting the changing material conditions of the scene in Australia during the Rise of the Imports. Workshops and spare parts importers start to emerge that cater to this new type of modified-car culture…
Overall, I have done too much work. This is clear to me now. There is no way this thing is going to be below 100k. I am going to be sending off the first two thirds (67k) to the supers tomorrow. I wonder if they will tell me that section is enough for a PhD? It has no fieldwork in it. It covers only 20 years of history. Nothing about hoons either. I feel like I have done a Phd and a Masters (and maybe an honours thesis or two). I am up to about 75k.
Well, listen to their advice with it, first off. Just get it out of the way, pass it, don’t pretend its a magnus opus that everybody will read (they won’t). Use all your extra material for the books you write later on – so work out where to cut off the machine now and where to expand, a good 70,000 investigation, even that doesn’t do what you thought you were doing, is better than a 110,000 word one that rambles, covers too much.
You may be closer than you think. So, just relax, dont’ work on it as they read it, just plan on where you can cut out research.
Saving games is easy.. just don’t pull out the memory card (man’s relation to history) during a save check (critical event), etc…. ahem.