Semioclast

As this semester declines towards a close I am starting to think a lot about upcoming projects and about writing in general. I’ll be writing a draft of my project proposal over the summer, so my thoughts have tended to gravitate in that direction. On that note, I present to you, our reader(s), the first-ever post at the new Semioclast.net:

Game scholar Jane McGonigal of 42entertainment and I Love Bees fame (among other neat things) has been posting chapters of her epic, 573 page dissertation titled “This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” over at AvantGame. She’s been releasing it chapter-by-chapter on her site and it is shaping up to be quite a thorough and engaging piece of scholarship that works on some key questions about what it means to experiment with play these days. As always, McGonigal’s work is innovative and exciting.

The dissertation itself is only part of the story as I just learned today. Throughout the process of writing the dissertation, McGonigal blogged what she called her “Best Sentence of the Day”. Some, like best sentence #87 (”There is nothing inherently fantastic about receiving a fax.”) are short and sweet, while others are more involved and take the “best sentence” designator fairly loosely. Others still, like this conversation with Ian Bogost, give us a look inside the process behind the document. The whole thing has a rather informal feel to it, which is a nice change from the seriousness with which we normally treat projects of this size and importance.

I think it’s nice to focus on this level of the writing process as it feels more compartmentalized and manageable than the chapter or section sized chunks that we are used to hearing about people suffering through. The idea of having a daily best sentence must help with the feeling of accomplishment that makes the grind of daily authorship more manageable.

I have to say that I am intrigued as we don’t often get a chance to look at what goes into writing one of these things if we’re not on the author’s committee (and if you are, then you’ve experienced this meat-grinder of a process for yourself). The whole endeavor is very Web 2.0 and seems to invite annotation and commentary. I look forward to seeing more sites like this (perhaps my own) in the future.

Having recently defended his own dissertation, I ‘m interested in what Dr. Robertson has to say about this.

Edited to add: I see one more way of thinking about this. There is a storytelling element here. The blog itself seems to unfold the process through a narrative that includes not only selections from the dissertation, but through the personal experiences and thoughts that circulate around its production.

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