What is a Field Note anyway?

Well, dear reader, I’m glad you asked!

According to our friend Wikipedia, a field note “refers to qualitative notes recorded by scientists or researchers in the course of field research, during or after their observation of a specific phenomenon they are studying. The notes are meant to be read as evidence that gives meaning and aids in the understanding of the phenomenon.”

A course at the University of Washington goes on to say that there are four types of field notes: jottings, the diary, the log, and proper field notes. Let me break each of those down a bit.

Jottings, or scratch notes, are stream-of-thought ‘ramblings’ that you won’t be seeing on the site. These are the base gameplay notes that will help me write the actual field notes.

The diary note, on the other hand, is something you may see aspects of here. These are notes which are more personal in nature. Recording this kind of data can inform the larger project by highlighting the lens through which more analytical analysis is being filtered. It’s also just good writing if used well—ask any fan of nonfiction.

The log is the technical data that I will be keeping with each field note: how long I played for, how far I got in the game, what system I played on, etc (see the introductory field note for more info). This is just technical data that will be interesting to track as I go through this project.

Finally, the proper field note is simply how all of the above come together to form a wholistic product. In scientific research, this is super complicated—but for this project, it’s not that complex. These are the individual articles I will be writing here which will utilize all of the information above to create an interesting and varied analysis of each Zelda game.

A final quote about field notes that I found enlightening relates to how they are used. From a social science program at USC: “Field notes are intended to be read by the researcher as evidence to produce meaning and an understanding of the culture, social situation, or phenomenon being studied.”

Now, I can’t claim that this will be a scientific process—I’m too much of a poet and a novelist to guarantee that—but I do think that this is great framing for what each of these posts are intended to be. I want to really take a close look at the whole Zelda series and pull out some observations and analyses which other fans might find informative and entertaining.

Intrigued? Then go ahead and subscribe to receive updates on when a new Field Note is posted, and let me know in the comments which game you are most looking forward to. Thanks for reading!