I realized recently that I haven’t been mentioning my thesis on this blog for a quite a while. While this platform’s original purpose in 2015 was to keep contact with the outside world during the writing process, little was said about the thesis that I have been putting together over the last four years except for a few posts where I shared some of the discoveries I made at Ritsumeikan during my field trip in 2016. I am happy to report that it has been submitted to the Modern Languages and Cultural Studies department of the University of Alberta for external review, and that a defence date will be decided upon in the coming weeks.
The whole project is longer than I had anticipated, while not covering the entirety of the points that I wanted to raise, or the phenomenon that I wanted to account for. Some difficult choices had to be made to remove what I thought were important aspects of game centers, but ones that did not fit in with the general direction of the thesis. More research will be needed before these ideas can be shared, but I am looking forward for the opportunity to expand the scope of the original thesis in the future to match my original vision.
I will report on the defence date as a later time, but for now I just wanted to share a short excerpt of the introduction that I think describes the whole project with a decent degree of eloquence.
The objective of this dissertation is to provide an understanding of public video game playing from a holistic perspective, one that accounts for the materiality of the machine, the affordances of the software, and the space as the context of the play activity. At its core, this project considers video games primarily as the purveyor of a play activity and as a practice, and thus it aims to interrogate how these practices play out in the context of Japanese video game arcades while considering in equal part the influence of its texts, material conditions, and spatial context.
From Playing in Public: Situated Play at the Intersection of Software, Cabinet and Space in Japanese Game Centres, page 6.