Pathways, Desire Lines

Emma Winston ([email protected] | emmawinston.me)

"Pathways, Desire Lines" is an early prototype, and represents an attempt to condense some of the core findings and literature of my doctoral thesis into a minimalist and accessible multimedia form. I am in the final phases of researching the ukulele's "third wave" of popularity in the United Kingdom beginning at the turn of the new millennium. Many of my participants are, understandably, interested in my research -- as Barbara Kathleen Dennis (2014) puts it, "participants' praxis needs (are) not met when the loop of information or knowledge (is) not closed" -- but at times I find myself feeling overwhelmed at the task of trying to translate the ideas and narratives I am wrestling with into an accessible form. Translating everyday life into academic language is one thing; translating it back again is another.

The game (really more of a series of spaces to explore; there are no high scores, and no competitive element, much like the musical pathways it describes) is, by its very nature, a reductive and incomplete meditation on my thesis findings, but I nonetheless hope it captures both some of my central ideas, and the sense of play and finding-out that has been present for me as a researcher throughout the project.

This project does not reproduce any of my data as it will appear in the final thesis, both for reasons of participants' privacy, and to sidestep issues of data publication. In this piece I lean heavily on Annette Markham's method of "fabrication", which involves "creative, bricolage-style transfiguration of original data into composite accounts or representational interactions". Real experiences and findings have been combined, conflated, fictionalised and representatively adapted. This is also rather helpful in transforming the content of a 100,000 word document into a sub-5-minute game!

Pathways, Desire Lines is built using the Bitsy game engine, a web application by Adam LeDoux designed for minimalist storytelling and exploration. Bitsy's constraints are, at times, extreme (by default, for instance, it allows only three colours per game -- I have hacked it here to introduce a fourth!), but its simplicity and limitations are often conducive to idea generation, and also mean that it does not require an understanding of coding or programming logic. In this respect, it seemed a fitting medium to convey some of the feel of a musical world in which accessibility is a primary affordance, and skill is often entirely decoupled from worth and meaning.

If you experience any difficulties running the game on your device, try this mirrored version.