How Videogames and Awe Met and Made a 15-Page Paper Together

The idea for my final paper actually came last semester as I was in Dr. Burton's digital culture class and looking forward to this semester's Literature of Awe class.When this semester started, I got a bit of a special head start on my paper as Dr. Burton gave me the awesome opportunity to present to the class a few games that I thought really inspired awe. In selecting games and moments to highlight, I really considered what about games can inspire awe, which I started to explore in a follow-up post to my presentation.

That led directly into outlining the specific attributes of games I thought created awe, then a list of emotions that videogames could bring at awe-inspiring levels perhaps better than any other medium. In putting together a post about different presentation formats, I came again to a video I had watched before by Chris Franklin about how technology influences the content of videogames. This led me back to the idea I had last semester, and when it came time to give a preliminary outline, I had two strong ideas, but ultimately, feedback from classmates led me to pick the second idea, which was the idea I had last semester. My paper went through some drafts, and the annotated bibliography really helped me gather some solid sources. I asked Chris Franklin for some feedback, but unfortunately never got any (yet). Finally, for my final draft I added a lot more specific treatment of awe itself via Burke and some psychological studies, which really helped define and drive my argument throughout the rest of the paper, which I refined in light of those additions.

I've never written a paper quite this long before, and I think it shows, but overall I'm happy with it and I do think I make some interesting points that add something significant to the study of videogames.

Resolution: The World Makes Sense Again

This semester has been a really interesting one in terms of the progression of my research topic and my feelings toward it. I can honestly say that I've never had a semester that was so frustrating , but I've been able to push through and have come to a synthesis moment, to borrow the term from Hegel.

CC 2.0 Generic, Wikimedia Commons

I think one of my problems going into the paper for this class was that I came with so many topics that I wanted to address. Awe was and still is, in my mind, an interdisciplinary notion, and I think that biology, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and critical art theory all have important things to say about it. As I studied it more, though, I began to realize that I wasn't the only one having problems figuring out awe. The texts contradicted themselves, everyone used different words for the same things, and the works that seemed to be the most accurate in trying to define awe seemed to be the most abstract and vague and well. You might say that for about three months, I was pretty frustrated and had no idea what I was doing.