This thesis was defended in March 2021, and passed without revisions. The publication is only half the picture. As part of this research-creation work, I completed three hybrid games which I also showcased at various public exhibitions and conferences. These works are: Flip the Script, TRACES, and UNLOCK. UNPACK.
This doctoral project engages with multiple ways of knowing and creating knowledge, and my research questions reflect that. As a creator engaged in academic work, I make use of many ways of knowing. When I make, I create knowledge for myself and others through the making that I do, through my reflections on that making and through the traces of it left behind. I also learn from the academic and practice-based work of others, which informs my own practice. I use the process of writing (such as my journal entries and this dissertation) to share what I have learned as well as to work out tacit, as-of-yet unverbalized ideas.
With that in mind, my research questions follow. My first question is: What are the affordances that physical-digital hybrid game experiences offer as a form for creating opportunities for critical, reflective play about nuanced subjects and what possibility spaces does this form open up for designers?
Or, put another way, what does this form of experience, including the design approaches and the objects that create the experience, allow designers to do when it comes to creating critical, reflective play experiences? What does it do well that other forms may not? On a personal level, this question becomes, for me, what is it about the kinds of ideas and experiences that I want to get across that draws me continually back to this form?
My second question is: What methods can creators of physical-digital hybrid games use to create robust traces and records of their in-situ praxis and creative output for future examination, and what impact might such records of praxis have on their work, their ability to reflect on their craft, and their growth as designers?
In other words, given that I am working in this particular form, how do I share both my finished work and also preserve the in-the-moment work that I have done in order to learn from it, and what can I learn from it?
Some parts of the answers to both of these questions are non-verbal, living in the process, in the resulting projects, and in my experience of both of those. My task for the written portion of my dissertation has been to draw out as much of that knowledge as possible, attempting to make visible the invisible, and communicate the tacit knowledge of experience.
Dr. Jess Rowan Marcotte, Section 1.2 Research Questions, Hybrid Knowing: Preserving Physically and Digitally Entangled Traces in Hybrid Game Design
