My primary idea for a dissertation was a creative work from a field of New Media. The plan was to make a hypermedia story. It had to be a tale based on transmedia form including elements of films, graphics, hypertext and wikis from across the internet, with a multiple choice way of reading. However, after a short amount of research on this topic and assessment of my knowledge and skills I decided I would prefer to write about it rather than do it.
Over this week I have tried to formulate a few potential questions or topics from this field, but always ended back at the subject that I had superficially studied last year. This Is Alternate Reality Game. So, I stopped resisting this subject and just decided to go into it. On one hand I am deeply fascinated with this form of games (or activity) but on the other hand I am aware of the fact that there are still not many academic papers or books on this subject. Over the last few days I have been looking deeply into scholars’ resources, not only at Bangor University, but much further. After analyzing my findings and fascinations on this fields, and looking at it from an academic perspective I have built a small mind map (below), and formulated a few potential topics:
The structure of magic. Immersion in ARG.
Storytelling, interactive fiction or game: Case study of ARG.
Game or Interactive story: Case study of ARG.
If it is not a game then what? How to understand ARG.
Into the rabbit holes. Immersive aesthetics in the ARG dimension.
Transmedia storytelling: From Big Brother to ARG.
My other subject of interest is documentary films, particular the movement named Cinema Verite/Direct Cinema. There are many books and journals dedicated to this mater. I have watched and own most of the important films made by the leaders of this movement. In the previous academic year I wrote a couple of essays which directly or indirectly concerned this subject.
From this reason I would rather treat this field as a reserve, because I would learn and discover something new from my dissertation, then rather looking for the same perspective or point of view in the field which I already know.
However, for this subject I also prepared some small mind map of potential fields in the Cinema Verite/Direct Cinema. I have not formulate any potential topics, but the graphs itself is almost in form of proposals
Objectivity and subjectivity in Cinema Verite: Anatomy of uncontrolled documentary.
Realism as a style in Cinema Verite: Revolution or evolution of documentary films
Visual anthropology vs. unobtrusive journalism: Comparative analysis of “Primary” and “Chronicle of the summer"
