TOC - original of mine

WIP Table of Contents for the research paper. The reading links won't work for you, reader. I am not publishing them, at least for now.

  1. Thesis front matter
  2. A note on structure and voice (maybe this goes in introduction but other papers have it before)
    1. Ontological layers
    2. Hyperlinks
    3. Footnotes
      1. Two styles - one for references, another for FEELINGS. Or bring silly. Maybe put a fictional character who comments on stuff. Either from the game or an imagined future archivist. Distracting or fun?)
  3. Introduction
    1. Summary of project
    2. I designed this thesis around how I want to spend my time. Database design, physical prototyping using OCADU tools, making a game, speculative fiction, excuses to visit archives.
    3. Short methodology
    4. Description of chapters
  4. Methodology
    1. Reflective practice
    2. Is there something that describes my visiting archive research?
    3. Is there a world for all the discourse analysis I'm doing and how it feeds into mechanical and fiction properties of the game?
    4. Game sketching/exploratory prototyping
      1. Tools, Systems
        1. Games as generative systems
        2. Databases as templates for fragmented narrative
    5. Drawing to understand theory
      Pink - Doing Visual Ethnography-VLRSPYBG
      Pink - Advances in Visual Methodology-TKGR7RPJ
    6. Kinetic physical interaction for cognition (goes to theory? This ended up long - maybe short summary here)
      1. Drawing to understand theory
        Conversation
      2. Material exploration for artist
      3. Creating possibility space for players
      4. Interactional mechanics (just digital or both?)
      5. Player interaction with physical items?
      6. Making the player make things (if I can fit it in.)
  5. Layer one - abstracting others thinkers into me
  6. Theory/Discourse analysis (keep these topics to one paragraph, not an essay each!) Lit Review
    1. Blurring the magic circle - worlds in worlds
      1. Narrative layers
        Bell - Interactional Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology-PFZZ8WCH
        Ensslin - Video Games as Complex Narratives and Embodied Metalepsis-XHNIP9S8 (missing paper)
      2. Mimesis
      3. Possible worlds
        Planells de la Maza - Possible Worlds in Video Games- From Classic Narrative to Meaningful Actions-RYVQFTAU (Partially read)
      4. Mikkonen - Minimal Departure and Fictional Narrative Situations-D4PVBWJI
      5. Actual and virtual (TODO current gap!)
      6. Ontological layers
      7. Ontological bleed
        Hugaas - Bleed and Identity- A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-out from Role-playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of-BPX6HACN
      8. Examples
        1. Hyperreality installation
        2. Alt reality games
        3. Immersive theatre
          1. Sleep no more
          2. Escape rooms (TODO: gap!)
      9. Application to cognition
    2. Psychological impact of fiction on actual cognition
      1. Probably cut this for space (also the title doesn't cover this topic probably - TODO: Big gap)
      2. Dissociative distortion
      3. Fiction on cognitive state studies
      4. Game mechanics/embodiment/kinetic studies
    3. Identification
      Thabet, Thabet - A Player’s Story-7GGAHAEN (Unread, don't have paper)
      1. Player character types
      2. Player identification
        Robson, Meskin - Video Games as Self-Involving Interactive Fictions-I8Q2D4VI (Unread)
        Tu, Tunggal, Brown; et al. - Character Immersion in Video Games as a Form of Acting-MQJHNP4R
      3. Felt experience - Affect Theory
        Kris Pint - The Avatar as a Methodological Tool for the Embodied Exploration of Virtual Environments
      4. A-dimensional characters
        - BEYOND IDENTIFICATION- DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PLAYER AND AVATAR-KIRMCZYJ
      5. Empty protagonist
      6. Game examples
        1. Epistolary fiction
          1. Book
          2. Film
          3. Podcast
        2. First person
        3. Alt gaming
        4. Interface games
      7. Application to cognition
    4. Player agency (currently in game design section but maybe it should be here too/instead)
    5. Ergodic literature (work hard, learn hard) (TODO: slight gap!)
      1. Hypertext
      2. Puzzles
      3. Games
      4. House of leaves
        Gibbons - The Narrative Worlds and Multimodal Figures of House of Leaves- -D8BWQLQJ
    6. Multimodal Media
      1. Multimodal narrative communication
        Toh - A Multimodal Approach to Video Games and the Player Experience-444S6XHM
      2. Making people touch and make things
    7. Fragmented narrative
      1. Summary
        Krauth - Fragmented narratives- Minding the textual gap-SBDI3XIR
        Environmental Storytelling—The Liminal Space Between Embedded and Emergent Narrative
      2. Bracikowska - Environmental Storytelling—The Liminal Space Between Embedded and Emergent Narrative-VE38CVJX
      3. Literary/Film example
      4. Database interface games
      5. Application to cognition
    8. Para social relationships (TODO: gap! realized I need this from writing this outline!)
      1. Description
      2. Archivists/historians/translators build these relationships with the historical characters in their artifacts
      3. I build these relationships with the media theorists I study
      4. The player protagonists builds these relationships with the non-entity NPCs (in theory the entities eventually become reciprocal)
      5. Probably players of the game and readers of the research paper will build this relationship with me
    9. Where does this go?
      1. Unnatural narratology
        Werner Wolf, Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Brian Richardson; et al. - Unnatural metalepsis and immersion- Necessarily incompatible--PEFZFZA4
      2. Cognitive narratology
    10. Example topic
      1. Example subtopic
        1. Summary with reference
        2. Application to project
  7. Discourse analysis (currently this is sprinkled through theory - but it might be better here going on a project by project basis and just referencing the above topics. But maybe that will make the last section too dry? But if I do experimental formatting they can hyperlink each other. Maybe I like this - colour code "layers" of document like stratas and then hyperlink concepts from discourse/precedent/production/fiction together. Move this note into a new note.)
  8. Archive visits (currently chronological - might sort by impact/relevance)
    1. Introduction and importance
      1. The time periods of the fiction and potential design of the databases will likely be dependant on the archive examples I can get access to.
      2. Interviewing archivists and their relationships with the "characters" that emerge in their artifacts
    2. Thomas fisher rare book
      1. Brain exhibit
      2. You should go back and ask to see pre-book items
    3. Interaccess archives
      1. Kit talk
      2. Kit visit questions for Kit
      3. Further visits if you arrange it?
    4. OCADU archive
    5. ROM archive (ideally archeology - both artifacts and paperwork for digs)
    6. Can you find an older archive?
      1. City of Toronto archives - 1960
      2. Archives Department of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), founded in 1860
      3. Museum of Northern History in Kirkland Lake 1981 (good to get data outside of major cities?)
  9. Generative prototypes
    1. Solo paper game
    2. Twine prototype
  10. Game design

    1. Structure

      1. Brief overview of software and artifacts
      2. Game controller
        1. Game states, variables,
        2. mechanics for controllong agency - affordances of mechanics
          1. What info is available to the player at what time?
          2. What impact is available to the player at what time?
          3. How much to control player curiousity? Some will explore loose files without prompting. Some will experience installation, others only online, many will require and early hook and others will be more patient.

    2. Interaction mechanics

      Szilas - Narrative Mode of the Third Kind-78SWCYSJ
      Ryan - The Fictionality of Games and the Ludic Nature of Fiction- Make-Believe, Immersion, Play.-YSYA3NU7

      1. Agency
        1. Navigation
        2. Curiousity
        3. Impactful (better word for this - interaction that changes the game state and fictional world in a way visible to the player)
        4. Revoked
      2. Input
        1. traditional game design, interactional mechanics Bell
        2. unique to interface simulation games
          Krampe, Lotzow, Thon; et al. - Playful Poetics- Metareferential Interfaces in Recent Indie Games-DVYGZH26
        3. Unique to Bleed

    3. Relation to ontological bleed

    4. Relation to empty protagonist
      Gibbons - The Narrative Worlds and Multimodal Figures of House of Leaves- -D8BWQLQJ

    5. Relation to narrative fragmentation

  11. Project planning (is this too boring to include? Might as well document and then delete later if not meaningful.)
    1. Initial OCADU pitch summary
    2. Evolution first semester (mostly from research)
    3. Initial timeline of development (screen capture monthly break down)
    4. Software used? Game design document link?
    5. Actual timeline - some things sped up from class assignments, artist talks opportunities (percha kutcha, queer games con, maybe others will surface. Should I ask Toronto Games Week if I can talk?) and thesis timeline changes - pure enthusiasm. Probably other things will slow it down.
  12. Prototyping
    1. Database design
      1. Core DBentry JSON - starter, current, master one spreadsheet for everything
      2. How much info should be available in each interface?
      3. Prototypes Each individual database (include failed designs?)
    2. Artifact design (likely with links to fiction section a lot)
      1. Considerations for fiction.
        1. Initial list
          1. Inspired from material curiousty
          2. Link to archive visits
          3. Added from experimentation
            1. finding gaps in understanding plot
            2. Gaps from expressing mechanics
            3. Gaps from understanding worldbuilding
      2. Each individual artifact (include failed designs?) reference types above. This section looks tiny here but it will possibly be the largest section after theory.
        1. Evidence artifacts (actual items - infected, some uninfected for padding and interest)
        2. Fictional projects (like archeological digs that turned up evidence)
        3. Beurocratic ephemera artifacts - paperwork, emails, letters, forms. Just learned these can be their own thing and not just annotations on evidence entries! Yay!
      3. Procedurally generated artifacts systems?
    3. Installation
      1. Changes to software
      2. Considerations for accessibility
      3. Hyperrealism
      4. Set dec and production design
  13. Fiction
    1. Summary
    2. Breakdown of final plot (spoilers!)
    3. Characterisation
      1. Designing empty protagonist (making room for an imagined player)
      2. NPCs
        1. Humans (likely ref Outer Wilds)
        2. Entities
        3. Shadow self (when your identity becomes an Entity and you loose control)
    4. Worldbuilding
      1. Archive organization -whonare they and what was the original intention of the archive?
      2. Demon realm
        1. Difficulty with finding a non-stupid name for it (the archivist will likely refer to it at least abstractly, maybe diff names diff time periods, this document def needs a name for it.)
      3. Player realm
        1. Once established those two layers, must talk about how they smear into the "actual" world
    5. Chronology
      1. Archivist in different time periods
      2. Databases from different time periods
      3. Beurocratic ephemera artifacts
      4. Regular artifacts
    6. Development
      1. Inspiration
        1. Fiction
        2. Scientific
          1. Archeology
          2. Physics
          3. Nature
        3. Mechanics (how a desire to express theoretical concepts or interaction mechanics manifested in the plot an worldbuilding)
      2. Difficulties
  14. Postmortem
    1. Little presentations Petcha Kutcha, QGCon
    2. REB approval? (TODO: Ask Cindy if I need this for play testing and the archivist stuff)
    3. Player Response
    4. DF show
    5. Don't know if I'm supposed to write about corrum or defence here?
  15. My feelings
    1. Maybe these are everywhere already, in footnotes and in language and don't need there own section.
    2. But maybe this is a good place for me to talk about how the project did or didn't meet expectations.
  16. Conclusion - hopefully learn how to write this in class.