I left school with issues towards the education system that I was already struggling to deal with, but was not that consciously aware of. I always had mixed feelings towards the way people were handled in a one size fits all system. I was then presented with a very glamorous and unattainable view of HE, and once rejected from that, placed it to some extent on a pedestal. The inability of my precious academia to even open itself to my alternate concepts then had the effect of devaluing my own research, as I would never have considered myself up to standard, and of corroding my image of the academic institution. It also constituted a working class school style slam down, and indicated a lack of openness to research ideas that were out of the main playing field. This then is some of my major experiences of research after a life in education from 1996 to 2021.
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April 21, 2021 2:39 PM (GMT+1)
There is (of course) an online planner for reflecting on how you can round out your skills to become a better researcher overall. It is Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework, which is something that I, interestingly, once reflected on a great deal but then had a go at when I had lost all interest in it, for the simple reason that it was 2021, Covid arrived, my PhD course was suspended and my imminent medical retirement began to be openly discussed. I was basically, to all intents and purposes, past it. I once wanted to be Indiana Jones, and later Lara Croft, and if that failed, I wanted to be a Librarian; not only did I actually, kind of, do that, minus the whip/Lara bit, I also had a lot of interesting stops along the way, and discovered that I had a very specific set of skills that employers do utilise, but not always in the way that I expect them to. I then became a mother with a mortgage, and kind of stopped caring, as long as I got paid and my mind was engaged. Don’t get me wrong, I have had a cracking career, with some lapses, but I learned that dreams are not always what you are good at, or even initially believe you are really interested in; mostly what you want is to get paid, keep your family going, and not have a terrible time at work.
One of the jobs I was good at was creating projects for the long term unemployed; I successfully applied for and managed millions in European match funded monies along with other bid experts in my workplace. Would I be afraid of applying for funded money as a researcher? No not really. Does this make me an expert in this section of the research skills breakdown? No, interestingly enough, because this is just one third of the skills needed for the overall section this element falls into. The other two areas are research management, the skills for which seem to be inherent in the actual PhD completion (and therefore kind of immaterial for this personal assessment I am attempting), and professional conduct. The description for professional conduct is where I feel I could really use some development in this category, as it has a slightly different set of descriptors from those I would expect to see attached to say my employment. While the principles are the same, the details are very different, so ethical working in employment can be miles away from adhering to a board of ethics within the PhD structure in an educational setting for a piece of work that will be internally and externally verified; I am already fully aware of that just from looking at the paperwork. While I am a big believer in transferable skills (I would have to be at this point in my educational life), there still has to be a transfer process and a capable someone to assist with picking it up. The researcher element of professional conduct includes aspects such as co-authorship, which rarely even occur in employment; collaborative working is far more the standard than a co-authored piece. I think this therefore has to be considered a prospective personal weakness under the game rules I am setting myself. For one thing, yes I believe in professional conduct, but I believe more in making myself heard if you’re dealing with bias and things that are just wrong. Yes even to the point of getting the sack.
One of the things I have found most amusing about this exercise so far was that my strengths were clearly heavily weighted across two of the four areas, both of which relied on personal implementation with no networking or engagement. I can work as part of a team, I am even considered fairly good at it when I make the effort. That’s the nub though, I have to really make the effort. I would far rather work alone, completely independently, or simply be in charge, as I pretty much always end up thinking I know best once I’ve had a clear idea or concept anyway. I almost always end up in independent or management roles in work for the same reason; that’s just who I am. I am a good team leader, I like people, do not find line management particularly onerous having completed HR tasks in nearly every role for over twenty years, but I also now avoid higher management roles, even at the cost of higher pay, as getting them means I only line manage, and start losing my precious projects and ideas as a result. It also means I may have to follow policies that I simply do not agree with. This means I have also had to question mark all the ‘engagement and impact’ bits of this researcher framework, because I never push myself to bother with them, I just like the thinking. As I have gotten older, I have been able to pick and choose the bits I like and want to do, and I have had the temerity and standing to argue for them too. I realise this may have resulted in my doing things because I want to, not because they progress me in any way. On the other hand, twenty-five years wandering around doing things because I feel like it (and I am insatiably restless and nosy) has knocked quite a lot off this list by accident, so it completely depends on how you look at it. Obviously not everything I have involved myself in is that useful, even I am not that sure how I can argue my Level 2 Aromatherapy qualification following a three-month bored stint into PhD usefulness, but still. Health and Safety and Risk Management maybe? What I can say is I’ve spent hours using this qualification with my children. If you are serious about by the book progression though and being a fully rounded researcher rather than whoever you really are and want to be, there is a downloadable action plan you can complete to get guidance. I have a nasty feeling it may include engagement of some kind.
Like a mind map, or maybe Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; everything is apparently connected, and leads to the next interesting element of play, a little like in a well-written RPG. I had a really bad migraine episode recently, which makes it difficult to think clearly, and I had been struggling with stress management, when my partner suddenly announced he was resurrecting an interest in Warhammer, and was going to shop for a starter pack. Did I want to engage? No, I stated. Absolutely not, I literally had no head space to take on anything else, up to and including painting and playing with tabletop gaming. Still, it was gaming, and banning the light with large glasses I trudged out with him for a look, despite mainly wanting to sleep.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammerfb/images/0/0a/Ork.png/revision/latest?cb=20140321004017
A couple of hours later I had, despite the slow memory and brain work left after a migraine episode, engaged with the ex-videogame concept artist now running the Warhammer shop and his avid gamer colleagues, and was now possessed of a box of orcs, paint, and a codex, with a promise of further discussion on the links between tabletop D&D and videogame concept art over initial T’au vs Orcs skirmishes once our first armies are painted. I had also been handed two new games to look at for their narrative development, that the team felt had been sadly overlooked due to a lack of interest in narrative by devs over the last decade, and become fully informed on how the writer of Warhammer had been involved in the writing of Guardians of the Galaxy. My partner sniggering and my bank account reeling, I resolved to just stay in from here on in, so proving old researchers never retire.
If you are setting out at PhD level, I think one of the things you have to learn is that previous approaches to writing just aren’t enough. Basically, right up to postgraduate level, if you could write something decent, you were going to get a decent mark, it kind of went without saying. You certainly were not going to get 58 polite but determined rejection notifications that is for sure. I would argue that an above average ability at English, to some extent, covers up a lack of knowledge in every other subject; this has in fact been one of my biggest bugbears with the British educational system throughout my entire educational life, flying in the face of the fact that English is, indeed My Skill. It was not many of my friends, family members, or subsequent students’ skill, despite them being fantastic at their chosen vocation. And let’s face it, if you are going to buy a house, do you honestly want that house built by someone who answered their test questions in really good English, or do you want the guy who very quietly in the background built the very best houses? The issue with this is in how to test people vocationally without also testing their written skills; it is also in the question of how effective someone can be in the workplace with no communication skills and no ability to pass on the information regarding what they have been doing to, for example, your plumbing, car, house, or electrics.
At PhD level though, a certain level of English ability is so anticipated, that it is practically disregarded, and the focus is back on (yes, the subject), but also the assignment brief. This is now so advanced that it is at the point of being a reimagined skill, and must be, to all intents and purposes, fully relearned. Pass me a subject that I can muster any element of interest in, some spare time, and a keyboard, and I can write you something. Provide a brief even, and I would have claimed, probably accurately, that I could write you something against it. The issue is the level of the brief in question, and this was, well, pretty up there, and it was slippery. It also doesn’t really want a bit of information, it wants full on microwaved brain particles that make you begin to doubt you even bother looking at any subjects, let alone study them. Also do you have any proof, thank you very much, because no your word is not law, and we’re pretty sure there’s some gaps, and that is not fooling this paper, nice try though.
I think the hardest element though, is the framing of the work, and it could be that this is the slippery skill that I need to fish out from this whole mess of an eel pie. I do know that I struggled even more with subjects like paring down the research questions, which is really about framing the work, than with anything else. The final submission of mine that made it through to completion was not a plethora of new work. What it did have was a whole new angle, as if it had been turned to look through a new window of light, combined with the removal of superfluous work so the content was controlled. I also know that where I was trying to open my research questions out, thinking “I am never going to have enough to write”, in the accepted question set I instead reined them in and gave them fences, because I had begin desperately thinking “the potential here is out of control and there is no way I can manage it”.
Possibly one of the reasons for my divorce, in all honesty, could have been my ex-husband’s cleanliness, or conversely, my lack of interest in it. He was willing to stay home until the house was clean, when the sun was shining, while I saw this as an absolute waste of life - in this, we were complete opposites. Many of you would be horrified if you saw our house, or even just my desk. Games are piled everywhere. Paintbrushes and watercolours are mixed with Gelli plates and packed lunch boxes and Magic the Gathering cards, now with Warhammer models piled carefully on top. Things teeter. I dare you to ask any of us where something is. Here’s the interesting bit; if we are still interested in it, we know where it is. To the millimetre, even. If it has lost our attention on the other hand, then it’s gone, possibly (to be fair) never to be found again.
My mind mapping documents are like that; they make no logical sense to anyone else, and they sometimes make none to me either, and yet my brain somehow pieces it together anyway. I read somewhere once that creative or artistic people sometimes (definitely not always!) function better in chaos, it creates more ideas or better flow, I forget which, but the idea was that the odd concatenation of items allow your brain to put new concepts together without effort, which potentially led to new ideas. This draws me to my middle daughter, who is the scruffiest person on the planet, and will drag everything out of her drawers if necessary to coat her room in mess. If asked why, she will tell you that she just likes it. She has one of the snakiest twelve year old imaginations I have ever conversed with, and paces around a clean room with heightened stress levels, like some kind of caged tiger. I have no idea how she copes at her dads’, but hopefully she is learning the basic home hygiene she is probably never going to get from us.
The beautiful, sterile clean rooms that you could easily move around were very handsome, but I remember that for me they just seemed to stop the flow dead, and that was one of the driest creative periods I ever experienced. The only interesting thing I ended up making was occasional food. The frustrating thing is, I seem to feel my own lack all the time. I want this mindmap document to be organised, and understandable, but it just isn’t, in the same way that I want my rooms to be beautifully tidy and for me to still be able to create in them, which I can’t, and simply don’t. I suspect this is likely to be a metaphor for the whole PhD journey; we have in our minds an outline of what we want, but what we are going to get is probably going to be significantly different. While we are in control of what we research, we cannot change who we are, and we cannot change what the results are going to be, and we are continually crippled by our own self-judgements; all things we need to find the tools to control and overcome along the way.
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April 14, 2021 2:35 PM (GMT+1)
Sometimes, the best thing you can do when studying, is walk away from it. I mean, possibly not when you’re thirteen minutes away from a deadline or something, that would potentially be foolish, but when you are at a certain point, if you are working to schedule, one of the things I have found is that breaks should be part of the scheduled activity.
If you are an avid reader or gamer, you have probably, at some point, had in your hands a book or game that you have loved so passionately that you have been unable to put it down. It has probably resonated with you so strongly, that you have finished it, and it has instantly left you with an indefinable sense of loss, and you have drifted around for a while, and then become angry at yourself, or at the book/game, and eventually, inevitably, you have reached the realisation that you are going to have to read/play again. I will say that I did this less and less as I got older, because it absolutely does not work. A second read (or play through) straight from a first is absolutely anticlimactic, and can in fact turn me away from the book altogether. The important factor being its freshness.
Then move to a piece of work that you have been hammering at for days, or weeks, or even months. You have read paragraphs of that work repeatedly while rewording them, adding to them, inserting quotations into them, and properly referencing them. Whether you realise it or not, by this point, you pretty much know them by heart, although you cannot necessarily read them out without the page in front of you. Eventually, you reach the stage where that work is complete aside from a proofread. At this point, my findings are that you cannot effectively proofread that work, because you cannot read it. You think you’re reading it, but your brain reads what it thinks the page says, not what is actually there, and completely misses the errors. Years ago, during the first year of my degree course, I was given one of my best ever tips for writing. It was to complete an assignment at least a week before the deadline, put it away somewhere, and forget about it for at least three days. I have actually found a week to be more effective. A holiday is perfect, to be completely honest. We can only remember so much information, and with a distraction right in front of us, we forget what those pages say if we have some time not to look at them. When we pick them back up, the big glaring holes are far easier to pick out, because it is as good as someone else’s work.
I last applied this thought process to my PG Cert assignment, by now we’ve reached around 2020. I was expecting to see the holes, and this was all fine, but I also had a lot of word count to cut down. While this is not that unexpected for me (I can go either way, too much or too little), I had forgotten how cathartic it can be to carve away the dross that quite simply does not need to be in the write up. Over 1,500 words went in this draft, which was a third of the content, and I thoroughly enjoyed deleting all of it. It felt incredibly repetitive and full of filler. I did begin to struggle more towards the end of the exercise, but I am going to choose to see that as a good thing.
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April 7, 2021 2:30 PM (GMT+1)
I have had some (unending, absolutely soul-crushing, insurmountable Everest's in tornado level storms) issues pinning down research questions. The temptation to a new researcher (well apparently to me anyway) is to always believe that the research questions are not encompassing enough. This makes it very, very difficult to actually write a question. What you get instead is a paragraph. Or sometimes, five questions cunningly packaged to resemble one holistic questioning scene. In my third attempt, I made each research question three questions, carefully separated by commas, so they were secretly one question in sections, thereby permitting a total of nine questions. As you can see, there is a reason I’m not taking a PhD in Maths. I have to say, the PhD Supervisors are not particularly fooled by this approach. For some obscure reasons that cannot possibly be linked to my suddenly non-existent research talents (I am skimming the R’s now in the Oxford dictionary for the meaning of the word research, because after all these years, I have imposters syndrome and have realised I know literally nothing and am blagging it, just seriously blagging it, please for the love of all the pasta in Italy do not ask me anything more difficult than my name, and on that note, WHO AM I???) they actually seem to want three clear succinct questions, that they are then going to rely on me to write about, on the basis that I can. The fools.
I think, especially on a PhD dissertation, the word count is the issue. Eighty to one hundred and twenty thousand words, you can’t even say it fast. It’s an automatic following reaction to assume that you cannot possibly talk or write so much about three tiny little questions. This is just a perspective though, as so many things are. Is that really such a big word count? Well, yes. I mean hell yes. But I have thought about this, and if I had woken up this morning and decided to write a novel, then I would be aiming to write more than that, and I’m not sure I’d even be thinking about the word count. I’d be thinking about story, narrative, characters, flow maybe, I don’t know, whatever authors think about after breakfast, apart from coffee and possibly what they did with their socks. The whole issue of word count barely crops up, but the end result is a Whole Book. Nobody even really looks that surprised - I mean good grief, why not?! Surely it’s a huge achievement every single time? On the same subject though, I regularly throw out three or four thousand words on a work topic, just to explain a minute changing factor on a daily event. I can easily talk about something I know very well. Force those words through your fingers into a PC and that’s a word count, which to be honest is where my proclivity for writing has actually always come from anyway. I’m opinionated and argumentative, I just don’t have the vocal chords or focus to follow through so written flyers are easier.
Surely then, that means, as long as you really know the subject - and let’s face it, the whole point of research is to really know your subject, or at least, the bit of it that you are studying - then you can talk about it, pretty endlessly. If you can do that, then you can produce an arguably endless word count, which will hopefully (let’s assume that we are not actual imposters and are genuinely just panicking here!) engage in the arguments of the rest of the researchers in your chosen field. If you can do that, then as long as you have followed the guidance, have an interesting thesis concept and are fairly confident you will be making a contribution to research, it really does not matter, surely, if you tighten your research questions to the actual three questions required? So, why does this keep backfiring on me? I have to admit, the only answer I’m coming up with is a self-confidence problem, because each time I haven’t realised I’ve done it until I’ve received the feedback. The slightly embarrassing thing is, the only person who seems in any subconscious doubt here is me.
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March 31, 2021 2:23 PM (GMT+1)
As part of my Masters submissions, I was required to develop a way of hosting some of my work; by preference a website. This was a fantastic introduction to developing an initial sense of sharing work with the public, while targeting a specific academic audience. One of the problems though was that I developed the website as an assignment piece, submitted the link, and for a while, did not think of it again. Not all the work was there. As time went on, I completed the Masters, and gradually forgot about the work that was not easily accessible and not on the website; I even forgot for a while that I HAD a website, that was still gathering dust in a forgotten corner of the internet.
As I involved myself in new innovations on a work-related basis, I was often asked questions about past pieces, and I began to realise that I wanted to be able to direct people to them. Not only that, it was really difficult to do; for one thing, I had to search my own emails each time to find draft submissions I had made so that I could track down my own links. Why are these not all on a single website location, I started to think? Before realising that many of them were. I resurrected the link to my own website, and really looked at it. It was still interesting, even a year or two later, and the work that could be added to it would make it more interesting still. I started adding the link to all my profile pieces, along with the link to my online dissertation. The problem then was that it was all so messy.
Driving forward several years from this point, I did of course eventually become medically retired, at which point my work related credentials vanished, along with some of the work I had hosted on the internet professionally. I therefore amalgamated all my work holistically into one portfolio, accessible even from the blog you are presently reading. The process of engaging in a reflective practice is that you really start seeing what you are doing wrong (blast that reflection and time out for causing extra workload...), and one of the issues I know that I will have is the continual updating of a core set of work I have already produced, because I feel that research may one day be useful for the student community.
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March 24, 2021 2:12 PM
You may have heard somewhere by now that I am was a disabled student. Okay look I was trying to be blase but if you haven’t heard this by now you are not paying attention because I have whined about having to slow down really quite a lot. There are however sometimes unexpected bright areas, and one of them for me is audiobooks. In a financial-home environment where all of us take every subscription necessity very seriously (Do I want this? Do I REALLY want it? Ok but can I get it free? No? Do I really NEED it? Look it would’ve been nice but I think I can cope…), the one and only thing I have never been tempted to cancel, ever since the free trial at the start of my MA, is my Audible subscription. I am therefore officially upgrading it here and now to one of my research tools.
Firstly, this is not a sales pitch. We all have our own thing, this is my thing not yours and I actually don’t even want to share it with you, so there. (Seriously, do not buy a subscription that might not be for you!) I first took a free trial for Audible after being awarded DSA (Disabled Student Award) software that included tools such as Dragon, along with microphones and headsets, that allowed PDF files to be read out to me. I have to admit, I never used this option much, though the lesson recording option I did find very interesting, as with note recording. Do not get me wrong, it really works. Reading a heavy text on top of chronic fatigue results in either head pain or sleep, very quickly, even in the midst of study and concentration. For some reason, listening to the information creates fewer problems, particularly in terms of pain. As there are few high pitches in most texts, I can even manage easy listening information with a migraine, it can be soothing, though I probably also won’t remember it. The problem with the academic software was that it takes forever (you know, fifteen minutes) to set up, and you have to be at your desk, organised, and using all those other tools, to really bother using it. Audible however was right there on my phone, in my pocket, and portable, all for the addition of a pair of comfortable headphones. Audible doesn’t have all those lovely PDF files, but it is linked to Amazon, and more and more books are being released through Kindle with the Audible narrative already attached.
At first, trying to listen to books, my attention strayed horribly. I’d forget to listen when the cat walked past me. When a car drove by on the street. When something clicked in the kitchen. That 30 second rewind button thing should have worn away I swear, I have no idea how my phone touch screen coped. The auto button on the earphone wire became glitchy for a while, and tried to refuse the constant reverses. I made it take them on the chin. As with any new skill, practice was needed to adapt to listening to a book as opposed to reading it, and to holding onto the concentration needed to keep the book in mind alongside other distractions. This is something that so many people lack an understanding of, especially in disciplines such as art. You may have a basic aptitude or affinity for one subject above another one, but nobody gets out of bed and knocks out a DaVinci. Expertise is built on long practice and determination, not on inbuilt talent, and I think this is actually true of everything, including allowing the use of a new tool. Eventually, it was my commute to work that adapted Audible for me. I was used to plugging my phone in, replacing the car’s radio with app-based music. Now I had Audible based radio books, and was researching while driving. At first, I was amazed this worked, as my concentration had been flimsy everywhere else, so I had not expected this to last at all while concentrating on driving, but this really worked and ended up life changing.
Once I learned the trick of it, I could roll this out. Audible played in the background while I completed any low concentration tasks; cleaning, tidying, exercising. If I could not find the academic books on it (or through another audio form) that I wanted to read, then I turned it round, found a novel that I wanted to read on Audible for relaxation, exhausted myself on the academic texts, then allowed my brain to unwind with the novel through Audible later on. I often painted with music playing, now I had periods painting with Audible playing instead, especially in periods where I needed to take in more information quickly and when coming up to deadlines; it was a way of trying to balance calm and wellness with the need to absorb the information needed to submit pieces by the required dates. This came at a longer term cost; I rarely allowed myself necessary recovery periods, instead using these tools to get further in front, and seeing this as a way of banking time against later lapses. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and what I should have done is to continue to use these tools in the spirit I’d found them in, and not tried to be so flipping clever, as I eventually became ill again from the lack of downtime, but the basic principle I think is sound.
I then found there were difficulties with referencing a text I had heard. My memory can be faulty for things like names, but excellent for stories, so I would know that I had heard a certain example, but searching an Audible file from that piece of memory can be next to impossible, especially if you have listened to several books and cannot be certain which one you heard it in. I increasingly found myself going back and purchasing the Kindle versions of the book too, so that I could use traditional referencing, but ‘read’ the book by Audible. As time went on, I would find myself buying the Kindle versions, and ticking the option to add Audible narration, I would then only ever use the Kindle version for referencing. A tiny notebook began to permanently appear in my bag, so that I could note references that immediately resonated; which files I had heard them in, and a short quote so that I could later search the Audible file for them. If I was on the move, I would memorise an odd phrase from the quote instead to search later. As time went on, I began to use the word ‘read’ interchangeably for anything I had absorbed through Audible or sight; I genuinely forget now how I have read a text, I only remember that I have read it.
So the end result. After all the trial and error, I no longer bank away time, and I no longer cram academic texts that I am not even sure are relevant. Instead, I examine texts for relevance, use credits on what I really feel the need to read. After that I bank Audible credits, and take a break if there is nothing I feel is worth reading, at which time I return to my music and paint, and take the opportunity to rest, for real. On the flip side of that, I keep an eye on Audible’s very quick developments, and I make purchases from those banked credits that interest me, and that genuinely expand my interests and reading material. The whole collection of H.G.Wells was just released for one credit; I snapped it up. For all that I write about science fiction as part of my games narrative interests, I have never actually read Wells in any detail - ridiculous, and here is my opportunity. If I am enjoying a read or need a read, I use all those tools I have listed to get through it quickly, which is my natural inclination anyway having always been a fast reader, and I find I can now remember it better from hearing it than reading the words. Referencing and quoting I always try from a written version, which makes this a very expensive exercise in the cases where I feel I need to buy two versions, but I have genuinely found it improves accuracy. I borrow written versions where I can, and if this is not possible I will take my time and reference from the audio file. Environmental concerns have pushed me to begin avoiding paper and print, despite my aesthetic love for them, and so the occasional absolute need for a printed book has become something of a guilty pleasure.
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March 17, 2021 2:08 PM
When players talk about games, or when games are judged for their saleability or merit, one of the attributes sometimes talked about is their replay value. Replay value is a choice really for most players; the idea is that after their first play through, a player will want to come back, at some time in the future, and play the game again. It's not a major factor, but it is significant, so the higher the supposed replay chance, could supposedly mean a slightly higher game value.
Research knocks this lovely mechanism all off spin, and I'm looking at Lake Ridden, and trying to work myself up to a replay, because I want to write about it. Technically, playing a really good game shouldn't count as a hardship, but I'm feeling a little hard done by. My issues are these. Firstly, my gaming interest is presently invested elsewhere, oh ye of the obsessive attention span. I've had a word with it, said that logically we need to relook at this game, but it's being a complete child about it. “NO. I've PLAYED those. I'm playing THIS one now.” We can change the path of the laser beam here but we have to really concentrate, I'm not gonna lie it comes at a cost. Secondly, I've played this one, in the last eighteen months or so, and while my disability does weaken my memory in some areas (names, terms, words) it's as strong as ever for stories, and I quite liked Lake Ridden's, despite it being confusing and purposely inconclusive. This means I've actually lost the freshness, so I already know that when I start playing, I'm going to have to be careful not to jump straight to remembered conclusions. They can often be wrong anyway, we don't remember in the detail we think we do and a game can change (through DLC and updates) to become unrecognisable in a year.
So what is Lake Ridden? I stumbled across the small independent game designer, Midnight Hub, at the EGX games convention in Birmingham, where I had randomly joined an open gameplay team testing the first chapter of their new dark story, Lake Ridden. It was a stand out experience from the whole day for me. Other people were spending two hours in queues to play games like the new Sonic, while I was more interested in the new independent games tent centre that had been set up, and the vintage games consoles. (I had to show some of the young people how to fire at space invaders on old consoles like the Ataris, they had no idea there were shortcuts to make firing faster. Everything is labelled on new consoles, it's only looking at it now that I realise you didn't really used to get much guidance on using things. Anyway.)
All that Midnight Hub had running was the first chapter, but that was enough, and I was fascinated enough to watch for the full game release from that point, and to follow the developer. There was clearly going to be a dark story, well thought out background music, and excellent graphics in a beautiful environment, the setting stood out. I will go so far as to say it was the only game of its kind that I found at EGX that year. This was one of my first moves into puzzle games from walking simulators, and the puzzles were beautifully presented too. It expanded my understanding of what the art house genre might or might not incorporate, and also why, and gave me new ideas for delineating parameters in my own mind, without this game in particular ever being part of the genre. All of this equates to a strong replay reason.
My view now on research and a lot of work in general over the years has been that there is good information to be gained from both the first, freshest look at something, and from the replay view that comes from a closer association. The fresh view is sometimes the easiest to get, because a subject is easy to be interested in when new, but sustained interest, or resurrected interest is far harder. A games study makes this kind of research issue easy to see, but I'm not sure the subject actually matters; I think the replay value, in all it’s forms, has maybe held true no matter what subject I've researched.
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March 10, 2021 2:05 PM
Today I'm feeling the frustrations related particularly to trying to test certain aspects of gameplay. Rimworld is one of the new darlings of the modding community, and game adaptation through modding is one of the areas I have written about previously, particularly where this falls into a literary area. Rimworld is now being adapted by modders into literary genres, for example Call of Chthulu mods to create a H.P. Lovecraft universe. One of the mods within this possibly allows the colonist-pawns to write books of their experiences; this is one of the gameplay areas I intend to test this week.
I've spent forty game hours and counting absorbed in a modded version of Rimworld, but right now, all I want to do is tame a grizzly bear. It's not a high aim, but for various reasons, I've become interested in the differences within the AI on animal taming. I tend to find wargs, and grizzly bears don't wander onto this particular biome often. So far, three of my woefully unprepared colonists have been killed in taming attempts and the bears accidentally destroyed. Another bear is on the map, so strike four is on.
Another failed attempt later though, the bear is not dead, just stunned, and I have the opportunity to rescue it. Doctoring an animal can form a bond, so I go for that, and have my little pawn Donaldson (a practising animal handler) carry its unconscious form into the dining room in a prepared animal bed to sleep off some meds while I do some preparation, letting the rest of the game play on around me while I work this part through. My best animal handler so far is Nathaniel 'Nathan' McCoy, so I leave him butchering the sorry dead in the same room, in case the bear wakes.
A short time later, I'm caught short by Donaldson (-Donaldson???) cheerfully skipping along with a pile of fresh meat. Where's he heading I wonder absently, before all the fateful alarms sound, and the red warning 'Grizzly Bear Revenge' floats across screen. I am now fully back in the room. The overzealous Donaldson-in-training has made the fateful error of bumblingly practising on my precious grizzly bear and botched the training attempt, causing the bear to wake up and attack everyone in the dining room, and losing my one chance at testing the blasted, blasted warg/bear comparison. Nathan, still seated at the butchering table, picks up his revolver, and, his eyes never leaving mine, blows the bears brains out with one carefully placed headshot. I swear he never even glances at the bear, blast his pixelated face.
For a moment, I consider euthanising him, which is an option under pawn operations, but he's my most skilled medic, bionics surgeon, animal handler, and food producer, and therefore the most valuable pawn on the map. In that instant, I know it, and I am almost sure, he knows it too. He is also my favourite colonist, despite his bio giving away his tendency towards being a lazy wimp, but right now I'm never going to tell him that. He loses yet more favour points by dropping the revolver, picking up the bear, butchering it while it's still warm, feeding it's meat to the wargs, and passing it's fur to Bluewolf, who heads straight to the tailoring section. My bear is tee shirts within three minutes of gameplay. For the record, I'm now up to fifty gameplay hours, no more bears have entered the map, may bees eat their hides, and Nathan is now a level 16 surgeon, making him untouchable. Somehow, he's still my favourite pawn. I think he reminds me of my brother?
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March 3, 2021 1:58 PM
I have reflected a great deal on past research, the process of producing that research, and eventually the completed pieces. One of the things I have been faced with more than once is reusing completed pieces. I once got a call from an ex-employer for whom I used to write employability projects, and was asked to look at some old work, as there had been an audit question raised. This is standard practise, and can happen several years later, but is fairly unusual so late on. I remember meeting up with staff I used to work with, and looking through boxes in the store room to work through the question, which was finalised in a few short minutes. While there we found a box of old trial applications that I was pretty impressed with. These are really good work I said to my ex-colleague, who wrote them? It turned out this whole section of the store room was mine. After finding it hilarious that I hadn’t recognised my own, once neat handwriting, he had been unable to fathom my lack of affinity with my earlier work. I had written so much though, and this set had not been accepted for funding, so I can only guess they hadn’t stood out.
I know that straying across, or having to use, old work can be a disconcerting experience, and can be utterly different from writing it in the first place. My first experience of reusing an academic piece I have already mentioned in an earlier blog post, and was a completely unexpected request. It was suggested to me that I use my degree dissertation as my Key Skills Level 4 Communication submission, and at the time this use made a lot of sense. It was clearly an advanced written piece of English, which is what was looked for on the course. Then during the MA course, one of the assignments was to engage in academic social media, and for this part of my engagement was in Academia and Researchgate. On both, the main piece I had ready written for upload was my degree dissertation, which I had managed to transfer onto a memory stick. I uploaded it, and it still obtains regular reads and mentions. Oddly, the piece would now be lost if not for this, as shortly afterwards, my PC drive blew up, and my memory stick corrupted while being used in my PC drive. The degree dissertation was not backed up on a cloud storage device, and so is only now available online at all because of its association with the MA course. All of that research, lost, except for a dusty storage facility.
The most recent reuse that I have had is due to the PhD, and is my return to my MA dissertation. I am attempting to use the MA dissertation as a starting trampoline from which to develop one of the research questions further, to create a background to the arthouse videogame genre. There are several issues here. Firstly, rereading what I have already written is downright difficult, especially so soon after I first wrote it; I almost wish it was longer ago than just six months, though if it was, it would be out of date so less use. Secondly, do I still agree with it? I have no idea; I think I do, but does that mean I am being arrogant?! Good grief, the questions and self doubt never cease. And finally, this one being the big hitter, was I right? After I submitted my MA dissertation, I realised that I seemed to be the only researcher writing about a Ludic Aesthetic from the viewpoint of videogames. There were other people writing about a ludic aesthetic in terms of comic books, graphic novels, or anime, and I was advised of texts on cultural aesthetics by authors such as Sianne Ngai, but this was not well documented discussion. As far as I know, my Scalar book is the only one looking at a cultural videogame aesthetic. The problem with using a relatively unsubstantiated piece of research as a trampoline, is that you pretty much need to have some confidence in it. Is that the same thing as having confidence in yourself?
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February 23, 2021 1:46 PM
I have reflected previously on the mind mapping process and my move, forced by disability, into a technological method of mind mapping possible research notes. This process, to me, is ultimately very personal. If it was not personal, by default, it would fail, because there would be no temptation for you to touch it, use it, or interact with it. It also has to be easy, because any time wasted on the fly is a no go. This is what I have learned while being someone who learns while working and bringing up a family. If it distracts me from my children, it is a No Go. Having said that, sometimes something that looks like wasted time, quite simply isn’t. The move to an online system for collecting a research mindmap was a natural progression from the forced technological advancements throughout the MA course. Every module consisted of three assignments, and every assignment relied on the use of a new piece of software. Our tutor used this method to ensure that our knowledge increased exponentially, and while there was resistance to the rigours of the course, I personally feel that I benefited hugely from this. It was changed after my year from the sheer level of student resistance, but I will be thankful that I had to undergo it, while simultaneously having kind of hated the painful process. My aim of updating my original humanities degree, in which I had written an Access database, had been achieved. In addition to work completed on gaming, just in one assignment, I had completed a full piece on digital curation using new applications (I personally used a PearlTrees account); so I can confidently say that I learned new technologies opening in the museum sector purely as a sideline within the course. I also completed a piece on library management and curation, satisfying my requirement to develop my understanding of the processes relevant to library knowledge. By all this, I am not suggesting I completed a specialised library or humanities course, because I most certainly did not; I was instead given a significant selection of media tools that I feel were designed to let me progress however I wanted, which had been the original point.
I may well never use any of the exact same new software again, but in those few short months, I became application confident; so much so that I now try out new apps as a standard method of learning, and utilise gaming apps as much as PC and console as part of my research; this would not have fallen on my radar as a researcher previously as I barely even knew of their existence. With hindsight that I then gained from the first year of the PhD course, what I feel I may still be lacking, is an understanding of some of the postgraduate terminology and what fits where; this element is still open to interpretation in my mind, despite my having completed much of the actual work previously in other guises. So, I have completed methodologies, but a PhD methodology then looks and feels different, even despite having written a postgraduate methodology previously. The links between research context, theoretical framework, methodology, research questions, and so on pretty much eluded me - I actually ended on a fourth draft submission to PhD supervisors trying to show I had the process clear in my head, which I still didn’t, completely, though I was getting closer.
Sometimes, it can just pay to do something practical and different, even if that distracts you from what initially looks like the main priority. Last week, I needed to complete a presentation for the PGCert, with the subject matter (you’ve guessed it) to be the methodology and research questions. Given the number of incorrect drafts I had already submitted on this subject, I cannot say I was expecting to be able to submit an accurate presentation either. The obvious digital option was to present by Skype, but I was not comfortable with this, as my Skype connection drops regularly, I have never shared my screen and have not worked it out yet, and did not want to stop the whole day messing with technical issues. I therefore offered a YouTube link with a recorded presentation. Simple, I thought. This turned into a comedy of errors. I am not going to lie, I became obsessed, and dragged work colleagues into my new obsession. We had just finished some Google training in which we saw a Slides presentation, with the presenter video streamed directly through either Chat or Hangouts onto YouTube and saved Unlisted so that it can only be used by those the link is sent to. The presenter video is therefore set into the slides within the presentation. It looks and sounds great, but we are really busy, at work, so although I do have a research day allocated, I do really need to use it wisely. We could not make it work, so we contacted Google, and it turns out a business account is needed. I rewrote my presentation spiel as an autocue, and we recorded the clips as individual videos embedded in the slides, and then retaped the whole presentation and uploaded it as a YouTube link. It looks amazing, but the repeated reprocessing damaged the audio. By mid-week, we had three recordings and nothing that worked right. I arrived the following morning, and recorded a traditional presentation, in a room, in 10 minutes, and uploaded it to YouTube, with a set of slides, which is what was used, and had a sorrowful PhD supervision meeting.
So what had I learnt? My colleagues and I, it turns out, do not feel we wasted our time. We learned loads about recording presentations, recording in general, uploading, and could now produce a presentation really quickly if required, for a PhD course or anything else. We can also use a second presentation as an autocue, which we have found works as a memory aide for my disability. Finally, I talked through and badly explained the research questions and methodology with my audience so often they tentatively began making some kind of sense. The presentation is actually okay. Just stopping writing, putting the whole thing down, and attempting a presentation, it turns out, was not a waste of time in the slightest. It was a bit of a win.
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February 16, 2021 1:43 PM
The second academic year dawned and I was back to positivity! I was back at work, I had submitted everything required of me, and there was just a dissertation preparation document to submit, how hard could it be? I struggled for ideas. I had written so much about gaming that I began to wonder if I was going to end up with writers block on the whole subject; as a result, I tried to move away from it for my final piece, and began searching for other options, or at least a wider overall concept to draw from. Nothing suited, and I struggled to find anything that in the circumstances would hold my newly impaired attention well enough to research it properly. After a long tutor discussion, I was inevitably turned back to gaming, but with a slightly wider remit this time. It was something of a wild card, and my tutor had some doubts that were alleviated as far as possible by improvements in methodology, but I had become interested in what I saw as a changing approach to wider stream media, in response to the boom in the gaming industry. Television programmes, films, teaching, even warfare had all begun taking a game-like approach; games were suddenly cool, and there was a gaming focus in many other sectors that I wanted to draw out. I put it into my dissertation proposal and submitted it; in the meantime, I kept my eyes and ears open for indications that I was correct, and for the first time, used a Google sheet to list information rather than a paper based system.
The first week’s class of the PGCert is all about research mind mapping. Until I saw the slides, I had no idea that this was the purpose of my old MA Google sheet, and had been the purpose of every pile of dogeared papers that I had previously piled up to write something big before that. Usually, they had consisted of post-it notes (half of which were lost), torn out scraps of paper, some with my shopping list on the back, and often, to-do lists, many with a liberal smattering of highlighter pen where some areas had become more crucial than others. Some bits were brutally scrubbed out with biro, these sections not to be done now under any circumstances, because Things Had Changed. As my Google sheet grew longer, I began separating it into sections and chapters. As it was cloud based, I could access it anywhere. On my phone at my mum's for dinner. On a train. In the middle of the night unable to sleep. As I wandered through the library at work, I would notice a new text, and skim reading, add a quotation or two, which lead me to add a reference sheet at the end rather than risk losing track of the quotations. I began noting down games that interested me, and that seemed relevant. Then events in the news. Without me really noticing, it became 24 pages long, all bullet points, all in my own personal shorthand, which had developed from years of work and study. Always before, my notes had been a mess, because they were on many sheets. Now, they were still a mess, but it was a mess organised on one major map, and the kicker was I hadn’t even done it on purpose. I just had a dodgy memory now so needed to only have to remember one document title. I never, ever read it, just kept adding anything interesting, and if it seemed confusing when I glanced at it, I did a bit of tidying, added some section headings, numbers, extra spaces, basics like that.
The final year had one module of another three assignments, the dissertation proposal, and the dissertation itself. I worked as much as I could on the non-dissertation module, then booked a week’s leave to finished it off properly. This left me just at the stage of dissertation write up, when I really started to feel the drain again of full time hours, and the migraines, already chronic, became rapidly more regular and severe, often occurring several times a week, with the rescue medication becoming less effective at controlling them. Beginning to worry that I was not going to get through the last stages, I buried my head in the sand and just kept adding to my mind map. Falling down the stairs no less than nine times in a few weeks, I finally relapsed fully, and was referred to Neurology. Rescue medication was not the answer, and the migraines were simply too dangerous. I was taken off all pain medication, initially for an expected period of six months due to anticipated contraindications, and the process of weaning me onto a specialist anti-seizure medication began. The new tablets gave me severe Ataxia, which was like being permanently underwater, without the drowning part. Speech, hearing, and balance Did Not Work Properly. I was signed off work because I could not stand up straight, let alone walk. I can honestly say the next eight weeks were some of the hardest of my life, though I did make it back to work (with my face still numb and unable to taste anything) after six weeks. Despite my already having limited driving to when I was migraine-clear, my family insisted on my car being traded in against an automatic, in case of numbness in my left side becoming more prevalent. The new car was more expensive, and much more reliable, and despite having to adapt to an automatic, I appreciated the trade within weeks of returning to my own steam. Anything outside of a set mileage was taken by train or bus, in case I needed collecting later on.
Despite all this though, we had been exactly here before. I was once more incapable of working, but unwilling to relax into the dangers of doing nothing in the knowledge that I was going to be returning to work shortly, and my new set answer for that was to temporarily become a full time researcher. I opened a new Google sheet and started writing a dissertation. The first thing I realised was this was an impossible task, and cut off from other people, it was really hard work to focus when my mind just did not work well. I also made things harder for myself initially by starting from a completely blank slate. All I ended up with really was a bullet point list of what I had actually been doing in terms of work on the dissertation, which I initially thought was pointless. I knew what I had been doing, didn’t I? I didn’t, it wasn’t, and luckily, Google Drive autosaves literally everything. What I did then was go back and make a Google sheet version of my dissertation proposal, that was based on the chapters I had said I would write rather than the actual proposal framework, and opened that information out with what I had actually been doing. I immediately found I had to refer to bullet list A, that I had initially dismissed as pointless. Score 1 for accidental file saves. After a day or two of this, my mind started to stutter and blank, and I could see there was not nearly enough information in there, and it was not good enough at this point anyway, so I closed the document, left it for a day, and went back to playing the games.
It was finding more games to add to the mind map that sent me back there. I made a copy of that too, and instead of really overworking it (I mean I hadn’t even read it!), I just wrote it up. Some of it was irrelevant, and I deleted those sections from the new copy straight away. I still have the original sheet so they’re not lost, and they may be useful for later things, but they were clear tangents to the subject at hand. I could see straight away that the word count was already there, and would even potentially need editing. I had taken plenty of time over collation and it had been gathered from a huge range of sources, as and when I had seen subjects or thought of them. Some of the areas were relevant and interesting but I had not supported them well with evidence. I had added a reference sheet as I had gone along, so could again find all the references already present, and work from there to generate further research. I then began comparing the work I had already completed on the initial document using the starting point of the dissertation proposal, with the developed mind map. As my thoughts had been working along similar lines, these crossed in several areas, and I amalgamated the blurred sections. This was the basis of my dissertation. My first action was to read and edit, and highlight any areas that still needed work against the original chapter requirements of the dissertation proposal. There were some, but none were insurmountable, even for someone working from home, as most of the footwork was already complete. I submitted my first version very soon after, and received comments back. The main complaint my tutor made was that Scalar was capable of a significant amount of media and I had not embedded any, despite having plenty; I even had personal film of my own gaming progression and images. I had one week left. I managed to work through almost all the requirements, but this was my first use of Scalar and while I very much appreciate the end result, I did not find it intuitive to use with a deadline, and I never did manage to fully embed all forms of media, so there were some I had to take out and find alternatives for.
I submitted the final piece, within the required timescales and before deadline, just before returning to work again. I was proud of the finished piece, and was overjoyed to be awarded a Distinction overall at Masters level. I completed my usual process of swearing never to be involved in any form of education again, I was utterly done this time, completely exhausted, etcetera, and then while at a library convention in Birmingham a few weeks later I noticed that BCU had a PhD supervisor who could handle a videogames PhD; I had looked at the end of the MA course and was quickly made aware that this is not that common, especially for people who cannot move away for university due to home commitments. BCU also had a part time and distance learning option, and the government had opened student loans for doctorate level courses. Okay, I thought. Why not? I probably won’t get anywhere anyway.
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February 9, 2021 1:35 PM
By the latter part of the 2019 academic year, I was too ill to climb the stairs in my house, was on extended sick leave from work, had reached the realisation that I could not handle the course, and probably needed to begin the steps necessary to quit. Secretly, I was still convincing myself that I was probably okay. I had submitted the assignments needed for the initial modules, but I felt I had dragged them out, and I was fairly sure that my marks were going to reflect that. In addition to the rare blood disorder that had caused my miscarriages, I also had a number of comorbidities, including a diagnosed of Chronic Hemiplegic Migraines, a type of migraine that resembles a stroke and removes control of one side of your body (the left side for me), including speech, lasting at that time, for me, for around 48 hours at a time. My first fully confirmed attack left me in the local stroke unit for 5 days, while my family fended for themselves. As the effects wore off, my partner brought me my watercolours and sketchbook, but the children were too afraid to come to the hospital.
I remember trying to read one of the novels that was also an MA course book. As I reached the end of the first chapter, I realised I could not remember anything I had just read. I had a cup of tea, then went back and read the first chapter. The nurse came and chatted to me, and then I looked down, and realised I could not remember anything I had just read. I had lunch, which was being brought round the ward, and then went back and read the first chapter. As I came to the end, frustrated, I realised I could not remember anything that I had read, just as a volunteer carer came around chatting with patients. He asked me what I was doing, so I told him. He had been volunteering on the ward for many years, since a stroke had caused him a personal calamity, and had a wealth of information, which turned out to be perfectly accurate. My memory was impaired, but not permanently. It does work differently now, but I still absorb the information, as long as I do not attempt to do so too soon after an attack, or take in too much at once. Reading a chapter of a new book in the phases after a hemiplegic migraine is like waving information cards at a newborn, quite frankly your brain does not care and wants you to go away unless you are going to provide something helpful and reparative, like peace food and sleep. Despite previous illnesses, this was actually my first real understanding of the importance of rest and distance for physical and mental health, because this was the first time I had literally failed to operate.
I was sent home with confirmation MRI scans, a proposed medication plan that at this point relied more on rescue medication than prevention tactics (this was of course going to escalate), and a continuing lack of understanding of my own fallibility. What I did do, was prepare to leave the course, with the logical awareness that I might not be able to continue. The first step was to apply for an extension, so I did that, and began preparations to return to work. At the same time, I was enjoying my classes, and taking care to reserve the energy to attend every one; I liked the interaction, and my ability to stretch my mind anywhere else (other than when my hands were pain free enough to paint) was very limited. The stimulation from the classes had been enough to keep my research levels up in gaming, and I had by that time discovered Audible. While reading for long periods was exhausting, I could listen to a book for a set period of time if it was available as an audible file; there was a limited selection, but some of the academic gaming books, which were newer, were available; oddly enough the medium suits a damaged memory, and things learned are often easier to remember in this form. The most difficult aspect of researching in this style is remembering where and at what section you have heard something, and finding a quotation again to reference it. As a result, I found my costs soared, as I often purchased a book and Audible version of the same text consecutively, just so that I could find something I knew was in a single production. I was also offered DSA support, and supplied with a specialist chair, which helped with the pain in my joints, hands and neck, and supplied software that supported the reading out of some academic texts. At the same time as the deadline for several separate assignments loomed, I received notification from my doctors that I was looking at around six weeks to return to work. I knew I would not cope with a working day without practice, so with no real expectation of success, I redesigned my sick days into pretend working ones, and used the assignments as work, progressively making the days longer to combat the exhaustion gradually instead of having to contend with it all at once upon my real return to work.
I was effectively now working as a researcher, and I actually thoroughly enjoyed it. I was also surprisingly fast given that I had arguably been very inactive for a sustained period, and was expecting very little, but most of my mental acuity had been focused on gaming for some time, and it seemed a natural progression. I completed all outstanding assignments within the period allowed, with time to spare, and was able to go back and make alterations too. My assignments were heavily skewed towards games narrative, with a smattering of games industry development, crunching, games as an art form, and YouTube and Twitch celebrity status in gaming; this is the backbone of my portfolio and was developed throughout that first year, but refined during this period. I never used the extension, as the assignments were submitted, and the second step to leaving is to not submit the assignments in line with the agreed extension, which I actually had not even used. I forgot about it as I became absorbed with trying to manage at work, and as the medication began causing me problems; the increase in hours as I gradually returned to full time combined with side effects eventually led to relapse that I will get to later on, as this impacted on my final piece. It was at this point though that I had my first unexpected surprise. I received my first year marks. Quite the opposite of my expected poor result, I had achieved the equivalent of a first. I absolutely was on track for the final year.
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