Exploring Geographies of Video Games: Placing Virtual Worlds

Cottonwood tree from Firewatch

 

In the last 35 years or so, digital technology has become an ever more prominent feature of everyday life in developed societies. The spaces in which we take part in activities for leisure, work and social relationships are increasingly virtual: interactive environments that we can navigate, manipulate and experience through screens, keyboards and other interfaces. Virtual spaces are not only technologically significant but also culturally significant, affecting the way we make sense of the world. 

In an industry growing at 8.5% per year and now worth $99.6 billion in global revenue (more than books, cinema and audio entertainment), video gaming exemplifies the rising cultural importance of virtual worlds. The industry’s growth is coupled with improvements in computer processing power and 3D graphics technology, which game developers are using to craft increasingly detailed and complex virtual environments for stimulating play experiences.

Traditionally, the environments of video games have mostly provided a backdrop for the mechanical interactions that the game asks you to perform - such as the precise movement of buttons and control pads in racing and first-person shooter games. Yet for the emerging genre of ‘walking simulator’ games, it is the active exploration of immersive virtual worlds that is at the heart of the play experience. Developers design environments filled with intriguing and emotionally powerful details to discover, which tell stories as you walk through them.

The development of walking simulators therefore represents an important moment not only in the evolution of video games, but more widely for how virtual spaces are used and what they mean. Because rather than serving as a platform for some other purpose, the game environments themselves are the purpose: to provide tangible worlds with a deep sense of place that players can imagine themselves into.

 

Virtual Places

Places, in geographical terms, are spaces that we know through the meanings that we associate with them; those with which we have some kind of subjective attachment based on our experiences. While spaces are basic areas or volumes with geometrical properties, spaces become places when they are filled with cultural and social reference points. In short, they are meaningful locations.

Traditionally in geography, the idea of place is universal; something that we all experience as human beings. To be conscious is to form some kind of awareness or understanding about the world – to attach meaning to it. And as we live our lives, we develop a series of relatively settled social and emotional bonds with spaces through our everyday experiences in them. By studying culture and art, it is possible to get insights into how this process of meaning-making works, and ultimately gain a deeper understanding of places based on real, lived experience.            

Although many traditional games fail to offer much opportunity for this kind of deeper emotional investment in their virtual environments, what intrigued me about walking simulators was how their explorative gameplay seemed to invite players to immerse themselves in the spirit of the game world, treading their own path through the (hi)stories, events and landscapes that make the world meaningful and emotionally powerful.

Yet in geography, places are usually understood to be physical locations – not digital media made from computer code. This follows a tradition in the humanities and social sciences where virtual reality and physical reality are often separated from one other. The virtual is then either celebrated as a sublime realm of innovation, creativity and communication, or vilified as a dangerous world that is disconnected from the social norms of ‘real life’.

So the main question I had going into my research was this: to what extent can the virtual worlds of walking simulator games be considered ‘places’?

What excited me about this question was how the answer would have consequences that reach much further than my individual study. It was important not only for understanding the worlds of video games, but perhaps more profoundly for the concept of ‘place’ itself: what a place is, and how we can experience the feeling of being in a place.

To address these issues as fully as possible, my research focused on a wide range of meaningful elements of walking simulator worlds: from the structural, systemic aspects of gameplay (how the player can/can’t interact with the game world) to the more interpretative aspects (player’s individual emotional reactions to the world).

 

Agency and Interactivity

Because video game worlds are virtual, players are limited in the actions they are able to perform – their agency – compared to what they can do in the physical world. However, these limited activities ultimately define the kind of experience the player has. The ways you interact with worlds determine your relationship to them, and for video games it is their developers who have the greatest say on what you can and can’t do, and how the game world reacts.

In walking simulators, developers actively avoid the numerous and complex controls of many traditional games, apart from the basic functions of moving and looking around. There are no scoring systems and typically no objectives for measuring your success or progress in the game. Indeed, the ‘walking simulator’ term started as a negative label given by some gamers, who argued that all you do is walk in the game world – there is no challenge to tackle; no skill involved in playing. Some have questioned whether such experiences can even be called ‘games’ at all.

But these arguments display a narrow understanding of the kinds of interaction that games can involve. Avoiding traditional game mechanics is a deliberate technique that designers use to encourage players to engage thoughtfully with the game world, freeing players’ attention from the immediate challenges of precise button pressing, winning and losing. Instead, developers craft powerful experiences whose stories are guided by the player’s decisions, interpretations and emotions.

Of course, developers often still have a particular story or emotion that they want players to experience, which they can convey through careful design. They can control which areas of the game world players can access at any given time (‘gating’). They can use lighting and sound to draw players’ attention towards certain details in the environment (‘signposting’). And most importantly, they dictate how information and objects are placed in the game world. Like in the physical world, then, forces of power shape the meanings that people associate with particular locations.

The uniqueness of walking simulator games is that this power relationship is a liberal one, based on a continued conversation between the designer – speaking through the environment they build – and the player as they attempt to understand the world. There is no official nor accepted version of events because everyone’s experiences will be different depending on how they played and interpreted the game. We each form our own personal bonds with locations in the game world according to our individual experiences of them, in the same way we relate to physical places.

 

Immersion and Believability

In video game worlds, such experiences always take place through an avatar – a virtual figure with characteristics that determine where a player can look, how they can move, and what actions they can perform.

What is distinct about walking simulators, though, is that all of these attributes are designed to immerse the player as fully as possible in the experiential space of the world and its characters. Nearly all walking simulators are played in first-person, as though the screen is the avatar’s eyes and the speakers their ears; the world enveloping around you as you play. The typically slow movement of walking helps players to pay attention to detail, and take in the atmosphere of the environment. And any actions you can perform tell the player about their ability to affect the world, and the roles and responsibilities that go with this. For example, interacting with urban infrastructure in INFRA gives a very visceral sense of the huge scale and importance of such systems, as well as the enormity of the task of managing them.

Vast industrial environment in INFRA

 

Yet what I discovered from my research was that these qualities of perspective, movement and action aren’t enough by themselves to create powerful immersive relationships between players and game worlds. Rather, it is their authenticity and consistency that maintains the player’s sense of presence – of being in a real world.

Authenticity refers to what belongs in the world, according to its fictional logic. If you’re setting a game in 1980s rural England, like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the objects in the world need to be from that cultural context if all players are going to believe in it, even if this requires some research. Whereas consistency is about maintaining the aesthetics and physics of the designed world throughout the game, otherwise players will struggle to feel like they can know the world and become attuned to its characteristics as a place.



The characteristically rural English landscape of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

  

In the end, both authenticity and consistency are about the mental pictures of the world that players form in their heads. Game worlds don’t have to be realistic for players to have meaningful experiences in them – they just need to be coherent and believable; as though the world could exist.

Unfortunately, during play there are plenty of things that can disrupt the mental image of the world that players form. Technical glitches can affect the appearance of the environment, or prevent players from interacting with it altogether. Other times players may simply struggle to believe in the story they are being told.

In many cases, problems can be fixed before and after the game is published, based on testing and player feedback. It is an ongoing process of fine-tuning the game world that balances the capabilities of the technology and our perception of virtual worlds as human beings.

But ultimately what video games demonstrate is that immersion and believability in virtual worlds are uncertain, fragile achievements that rely on a number of human and technical factors that are both prone to error. During play, video games worlds can easily feel like believable places one moment and malfunctioning technology the next.

 

Navigation and Narrative

Of course, video games are often engaging not just because you feel like you’re inside a believable world, but for the powerful experiences you have in that world during play. In walking simulators, where play is based on exploration, game developers aim to create worlds that are interesting for precisely that purpose: with emotionally powerful and thought-provoking features to discover throughout.

How developers arrange their virtual environments is therefore an important factor in the relationships players form with game worlds. Developers of walking simulators typically aim to heighten the wonder of exploring by crafting deep worlds that are rich with the subtle and intimate details of a story, strategically placed throughout the world for players to encounter at specific locations.

In game design this principle is called environmental storytelling. With each new narrative detail that players uncover and piece together, they become emotionally invested in the fate of the game world and its characters, encouraging them to investigate further.

Gone Home is one of the clearest and most celebrated examples of this technique. In this game, the player plays a character who returns to their family home to find it mysteriously empty. To understand what happened, they must untangle an intricate web of family dramas by finding notes, objects and tape recordings left throughout the house.

Some of the objects to be discovered in Gone Home

         

The unique power of video games for this kind of storytelling is that players can have a stake in the story themselves, because the way they navigate the world determines what information they discover and how they interpret the experience. The story is interactive, as players bring their own ideas, memories and meanings to the world to make sense of what they find.

The result is that a more intimate and personal relationship develops between the player and the fictional world than if the story was told to the player directly. The job of the developer here is actually more about leaving room for players to fill with their own imagination. Developers provide the stimuli in the form of interesting landmarks, symbols, events or artefacts, and players are left make their own path through the material according to what resonates with them.

As my friend Rosa Carbó-Mascarell has argued, playing walking simulators is a psychogeographical act, where the player’s thoughts and ideas intertwine with the world as they play. Game worlds here are performative – not fixed or settled, but diverse and continually remade as players write their own stories through exploration.

 

Emotion and Identity

To encourage people to invest themselves so deeply in game worlds, developers need to create environments that players feel are worth exploring in the first place. Game design for walking simulators becomes a question of how to make players care about the world.

For this reason, developers tend to base the design of their worlds around a core emotional experience that they want to evoke in players, which becomes the framework for the game’s design. The world is populated by intriguing, relatable characters, and arranged to set the stage for dramatic or thought-provoking story events. Perhaps the most important (yet underappreciated) technique for tugging at the heartstrings of the player is sound. Sound has the quality of being able to convey the mood and atmosphere of story events very effectively, whether this is through the tone of a character’s voice, or evocative music in games like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

Layered with sound and story, game environments become both internal and external – visible worlds that you can navigate, but also shaped more subtly by contours of thoughts and emotions.

Unlike any other storytelling medium, however, in video games we do not just passively watch characters go through the trials and tribulations that their world presents them with. The interactivity of video games allows us to somehow take part in the story’s events. We might be asked to take on a character’s role, controlling their actions and witnessing their consequences for the world. Or our role could simply involve interpreting the narrative information we encounter as we walk through the world. In both cases, we are asked to identify with the situations represented on-screen and participate in the storytelling ourselves.

Here, we care more about the world because we are actively involved in producing it.

The situations players confront in the story are often particularly emotionally powerful because the developers have based them on real people, places or experiences from their own lives. It is the authentic feeling behind these events that players connect with through empathy.

However, players as individuals will differ in their own personal interests, experiences and desires. I occasionally found it difficult to emotionally engage with the sci-fi horror world of SOMA, where the presence of monsters prevented me from exploring the intriguing story of an underwater research facility as deeply as I wanted.

An abandoned area of SOMA's underwater research facility

 

What all these observations show is that walking simulators are particularly reliant on the player to make sense of the experience, at least as much as the developers. While many traditional games have score counters and objectives for players to measure how pleased they should feel with their experience at any given time, in walking simulators this reward system is mostly moved inside the player. You explore an area of the world if you think it would be rewarding to do so. It is your interpretation of the story that matters most for the emotional connection you develop with the game world.

The realms of walking simulator games are not fixed places. There is no universally understood version of the world and play events that shape it. Rather, in the words of one of my interviewees, they are “emotionally myriad”, blurring together the identity of the individual player and the spaces of the game world during play. In walking simulators, you explore the cracks and crevices of the self as much as the environment represented on-screen.

Conclusions

A lot of what I found during my research complicates the traditional perspective of ‘place’ in geography, where place is something universal and stable in how humans live their lives. If places exist in video games, then they are inconsistent and fragile, depending on a careful balance of intricate design and player imagination; working technology and believable aesthetics. When any one of these factors breaks down, the vision is easily disrupted. 

Despite this complexity and inconsistency, the relationships players form with video game worlds are still meaningful. The play experience is often moving and creative, as players draw on both the emotive stimuli already in the environment and their own imagination and interpretations, creating their own stories and memories of the world.

Video games therefore do not detract from, nor attempt to recreate, our relationships with the physical world. Their virtual worlds are meaningful in themselves.

Although video games have distinctive qualities, they aren’t the only medium this can apply to. Think about the times when you seem to lose yourself in the world of a novel, or transported to another place by a piece of music. You can still feel a powerful sense of place even if you are not physically there.

Because of these observations, I don’t think that it is useful to focus on how the sense of place we experience in virtual worlds is different from that in the physical world. Given that virtual spaces are becoming an increasingly regular feature of our everyday lives, I think the whole idea of ‘place’ needs to evolve in line with the diverse ways that people form attachments with spaces of all types, wherever they lie on the line between physical and imagined.

I’m proposing that ‘place’ should be seen less as a universal experience confined to the ‘real’ world, and more as an event in which diverse human practices and material technologies come together to generate meaning in a world, whether virtual or corporeal.

The attachments we form with locations are deeply significant in our lives, giving rise to cultures, inspiring countless artists, and affecting how we make sense of the world. The importance of these research findings is that they allow us to appreciate the role that cultural products and their virtual environments – such as video games, literature, music, and more – have in this process.

By showing how these geographical relationships can occur in video games specifically, I hope that people can not only appreciate what this fascinating medium has to offer for human experience, but also recognise the value of understanding and studying the diverse cultural practices through which we find a place in the world.



Paper boats from the iconic ending of Dear Esther

 

Writing a Dissertation (Or Other Long Piece of Academic Work)

Projects like dissertations are all-consuming; slowly sucking up hundreds of hours of your life as the very first sparks of ideas eventually engulf you with all the reading, planning and doing that research entails. Amidst all this workload, it’s often easy to lose sight of the fact that, at the end of it all, a dissertation is words on paper. No matter how much effort that has gone before, it is a cruel truth that the totality of your work will be judged on the words you write in the relatively short period after the fieldwork and analysis. There are no prizes just for taking part.

Time management

So it makes sense to give yourself the best chance you can to do the writing part well. Being organised is crucial. There needs to be time not only to write each section well, but also to improve on your drafts; get any feedback from supervisors or friends; finish contents pages, bibliographies etc.; and cut down any extra words at the end.

When I started writing my dissertation on the environments of video games, I had just over a month to go before submission. This wasn’t ideal. I originally planned for longer, but a couple of the game developers I interviewed had to re-arrange their interviews. This meant that it was even more important for me to plan my time appropriately to get the project completed in time.

When scheduling each stage of the writing, I found it very helpful to work backwards from the final deadline. The deadline date and time for submitting your work is the one condition you cannot breach, so it makes sense to base your planning around this point. This can be quite daunting, because you are forced to think about the inevitably huge quantity of work you need to do, in a time period that is inevitably shorter than you want it to be. But without this kind of forward thinking it can be very easy to write each section according to how much time you think you have, or think you need, rather than how much time you actually have. The danger then is that later sections suffer when you suddenly realise that time is slipping away, yet you still have a long list of tasks to finish.

The best solution is to make a timeline of every task that needs to be completed before the deadline, giving the order in which they will be done and how much time you can afford to spend on each one.

Working out the order is partly a case of prioritising. It’s logical to do the tasks that are more important earlier to ensure that they are not hindered if time becomes tight.  For my dissertation, I knew that 50% of my overall mark is based on the substantive chapters of my dissertation – those that discuss what I found through playing the video games and interviewing game developers, analysing this data, and relating what I found to other academic work in cultural geography. These were therefore the first sections I wrote once I finished my analysis, as they would have the greatest bearing on my final grade.

However, also be aware that the content of some sections will depend on what you’ve written beforehand. For example, there’s no point in making a contents page until you know what the page numbers of each section are going to be, which will change constantly as you are writing and editing them.

Basically, be sensible – don’t waste time working on something that you can’t finish until later on anyway.

Knowing how much time to allocate each task is trickier to judge, because you can never be entirely certain how long a section will take to write. Writing is a fickle exercise. In some glorious moments the words just spill onto the screen, the moving of your fingers and brainwaves somehow perfectly attuned. Other times you’ll stare at a blank screen willing the words to appear, to no avail.

One clue you can deduce is the number of words that a section needs to be. From your past experience of academic writing, you’ll probably have a rough idea of how long it takes you to write a piece of a given length. For me, I’m normally happy if I write 1,000 words in a day for academic work, though I can write double that if I’m really pressured/inspired. As this piece had to live up to the high standards and intricacies of a dissertation, and I knew I’d be writing for days on end, I cut myself some slack and aimed for roughly 800 words a day.

With the order and timescale of each writing stage identified, the hardest part of time management is trying to stick to your plan. Like the strict deadline of the final submission, I find that the best way to get your sections written is to set a binding arrangement for a time when they need to be done by. For my dissertation, I decided to take initiative and set deadlines with my supervisor. As our supervisors were allowed to read and give feedback on one draft of each section of our dissertations, I arranged with mine that I would submit drafts of each section to him by certain dates, knowing that he would be giving up his own time in the days after these deadlines to look through my work.

There’s no greater motivator than not wanting to let other people down, so when you make deadlines make sure you tell other people about them, and that they are somehow invested in the outcome. The best people are supervisors, close friends, and anyone who can push you to do the best work you can.

Once you have a clear, workable timeline in place, it’s time to plot the words you’ll be writing.

Planning

As any teacher or tutor will tell you, behind every well-written piece of academic work is a thorough plan. If the people reading your work are going to follow your line of thinking, each point needs flow logically into the next, and assemble to form a coherent argument.

This isn’t to say that you can’t be creative in your approach. But however you decide to present your argument, it needs to be clear to the person reading it what the voice of the piece is; what story you’re trying to tell. And like any good story, the way it is told needs to suit the material and topic you’re presenting. The drama and intrigue of detective mysteries, for example, would be lost if all the facts were revealed at the beginning.

Of course, nearly all academic work shares some commonalities about how it is arranged. There will always be some kind of introduction at the beginning, usually followed by a review of the literature and/or theoretical concepts you’re drawing on in the piece. There will always be some form of conclusion at the end.

But it is in the substantive chapters – the material based on your own research – where you have the most influence over how you arrange your work.

The four chapters of my dissertation were each based on key themes from my analysis into the environments of video games: agency and interactivity; immersion and believability; navigation and narrative; emotion and subjectivity. Planning the chapters using the fluid boundaries of themes suited my material, because the factors that determine how video game environments are created and experienced are so interconnected that it wouldn’t be useful to pretend they could be easily categorised. For example, interactivity and immersion are difficult to disentangle because immersion could be said to be one form of interactivity. With themes, you can allow these closely related factors from each chapter to feed off each other productively as you progress through each stage of the argument.

That said, my argument still had a direction through the ordering of my chapters. In the order I’ve listed the themes above, my chapters move gradually from the more systemic aspects of video games (how the player can/can’t interact with the game world) to the more interpretative aspects (players’ individual emotional reactions to game worlds), which provided me with a logical route towards deconstructing what was going on in the design and play of these video games.

As I described in my previous blog post, once I’d devised this route through my material I wrote abstracts – short summaries – of what I would be arguing in each of my four substantive chapters, as well as the overall dissertation. Using abstracts is a great way of ensuring that you are clear about what point you’re making at each stage of the writing, and where each point sits within your overall argument, making it easier to follow in the final write-up. They also make it easier to sort your fieldwork data and past reading into the sections where they are relevant. It’s much more efficient to work with nicely condensed blocks of material when writing, rather than having to wade through a torrent of notes every time you want to make a point.

Nonetheless, writing up qualitative research is a fine-tuned and delicate process, in which you carefully synthesise what you’ve found with other work in your subject area to make arguments that hopefully expand the field in some way. It’s a balancing act. Too much of your own material and its appears to the reader as if you are unaware of the relevance of what you’re arguing to wider discussions in the field, and what other people have said about your specific topic. But too little material from your fieldwork and it ceases to become a project based on primary research that you’ve done, and instead reads more like an essay where you re-package work that other people have written to make your own arguments.

Because this form of writing is so intricate, I like to make a short plan for what I’m going to say in every single paragraph before I write it. I look through the material at my disposal for the section I’m writing, select the bits that are appropriate for the particular point I want to make, and then write a short sentence about how they’re going to fit together. These mini-plans can be very rough, and you can write them as you go along. The most important thing is not attempting to write a paragraph without some kind of guiding brief. Otherwise you risk veering off course with your argument.

Looking back through a draft version of one of my chapters, this mini-plan is a good demonstration of what I’m talking about. Here I’m writing about some game design techniques I identified through my fieldwork, using them to make a point by relating them to something that geographer Tim Cresswell has written. I also explain how this point fits into the flow of the argument, leading onto the next paragraph I’m going to write:

“Start off with gating, signposting, then pacing. End with point that these techniques are not necessarily visible to the player – leads on to discussion of exposing the design process. Use Cresswell quote at end”.

With just a couple of sentences of planning like this, you’re already in a much better position to write a good paragraph than if you started with a blank page.

With your synapses firing as you write your paragraphs, ideas for other paragraphs or even other sections of the dissertation are also likely to spring to mind. That’s why I also recommend writing notes to yourself as you go along, in the same document.

Some of the best ideas develop this way. You might suddenly remember an article you’ve read that is perfect for a point you’re going to make later on. Or you may decide that one of your research findings would actually be better off including in a different chapter. You may even think that the paragraph you’ve just written could be improved, so you leave a note to remind yourself to review that part later on.

My point is that planning doesn’t have to only precede writing. It is an iterative process – it evolves in the act of doing. It is healthy and efficient to continually evaluate your work as you write it, and use these observations to craft the sentences, paragraphs and chapters that follow.

Putting words on paper

Ironically, the practice of writing itself is probably the hardest part of creating academic work for me to give advice for! Perhaps rightly so, because I can’t tell you which words are best to use, and what order to put them in, because I’m not you. Writing is deeply personal and contextual; a product of the particular moment in which you sit at a desk and consult the pool of thoughts swirling round in your head.

But I can suggest a few factors to consider when you sit down to write.

First of all, writing under pressure is difficult. Most of us will be familiar with the condition called ‘writer’s block’, which usually comes in two varieties. The first is not knowing what to say, however if you’ve planned your work thoroughly this shouldn’t really be a problem. If it is, then definitely revisit your planning, as you should always know what point you’re making at any given stage of the writing.               

I find that the second type of writer’s block is much more common – knowing what you’re trying to say, but not being able to find the right words to express it in the way you want. It’s like perfectionism, but 100% justified, because in academic work the use of specific theories and concepts demands that you are precise with your wording, otherwise your writing could be misinterpreted.

As far as I see it, there are two ways you can go from here. You can either sit and stew over the sentences until you eventually thrash them out, or summarise what you’re trying to say and come back to them later. There are merits and drawbacks to both, and I use them interchangeably. The latter allows you to continue making progress, not wasting time staring at blank paper rather than putting words on it. It’ll likely be easier to write the section another time when you’re in a different frame of mind. However, sometimes I find that you need to force out the previous section so that you can maintain the flow of the argument, and know exactly where you’re going next. This is why I wrote all of my substantive chapters in order, so that I could assess how my work would sound when it is read.  

If you’re finding that issues such as writer’s block are hindering your writing more than you would expect, it’s worth considering whether the environment you’re working in is suitable. Do you work best with some background noise, or complete silence? Do you work well in your home/living environment, or do you need a separation between your living space and work environments? Does listening to music distract you, or help you concentrate? What temperature/lighting are you comfortable working in?

Personally, I tend to work best away from home, in places where there is a little background noise to prevent me from filling silence with distracting thoughts, but not enough noise to upset my thought patterns as I’m writing. This is why I worked mostly in a public library when I wrote my dissertation. As for music, I definitely prefer to listen to it when I’m doing a fairly mindless task, such as writing a bibliography or doing a contents page, as it keeps me ‘zoned in’ on an exercise that is otherwise quite mundane. But if I’m writing part of the main body of a text, which requires creative thought, I get too invested in the music when I’m thinking and it disrupts my rhythm.

On the subject of rhythm, also think about how much time you spend working and when you take breaks. Whatever happens, always try to make sure that you drink plenty, eat and sleep well, as these help with concentration as well as general wellbeing. But also be aware of how your productivity changes as you write. If you’ve been writing for quite a long time and the words aren’t flowing as freely, then take a break. But if you’ve got a good rhythm going and are feeling fine to continue, then don’t stop just for the sake of it. The rhythm of writing is inconsistent, like a mischievous spirit that possesses you for a while before moving on without warning. So you need to take advantage of the moments when you are inspired to counterbalance the times when this isn’t the case.                                  

I’d say that the take-home message here is to be self-aware when you’re writing. Pay attention to how well you write in different situations and learn from these experiences to improve your efficiency.

Feedback, editing and finishing touches

Once you’ve completed drafts of your work, getting feedback from other people on what you’ve written is invaluable. Writing, a bit like walking, can lull you into a trance as you immerse yourself in the world of your topic. You often become so engrossed in what you’re writing that it becomes difficult to take a step back and deduce how it will be read by another person. Even the simplest spelling mistakes can be rendered invisible when scanned by the familiar eye.

I find that there are two main types of feedback that are useful for academic work.

The first relates to the quality of your writing according to academic standards, which includes both how well you have applied particular theories and concepts to your study, and also how well you have structured and explained your arguments throughout the text. As your work is going to be marked by academics using these standards, this kind of feedback is gold dust that you must use to your advantage if you can. But to get it you’ll need access to supervisors, tutors, and anyone else with know-how about your subject area.             

As I mentioned earlier, I was fortunate that my supervisor was allowed to read one draft of each section of my dissertation before submission, and is also one of the final markers. Because I knew his comments could potentially make a significant difference to my final grade, I worked extremely hard to send complete drafts to him with enough time before the final deadline to act upon his comments.

The second type of feedback, in contrast, could be given by nearly anyone. Proofreading is about finding the typing errors, spelling mistakes and grammar problems that are lurking in your work, and also whether your writing is understandable and makes sense. In fact, it’s probably best to enlist the help of friends and family for this task, precisely because they normally aren’t knowledgeable about your subject area. This means that they will likely be more alert to mistakes rather than the academic content. However, judging how well they grasp what you’re writing about, without knowing anything about the topic beforehand, can also be a good indicator of how clearly explained your arguments are. Whoever proofreads your work, make sure they are people you can trust to be ruthless and look critically at what you’ve written.

Try to get as much feedback as possible, and give yourself plenty of time for editing. The best thing about feedback is that more is always better. Even if you can’t act upon all of it, there’s always the chance that someone new will pick up on something different that other readers haven’t noticed.

All this said, you definitely don’t have to agree with all of the comments you receive, even when they are from supervisors and tutors. Like writing, reading is also a personal act. People have different preferences and interpretations, and it is ultimately your job to assess whether the sentences you’ve written could be made clearer or improved by adding or removing words. Don’t feel you have to change your words if there’s a precise and valid reason why you’ve chosen them, or if you think the reader may have misread what you’re saying. You can always get a second opinion from another proof-reader if necessary.                                                             

There is also a tendency for feedback to constantly talk about details you could add to your work. Yet if you’re like me, my drafts are nearly always at the word limit or past it already. Editing is ultimately about being selective with the material you have available to create the best work you can within the constraints of the task you’re presented with. Use feedback as guidance, not gospel, because writing academic work in limited time and words is complicated enough already.

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The fact that I’ve managed to dedicate so many words just to the practice of writing a dissertation is testament to how deep and complex the process is, requiring no small amount of effort, knowledge and creativity. Writing is one element of academia that, for me, draws it into the world of art. Like a painter or poet, a researcher delves into an idea, experience or thing that interests them, and uses the materials they have available to express something unique about their subject. Sadly academic writing is often less accessible to the wider public, and is also bound by the limits of academic conventions and mark schemes.

But constraints are what make you creative. If academic writing were easy, then you wouldn’t spend years honing your skills and knowledge to learn how to discuss complex ideas fluently. By seeing your writing as an opportunity to communicate something new, relevant and exciting about your topic, you can concentrate your efforts on making sure that your work has the greatest impact possible.

 

 

Analysing Video Game Research: Making a Path

Coding my dissertation data

Way back in the middle of July, I finally completed the fieldwork for my dissertation exploring the environments of walking simulator video games. Armed with data gathered from interviewing 11 game developers, playing 12 games, and a wealth of secondary sources, I somehow had to make a path towards fulfilling my research aim. This was to understand the extent to which virtual video game environments can be experienced as places – spaces we come to know through the human meanings and feelings we associate with them.

I had a great deal of data to work with, but unfortunately not a lot of time. My fieldwork finished later than originally planned, due mainly to a couple of game developers having to postpone interviews because of their own commitments. Although this couldn’t be avoided, I knew I would have to make up the time by being efficient with my analysis. After all, the final deadline for submitting my dissertation wasn’t moving, and soon enough I would need to get words on paper.

I had already transcribed all of the recordings from my interviews and typed up my handwritten research diary to make the data as accessible as possible. To make it valuable for my research, though, I needed to somehow translate these texts into key themes and points that have something interesting to say for the questions I’m asking as a researcher. In qualitative research, this process is known as coding.

The only way to get started is to dive straight into the data. I started off by reading everything as closely as possible, noting down details that came across as significant in the context of my research aims, the rest of the data set, and prior reading on the subject. Creating a list of these topics as they were encountered, I’d then underline each one once for each new instance of that topic in the transcripts and research diary entries I read. By the time I’d read through the ~200 pages of data, I was left with 5 sides of topics, underlined to different degrees, with lines between them to show their connection to other topics.

So what do we learn from this early stage of coding? Well, already we can begin to see which observations were more or less prevalent during the research, simply by looking at the number of lines underneath each topic. We can also start to assess how different topics fit together by looking at the network of lines going between them on the list. It was a messy document, but within it were the foundations for the series of points I would go on to make in my dissertation.

To make a coherent argument in a piece of academic work, though, you can’t simply reel off a list of points. These points need to be placed within a framework that guides the reader towards understanding how they contribute to a wider discussion of the subject matter. In dissertations, each chapter usually provides a pivot for the discussion, so the path you make through the material often becomes a question of how you organise this chapter structure.

For subjects with lots of interconnecting factors, as are typical in human geography, themes are normally the best way to approach the research subject, which have distinct characteristics but also fluid boundaries that are able to flow into each other freely. This is the approach I took to the complex array of topics that my dissertation presented, condensing my various data into groups of ideas that provided the basis for my dissertation chapters.

I can’t claim to have any particular words of wisdom for identifying themes, especially for this project. It’s like alchemy. You collect together your thoughts and magically new patterns begin to emerge, and everything starts making sense. It’s as if your subconscious has been slowly weaving and winding the different bits of information throughout the research, and only by thinking deeply can you access this strange fabric that connects everything together. Like Sherlock’s ‘mind palace’ that he uses to thread evidence together until he reaches a moment of insight.

It started at the tired end of a busy day when I was considering getting an early night. I started to look through the list of topics I’d made, when suddenly things started to click. I picked out one key theme, then another appeared, and eventually two more to form a group of four themes that each nicely divided the range of points I’d identified during the initial coding stage. These themes stayed effectively the same right the way through the analysis and writing stages, and were as follows:

Agency and interactivity: relating to lack of mechanical interactions in walking simulator games (i.e. button pressing, complex and precise controls), and instead the loose interactive framework that designers use to encourage players to explore the game world mindfully.

Immersion and believability: how the game worlds feel authentic and visceral, as if you are really experiencing them – but also how they fail to do this.

Navigation and narrative: how game developers design powerful experiences in worlds, and the ways players navigate these to form stories as they explore.

Emotion and subjectivity: how game worlds are designed to make players connect emotionally with them, and how players’ own identities become part of the world itself through this process.

Once these four themes were solidified, it was time for the highlighter pens – probably the most important tool for coding analysis. Using four different colours, I turned back to my list of topics and highlighted each one according to the theme(s) they were associated with. By the time I was finished, I was left with a document that not only told me the most prevalent topics and how they joined together, but also where they would ultimately fit into the chapters of my dissertation text.

My dissertation was taking shape.

The final stage of my analysis was one I’d never properly done before in any research project, but turned out to be the best course of action I could have taken. I was lucky enough to have a fantastic, enthusiastic supervisor for my dissertation, and he gave me a gold nugget of advice for the final phase before writing. He suggested writing abstracts for each chapter – short summaries of around 200 words or less – that clearly set out exactly what I was arguing for each one. This helps you to tie together all the points in each theme to make a coherent argument for the chapter; taking the reader on a determined, purposeful journey towards conclusion, rather than a sprawled collection of ideas that prevent clear understanding. Furthermore, by knowing exactly what you want to say in each chapter, it helps you to decide how you’ll order them so that the reader’s journey is logical, flowing from one argument to the next.

For my abstracts, I went deeper and further than my supervisor suggested. For each chapter, I also wrote down three key pivots of the argument, which formed the chapter’s subsections. This then helped me to categorise the different pieces of data I’d gathered more precisely to save time. At the larger scale, I also decided to write a rough abstract for the whole dissertation. In the end, a dissertation is marked as a single text, and therefore it has to read well as such. It’s by having a consistent line of reasoning flowing through the chapters that the reader will get a strong impression of your research findings, and their place and impact within the field.

There needs to be a clear take-home message, otherwise the research will be wasted no matter how well it was completed.

Like the winding paths of the walking simulator games I played, my analysis was also about treading a path through a world of ideas, objects and feelings, and threading them together to make a story – a series of events that the reader must encounter to eventually reach conclusion. Hopefully this post has revealed how you can transform a big bunch of wordy data into a story, but also how this can be done concisely, wasting as little time as possible.

If writing an academic text is about taking the reader on a journey, then good analysis gives you efficient tools to break through the unknown and make a path towards understanding.

In the Virtual 'Field': Playing Video Games for Research

To understand how the environments of video games work, you need immerse yourself and play in them – that is their purpose. However, you might be wondering how something seemingly so indulgent as playing a video game could ever be considered ‘research’.

Yet immersing oneself in a different culture to learn about how it works habitually, at the level of practice and individual action, has been a valid research technique for a long time. It’s called ethnography, and is perhaps most famous for being used by social scientists of the past, who spent years living amongst tribal communities in the Global South. The principle is the same – you need to be immersed, and to some extent participating, in a culture and its practices to effectively understand them.

In this case, though, rather than observing other people/cultures, I’m observing myself – my actions, what I observe, hear, feel and think – as I play video games that I own. This is called autoethnography.

Ultimately, this method had to produce data that I can analyse and use to form an understanding and argument about how video game environments create a sense of place. I needed ways of capturing my actions, observations, thoughts and feelings accurately and in a usable format.

There were three main techniques I used to do this.

Firstly, there’s my research diary. After a gaming session, I take time to reflect upon my experiences and gather my thoughts. Then, usually later in the day, I write down detailed notes in my research diary based on my collected thoughts. As this is a reflective process, I can take time to consider both the game as a whole, as well as individual moments within it, in relation to the questions guiding my research.

Pages from my research diary

However, only writing about my experiences after playing the game might not capture the more instantaneous feelings I have during play, which are important for understanding how the game environments are affecting me. These experiences are often difficult to convey through writing, because when you write your brain is heavily processing and manipulating the bodily information it receives. Although you can certainly argue that it is impossible to ever comprehend basic feelings without manipulating them in some way, I’ve attempted to get closer to the ‘raw’ experience by using voice recording.

Using the arrangement pictured below, I set up a condenser microphone and voice recording software to record myself as I play the games. The advantage of this approach is that I capture my immediate reactions to all the small, incidental events within the game that might be forgotten later on when I write the research diary. This often includes sudden, pre-cognitive responses to the environment, such as wonder, fear and surprise, which are potentially as important to the experience as my longer-term impressions of the game.

My voice recording setup when playing games for research

The last main technique I use to record experiences is taking screenshots while playing the game. Visual evidence is excellent to have, not only as reminder to myself of the things I have witnessed, but for the dissertation itself, so I can point towards concrete examples of different design techniques and things I’ve encountered in the game environments. Images are also potentially better at capturing things like ambience, mood and symbolism than I could express in writing or through voice recording. I can then consider these factors in the analysis, alongside the diary and recording data.

Symbolism from the cave in Dear Esther

Visual evidence from The Stanley Parable

A cache box in Firewatch

Hand-written postcard in Gone Home

These methods aren’t flawless, and this is something I’ll be talking about in my dissertation.

Screenshots can’t be categorised and analysed as easily as text, because you can’t just do a key word search to find evidence related to a specific theme.

Constantly speaking and taking screenshots while playing can be a distraction from what is actually happening in the game, therefore altering the experience you have of the environment.

The voice recordings are lengthy, so will take a long time to analyse.

And all of these different data – especially gameplay recordings and screenshots – require large amounts of storage space on a PC, and therefore also take longer to back up to the cloud or an external storage device.

Nonetheless, I’ve been gathering a comprehensive and mixed set of data that will be valuable and interesting to analyse. They also complement each other very well for my research aims, as I’ll be able to compare and contrast what I observe in the screenshots/diary/recordings with the data from the interviews/talks with game developers.

I therefore hope that this original combination of research methods can potentially advance the field to improve future research in cultural geography, and on the subject of video games in particular.

The research I’ve done so far has been incredibly insightful, and although the analysis and eventual write-up is going to be hard work, I’m looking forward to seeing what can be learnt from this very unique body of work.

I’ll write again about the analysis stage in a month’s time.