April 7, 2005
chi 2005 and blogs
Hello all, I’m at CHI 2005 and have enjoyed catching up with Georgia Tech, RPI, UWashington, and Oregon colleagues–including GTXTers Michael M and Andrew S!! I’ve found the serious games panel and the social interaction panels to be engaging and relevant. I presented a new paper in the “Social Behaviors” session written with Howe and Nissenbaum on the topic of ‘values in design’– specifically, designing a socially-oriented game while at the same time incorporating and verifying particular values within the game design.
For GTXTers and bloggers out there, Scott Carter’s paper, “The role of the author in topical blogs” would be worth investigating. Citing the factoid that blogs tracked at Technorati are doubling in size every five months, Carter focuses on topical blogs and asks, “how do bloggers value a post?” He looked at 8 law and technology topical bloggers over one year in his research study, collecting data via interviews, diary study (2 week context diary that clued the researcher into why they might have blogged), text analysis via blogcrawler, interviews re: attitudes, phone, IM, etc. In the study, the majority of bloggers believed their role to be the reporter or the columnist, with the “reporter” role having more status for the blogger, acting as a motivational incentive to blog. Each entry in the study had appx. 5 links per posting.
read it!!
April 7th, 2005 at 11:38 pm
Thanks for the notes Mary. I had talked with Elaine Raybourn about the serious games presence at CHI, but unfortunately (as you know) I couldn’t make it this year. Can you tell us more about what took place and how it turned out?
April 8th, 2005 at 8:24 pm
ian I wrote a long reply last night to have it eaten by a firefox crash, boo!!
Elaine R and the group assembled at the special session didn’t show demos per se which I would have found useful but rather discussed where games might fit into culture. Some folks in the audience weren’t all that up on games so the entire conversation at next year’s CHI may move much further than this years.
While it is not a games conference and there were few games projects, the rigor of the chi research overall may be a huge benefit to the game studies community, and the peer review process of five reviewers per paper (we received pages and pages of comments on our paper which was enormously helpful) this may ‘ratchet up’ the research rigor of games research.