Time to Celebrate

I finally finally FINALLY graduated. I got so tired of being in school. But it’s not really the break I thought it would be, because now I’m trying to decide whether or not to go back for Ph.D. I think I’ll take the year and let that idea steep for awhile.

As I mentioned before, I was working on a really big project. One of the requirements for my degree program was to edit a paper previously written to be publication-worthy. Except I did mine over the summer and had to restart. Twice. It took forever to finally get on a track where I could weed out the information I didn’t need to include and just write. Apparently that was more difficult than I anticipated. But, I’m pretty proud of the final product. I felt all smart and stuff.

Anyway, I’m not going to put up the whole thing because I may use it later for something or other, but I wrote about the political discourses in Skyrim and incorporated some theoretical badassery from some of the articles and books I read over the summer. I explored what it meant to be a player in the specific type of game Skyrim is and how that reflects the different levels of immersion. I also looked at how players’ real world experiences could affect their decisions about how to respond to the different discourses presented in the game. Then I looked pretty hard at the historical references in the game and how players’ knowledge of them could affect their decisions. That led me to analyze the various narrative layers in the game and how players’ decisions create one of those layers. And finally, I observed how that particular layer looked throughout the Elder Scrolls series.

It was really tedious and really frustrating. I feel so sorry for my poor advisor who basically held my hand through the whole thing. But I learned a lot and I’m thankful for it. I just don’t want to do that again for a while. ha!