I'm in the second year of my Master's program in which I'm fortunate enough to get to study games with some really smart people (both professors and students). I had been stressing because I had spent all this time in the program and still had no idea what to write my thesis about. Obviously it was going to deal with games, but nothing was really jumping out at me. So I sat with a pad of paper and brainstormed all the topics I had been thinking about.  It included things like humor in games, the abstract avatar, the circle/sphere in gaming, and how to make engaging games about serious topics. None of those really excited me, though.

I thought back on a paper I wrote last semester on The Darkness and was reminded that my culminating seminar paper during my undergrad work dealt with the city in film noir. So I pitched the idea of doing research related to the city in the video game to my advisor and she encouraged me to roll with it. I'll kick things off with books on architecture and urban spaces while compiling a list of games I think are representative of the myriad of city-based titles. I hope to find out the following things: how cities are represented in games, how these representations reflect our culture, the influences of popular media on design, and the narrative and gameplay affordances of the city space. I'm starting off broadly so that I may find a more interesting question to turn into my thesis.

It's going to be a damn lot of work, but I'm up for the challenge. I may be drawing on the wisdom of crowds to help with my research so stay tuned!