Postgraduate Research When You Think You Can’t
I am sure everyone is expecting me to start by saying 2014 was spent in a pit of despair. Well, there was an element of that, to be fair. What there was more of, was a sensation almost of being back in my own (poverty-stricken!) childhood, and everything having to stretch. Every penny has to count, there is nothing spare, and some things are really going wrong. At the same time, there is a huge reminder that none of the stuff we have been worrying about actually really matters. It is all just extras. The important things in life are home, our children, our health, getting along, all the stuff we hear about every day but also kind of almost dismiss as trite, because, of course, we know all that, don’t we? A lot happened that is, again, as always, relevant/not relevant to my own development, outlook, life, and therefore viewpoint as a researcher, as a backdrop to my development in education. I met my partner and stepdaughter (the eldest of our three girls), arranged my children’s schools now they were moving up, ensured things were as settled for my little family as I could. Cash flow was seriously tight, and I quickly had to relook at my career; I had been applying to the NHS for no better reason than this is where I had accidentally landed following unemployment, but about the same time, something of a childhood dream job cropped up (Indiana Jones or librarian was it for me, and I had already completed the Archaeology degree), and I found myself applying as a team leader for a College library. The College was a little unusual in that it was combined FE and HE, having a University Centre, and I got the job.
The first six months proved that I knew a great deal about certain aspects of my new job role. These were line management, and the education system. I knew absolutely nothing about libraries though, and library management was now changing as fast as previous sectors I had worked in during earlier times. I loved my team, the staff were phenomenally kind, and I loved my new job, but I felt the leach of knowledgeable staff into new roles was a disservice to our beautiful library. I began looking at ways I could improve knowledge retention, but at the time I could not get any buy in at management level for a library qualification for the team leader role, as there were already well qualified staff in other areas of the team; this was just the way things were happening in Colleges. The broader sector was highlighting the problem, but library work was seen as easy by anyone not well versed in it. I personally guarantee you that an educative library is only simple on the top, in the bits you can see when you literally wander in and stare rather vacantly at the books. All the bits underneath that are making the whole thing work are really rather complicated. Qualifications leading to CILIP membership were expensive, and I had quite simply had enough of traveling around and paying out for learning. On a personal level, there had been so much to contend with in the last few years that I was also once more quite depressed, and felt incapable. This is an interesting fact that I have raised in previous blog posts, but when I am not learning, I contract an odd malaise, and become depressed. When I am learning, the course I am engaged on is at fault for every stress and pressure I feel, because it is an extra worry and surely I don't really want to do it. I have no idea if there is a name for this kind of love/hate relationship, but if there isn’t, there probably should be. At about this time, I was passed the details of a Masters course, the MA in Literature and Digital Cultures, that was run at our own University Centre. It was listed as a qualification for aspiring librarians, but also those interested in a career in the museum and curation sector, as well as being an English Masters, making it an update to my degree, and useful for more than just another employer benefit. It was also an arts degree, and I was producing my own art more and more often from home. Finally there was also a strong onus on technology, and our team as a whole was becoming more and more technologically based. I was eligible for a student loan, applied, and started.
Moving to postgraduate learning from a position of not learning at all was a little like moving a mountain. I felt the lack of, well, everything. A love of literature and a personal basis of wide reading is not the same as a formal education in literature. No formal library education. A huge gap in learning. Just too flipping old to learn it, what on earth am I doing, I have almost-teenagers to concentrate on! And so on. Right from the start, we were all encouraged to write about whatever we wanted. It was at this point that I had an odd juxtaposition of interests, and bear with me here, I have a point. Impacts on my health became more pronounced, I began losing feeling and control in my hands, and finally began receiving a series of health diagnoses. My partner was also diagnosed with PTSD, and at the time unable to work, took charge of the house, childcare, and our everyday lives, while I carried on with work, my usual daily tasks, and learning. My partner is a really good listener, and I had talked to him more than to anyone in my life before. Maybe it’s something to do with the PTSD, but disability is not always the negative that this society perceives it to be. What it can be is just another lens. One of his greatest interests is in gaming, particularly console FPS (First Person Shooters), and he is seriously good, in the top 2% or better worldwide in any game in the EA Battlefield franchise. Despite spending several years with no television as a child, I had access to a good stock of game books, and surprisingly, when I was about eighteen, I still developed an affinity for some of the old console games, most memorably Tomb Raider on PS2, ECCO the Dolphin (completed in two playthroughs, I later discovered I was one of the few it made sense to), Castlevania, and before that, hours upon hours spent trying to talk my dad through Mission Impossible on the Atari 7800, which was of course never going to happen; the joke of the game was that it was mission impossible. From that point, life intruded, and it is surprising how difficult it is for a wife and mother to legitimately do something as non-productive as sit playing video games, it honestly doesn’t go down well, so my interests had ended almost as soon as they had begun, and I am still a dreadful gamer that the rest of the family laugh at the second I touch a controller.
To distract me from all the tests and other things going on in my life, my partner, who really had listened, bought me a second hand Xbox One, and loaded it up with the new Tomb Raider game, which was heralded as a return to all that we loved about the original games. Being sick, I have discovered, is a weird mixture of being rather frightened, and bat-poop bored. Having limited options, I fired it up. I was dreadful, and wanted to toss it out the nearest window. All the same, Lara Croft was everything I remembered her pixelated little self to be, only now in lovely graphics, and the game was very nearly what Square Enix had promised. I started rummaging through the Xbox store instead of tossing it. My first submitted MA piece was a timeline loosely based around the development of Dear Esther, a game by the Chinese Room that was changing the way that games were seen, engaged with, and played. It had a new approach to narrative and music, the makers were going to become famous, I knew this without a doubt, and the game itself, to me, was nothing less than a work of art. By the time I wrote about it, I had played it through three times, and made my partner play it while I watched him. One of the things I was most interested in was the completely different effect it had on him, compared to that which it had on me.
I am guessing now as to the reasons for this, but I have talked to a lot of gamers since, and I think the difference is a combination of gender, personality, confidence in play, play style, and the sheer amount of time he has consecutively played video games as opposed to the length of time I have (consecutively) been playing. I had been absorbed by the beauty and narrative, instantly absorbing myself in exploration; the game achievements that I began to unlock were all about wandering off the beaten track, finding unusual story sections, and similar items. He, the more experienced gamer, instantly began experimenting with the environment and game parameters. In the first ten minutes, he had won an achievement for drowning his avatar three times, and one for throwing him into a fenced off bottomless pit, experiments he had randomly carried out just to check that these were not ways off the core game paths. Despite finding this incredibly irritating (envy-inducing?) on a personal level, I was fascinated. In some respects, it took me back to A-Level Psychology, in retrospect one of my most loved courses, and the old 1960s experiments conducted to gauge the reactions of people that we had learned about.
As my condition progressed, and my ability to read for sustained periods declined, I found myself turning more to the small, quiet games produced by the independent games market. My preference was for console, and specifically the Xbox One, but then my partner also built me a gaming PC from spare parts, and introduced me to some of the older FPS games with a strong narrative and more artistic graphics; the one that stayed with me the most was Bioshock, which I loved. For my birthday he then bought me a second hand PS4, so that I could access releases from the Santa Monica Studios, opened by Sony Playstation supposedly in support of the players wishes to finance the independent games market, and not for profit, and later so thoroughly let down by profit-related redundancies and closures that exposed the reality. Journey is one of the most played games I have on this console. I am still finding very few new solid examples of innovation through Sony-led mediums. As a result, my research progressed further into this area, until I was writing more and more exclusively about games narrative, and becoming gradually more familiar with some of the players in this field. My early MA assignments were skewed heavily towards art-house gaming, and while I did write about other subjects too, I began to get feedback that suggested my audience also preferred me to write about this subject. While my library work and the updating of my humanities based degree course was still in sight, I had entirely changed tack; I was researching and writing about a whole new subject matter, and it was video games.
