On August 5th,
I successfully defended my PhD in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. On
August 29th, I delivered my dissertation and it was approved. As of
that day, I am a Doctor of Philosophy.
I am now writing this blog because the dissertation (and the defense) is now
public for everyone!
If you want to watch
the defense, it is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMSCUCWOBmI
If you want to read my
dissertation, you can do so here:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rn476w3
The last five years of my life can be summarized by this single piece of work. Which is sort of wild to think about. But that’s what this is. The last five years of my life.
What was it about? Well, here’s the short pitch: This work is about how communities of online, live-service games like Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XIV and many others play with narrative. It is about how their ongoing experience of the narrative, and their communal interactions with each other and the game developers, influence the future direction, form, and shape of that narrative—and how the narrative’s fiction is shaped by what that community does. Ultimately, it is about how people come together to tell stories about shared experiences.
It uses the lens of video games, but this phenomenon can be extrapolated so much wider, into areas such as professional wrestling, television series, K-pop, mythology, streaming and influencer culture, sports, and many others. This work is relevant to anyone who engages in communal storytelling, especially online, and I do believe its findings will resonate for many people regardless of their affiliation with video games, narrative, or the internet.
My primary thesis of this work is this: An ongoing narrative experience trades mystery for familiarity. A community forms through the collective appreciation, dissection, and discussion of a narrative, turning what is at first mysterious familiar, and in that process a community is formed around that shared activity.
Thus, to keep the experience going, a developer must continuously provide new mystery while maintaining the familiarity that now keeps them there (along with the social connections, relationships and rituals formed through it). This is immensely challenging, and I am not attempting to solve this challenge once and for all, yet this dissertation provides a lens and a language to describe this phenomenon.
I hope to dedicate future blogs to breaking down the details of my research into something more digestible than a 711-page document, and so I will not spend more time describing it here. I’m not sure what the format of that is yet so no concrete plans but we’ll see.
Reading Guide
If you are interested in reading the dissertation, however, I will offer a few tips.
If you want just the basics of what this dissertation has to offer, do the following:
Read chapters 1, 5,
and 21.
That’s it. I wrote those chapters with the intention that they would be all you needed.
If you want a more comprehensive read, see below:
- Chapter 1, the Introduction provides an overview of the space and gives context for any reader. Start here.
- Chapters 2-4 provide background information, such as what are perennial games and mythology. This can be skimmed if you are not fuzzed about details and academic definitions but the introductions to each chapter will be useful (Chapter 4 is immensely fun, though, do read it if you want to know how Charles Dickens and wrestling and sports and Vtubers are all connected).
- Chapter 5 provides the basic thesis of my argument in the shortest form possible. If you read nothing else, read this.
- Directions 1-3 (the bulk of the work, chapters 6-11, 12-16, 17-20 respectively) can be read in any order and can be prioritized based on interest.
- If you are interested in the games, read Direction 1, chapters 6-11.
- If you are interested in the people, read Direction 2, chapters 12-16.
- If you are interested in the development and design, read Direction 3, chapters 17-20.
- Finally, the conclusion in chapters 21 and 22 tries to summarize all the findings into something cohesive and bring it into a larger context. I hope it was successful.
That’s it for now!
I will be back later
with more details and further breakdown but first I gotta figure out what my
life is after a PhD. Are jobs still a thing?
Seems like, no, from
what I can tell. Oh boy.