MA Pitch

"MA Pitch (Draft)" by Elliot Bear Yu is an experimental scholarly project born from a rejection: after a proposed virtual gallery or game critiquing how traditional academic writing and presentations flatten 3D objects was deemed unsuitable for a Master's exam in October 2023, the author set out to make the case through the medium itself. The core thesis is that non-traditional, creative scholarship in 3D form exposes what conventional formats lose, and that the administrative, personal, and political labor surrounding such work is itself part of the research.

The project is an editable Blender file, a 3D recreation of the author's graduate-housing bedroom study space at the University of California, Irvine. Its main object is a complex assembly of desks, books, textures, and vertices, supported by side-panel objects, stored texture images, and hidden draft models. Viewers are invited to manipulate, break, and explore the file, with the stated aim of revealing material that a static screenshot would discard.

A distinctive feature is the written component, which has been reshaped from a conventional artist statement into a non-chronological "Patch Notes" log. These entries address the difficulties of record-keeping and citation when scholarship takes an object-based form produced in software not designed for text, and they record dated reflections such as the decision to add a playground in the empty space around the model to keep the work on theme. The project was presented as a paper at DiGRA 2024, positioning it within game studies discourse on play, modeling, and the limits of conventional scholarly documentation.