IGS 150-170

I am not completely sure if Dr. Betajames wanted us to post a blog for this reading or not, so I am going to assume that he did and post one anyway. After reading the last chapter of the “An Introduction to Game Studies” text that was assigned for my class I find myself a little lost. The chapter went over picking a topic for a Games Studies project and performing research on that topic. I found it to be pretty helpful but at the same time it caused me to wonder what I was going to do my project over. The chapter pointed out some basic guidelines for picking a topic. I have done research projects before and find myself overwhelmed. I think it is because I pick to broad of a topic, like when I was in high school and thought I could successfully do a five page research paper over the entire Final Fantasy franchise. That paper started to get to long and confusing so I cropped it down to just Final Fantasy VII, ah good times.
I think I am going to draw from my love of art or maybe my eerie and obsessive interest with the human mind and thought process. Pulling from one of the aforementioned fascinations I was maybe going to look at why people relate so deeply with a game character or possibly public view of art in video games. This is all assuming I understand what it is that is expected of me for this assignment, I am not sure if I am on the right track. One really stupefying thing I learned about from reading the chapter is the Hermeneutic circle! I love the entire concept of this thing it shows how the research should move from theory to more observation and so on, plus it is a circle kind of like the unit circle from trigonometry (I like shapes). I am going to give this some more thought because I think I need to seriously compress the range of my two possible topics. Another thing the book mentioned was how hard it would be to research topics in Games Studies since it is still in the development stages. This chapter did help me out a lot though when it came to considering how to do my research and how to pick a topic. I know I want to go over either a topic dealing with social sciences or design and maybe pay close attention to meta-design. I find myself to be slightly more focused than what I was before.