I managed to present my bachelor’s thesis last week’s Tuesday. The final topic was a bit cumbersome “Play: the philosophy of art and play by Gadamer”. It also had a subtitle of “comparison to a different concept of play”. We have a mysteriously silent tutor (apart from the furious attack on this weeks presentation, something that caught us all by surprise), so I have no idea how it went beside the fact that it seemed to have been accepted.
Although I found the research for the paper enlightening, I didn’t come to any great conclusions: I compared what Gadamer said about play to what some (mostly Scandinavian) theorists have said about (role)play. Immersion played a big part on the comparison, mostly because what Pohjola writes about play sounds a lot like what Gadamer has to say. I also (briefly) criticized Pohjola’s ideas, basing my criticism mostly on the 2004 article Autonomous Identities. The text is already three years old, and I feel that theory of role-play has changed substantially during those years; nevertheless it was a good point for comparison. I have always been critical to the immersion-based theories of role-play, but I also found some sympathy for these ideas during my research.
It is now done, and I can set it aside for a while. I soon have to come up with a topic for my graduation thesis, but I think I’ll let the sleeping beasts lie for a time. Meantime, I probably should catch up with my reading - I still have some very basic texts of academic game study to read.