Writing our third year research proposal (8/5/2014)

This week I decided to work on the research proposal for my third year dissertation and got the following advice from my lecturer.

Lecturers Notes:

• Make sure to write something that has academic research backing it! Doesn’t have to be books, but it should be backed by professionals within their fields and universities. Newspapers can also be used effectively.
• Make sure the title relates to the topic.
• Do the research first so that I know it will be fruitful! Otherwise you are looking for very specific things.
• Can relate other fields to whatever I write about. 
• As always, he recommended using the online article ‘Moral decision making in Fallout’ as it is meant to be a good one and may also relate more to my current dissertation than it did the last one.
• ‘Can games teach morality?’ is meant to be another good online article I could use.

With the above in mind I may want to use books that talk about the subconscious, psychi and general play, especially since the game is based on a group of gamers going through tough times. Also look into avatars and how they represent players, since this relates to my work a lot.

I mainly plan to cover video game characters and how they react to environments and others through play. Also, how the environments and enemies featured in the game are based on the inner psychi of the in-game characters similar to ‘Silent Hill’ and 'Persona 4'.

Starting my Context for next year (24/4/2014)

As Context is over the lecturer explained that the rest of the sessions will be to help build up our research for our third year project. The research itself will need to be handed in around Christmas, thus working on it now is important.

Again, he reminded us to start our 6000 word dissertation which should continue from where our Context hand in ended. Thus I should try and find new examples for the subject and link it to my own intended project as the lecturer would like to see this.
Perhaps I could link this by talking about the characters I wish to portray in my game and the enemies the player fights. In short, do the characters alignments change depending on who they fight or who they play as since the characters will be role players playing a pen and paper game? 

Finally, he recommended that we plan ahead what deadlines we aim to complete first for the end of term. However, as I had done this already, I continued to continue to write my 'work process' which I have already started for the third year.