(Not that they are particularly ethically troublesome. Still, it's progress! All progress is good progress.)

I thought pretty carefully about the structure I wanted to use. It would have been quite easy to present the games, the theory I'm looking at, and then asked them to look at the survey and lead into a discussion. I didn't do that because I felt knowing what I was looking for would affect the way they read the questionnaire. Instead I presented a little bit on three games I'm going to be looking at, then I asked them to read the questions. When the discussion around that got to the point where I felt answering the questions needed it, I went back to my slides and introduced more specifically the differences in the games (and introduced the fourth - a variant on the online game we're writing), and how I expect those differences to influence the team cohesion amongst the players.

Picking the point to go back to the theory was a little tricky, but I think it was worth doing it that way. I got some very useful feedback, some around the use of specific words, but also about thinking about who will be potentially filling out the survey. It may be that a reasonably high percentage may not have English as a first language, so some of the subtleties of the statements I've put together may be lost. That's a point that I (in my privileged English-speaking way) hadn't considered! There were a couple of contentious statements, but actually only the ones that I was already not particularly happy with, so that's not so bad. 

The other thing I've taken from the experience is that I'm reasonably confident of my background theory. I feel I can talk about it coherently, and pull the reading I've done into a shape that makes sense of what I'm looking for and at. While the lab group is a reasonably safe environment to practice in, the flip side of that is that these are my closest colleagues. If I look foolish in front of them, I still have to see them regularly for the next two years. Plenty of people have said it's actually the audience they get most nervous about - not just my lab group (who are all perfectly nice, polite, interesting and interested people) but close colleagues in general. So coming away feeling more confident was a definite plus. 

I actually feel like that was quite an important step. Now, back to that questionnaire!

More recently I went to dConstruct, which is not an academic conference. It aims to be an inspirational one, with a theme to talk around rather than a specific technology to discuss and learn about. The speakers are professionals who also do a lot of presenting at conferences. I found it fascinating to see the differences in approach.

By and large, the slides were much better at dConstruct (granted at a design-oriented conference you'd hope for good slide design). There was less reliance on them, and less data displayed. In Don Norman's case, he didn't use slides at all and I don't think the presentation suffered for that. In Matthew Sheret's talk, the slides and more particularly how he moved between them (he'd hacked a toy sonic screwdriver) were a key part of the talk, but didn't distract from what he was saying. 

On the other hand, the academics had a much more rigid structure to their talks that in at least a few cases made them much clearer than those at dConstruct: 

1. Background of topic
2. Research questions coming from that background
3. Methodology used to explore research questions
4. Results and discussion.

Just like a paper, or a poster, or... well, most academic presentation I guess! 

So what have I learnt? From my time with American Express as well as what I've seen at conferences, I try to put as little as possible on my slides. They should not make sense without me there to talk around them. Putting tables of data on the slides doesn't work because a) it's almost impossible to make them legible and b) they distract people from what I'm saying. Use slides to show people things you can't say, so a picture (SINGLE picture, easy to see), not necessarily quotes. Have a structure so you know what your overall story is, although perhaps make it slightly less obvious in the talk than standing there and reading through it. 

Stylistically, dark backgrounds with light text is more robust if your room is too light. Talk at a reasonable pace, not everyone speaks English as a native and there's no need to pound people. Stay on topic - random 'surprise' slides are only really funny once. Test any tech on a machine other than the one you created the presentation on, just to make sure.

I think you have two goals as a conference presenter. You are trying to be interesting and informative (and I mean you, not your slides). If I can crack that, I'll be doing well!

I find that second approach fascinating. The gamer stereotype as portrayed in popular culture is of an adolescent, over-weight, socially inept boy who plays in a darkened room. Gamers may like to believe that that stereotype is changing, but the reaction I got from some of my friends when I mentioned I was playing World of Warcraft says otherwise.

I've been looking at social identity theory. The basis of the theory is that we have subtly different identities based on the groups that we perceive ourselves to be a member of, and whichever is most salient at the time determines the way we act. So if I in a lab meeting, I will react to situations as I believe a lab member ought to, whereas if I'm at a cricket match my behaviour will be slightly different. Chances are it will be an unconscious switch. The key thing is "as I believe the group member ought to". I am picturing the 'perfect' group member, and modelling my behaviour on the way they react. 

There have been various experiments in papers I've read to establish the effects of this in computer-mediated communication (e.g. Spears et al, 1990; Reicher et al, 1995) and a fair few in face-to-face stuff too (e.g. Brewer, 1991; Ellemers et al, 1999). They do seem to set the salience of the group identity or the individual's identity by seemingly innocuous statements in the experimental instructions. I would therefore suggest that by asking people whether or not they are gamers, you could easily be pushing them into using a gamer identity to for the rest of the study. 

For example, Rachel Kowert is studying whether or not gamers really are socially inept. She got people to fill out the entire social skills indicator, and compared the results for gamers vs non-gamers. She found that there were differences, but only in specific areas - including reading body language. She did mention one of the potential causes was that the gamers were conforming to stereotype. I'm not sure when she asked them if they were gamers, it would be interesting to see if that question was at the end of the survey, would you get different answers? Maybe if you asked them how many hours a week they spend playing digital games? It would be interesting to marry the response to 'are you a gamer' to even how many hours they play, let alone going back to the social skills indicator responses. 

Lina Eklund did a study talking to students about the way they played games with their families. She mentioned that she found the gamers she spoke to "very reflexive". They kept describing how their gaming helped them, and called it a hobby - a much more positive word for most non-gamers. Ellemers et al (1999) found that if the group was self-selected (as these gamers seem to have done) members will display strong group loyalty even if the group does not have a positive image to outsiders. I think this suggests that gamers are aware of the negative images associated with their passtime, and try to justify it with their comments. Theory suggests that non-gamers (being still in the majority) would not feel such a strong group membership if at all.

Another common finding was that it was difficult to track down enough female participants in studies. I had a thought that because the social identity of gamer is generally male, perhaps most women don't identify with that? I did ask a couple of women if they would consider themselves gamers - one I know plays casual games for around 5-7 hours a week, and one I know plays games like WoW, Rift, etc. Both said no. The casual player felt she didn't play the right kind of games, and interestingly the other said she didn't feel she played seriously enough to use the name for herself. Neither said "but gamers are boys"! It's a long way from being a representative sample, but raises some interesting points about what people believe a gamer really is.

I'm finding the social identity theory fascinating (if slightly hard-going in places), and I've enjoyed speculating on this stuff. I'm a little concerned I have a hammer and suddenly everything's a nail! I need to keep reading... 

[Brewer, M. B. (1991). The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17(5), 475-482. doi:10.1177/0146167291175001

Ellemers, N., Kortekaas, P., & Ouwerkerk, J. W. (1999). Self-categorisation, commitment to the group and group self-esteem as related but distinct aspects of social identity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29(2-3), 371-389. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-0992(199903/05)29:2/3<371::AID-EJSP932>3.0.CO;2-U

Reicher, S. D., Spears, R., & Postmes, T. (1995). A Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Phenomena. European Review of Social Psychology, 6(776502344), 161-198. doi:10.1080/14792779443000049

Spears, R., Lea, M. & Lee, S., 1990. De-individuation and group polarization in computer-mediated communication. British Journal of Social Psychology, 29(2), p.121-134.]

I had a brilliant time. It was a multi-disciplinary affair, with psychologists and sociologists much more prevelent than computer scientists (although honestly, I'm not quite sure where I sit. We're definitely the softer end of computer science, although the amount of time I spend coding puts me firmly in the technical camp. Perhaps a topic for a later post!). I heard a really wide range of talks on diverse topics including gaming addiction, the effects of rule changes on socialising, co-located playing, and (eventually) board games. I met some really interesting people from a range of places. I came across techniques from different disciplines that I hadn't come across before. 

As a result of 2.5 days of non-stop games research input, I feel like I've developed some clearer feel for where my research sits, a little bit more of what I'm actually interested in finding out, and perhaps some ideas for how to even get there. I didn't feel like a fish out of water, the reading I've done meant that I could hold my own in conversations and maybe even had some interesting ideas to add. I also got a real buzz out of it. I do love new ideas. Gets me all revved up to get back on with my work! 

I am slowly writing up my notes from most of the presentations I attended on our brain dump blog, but I do anticipate that there will be a couple of more generic posts pulling in bits and bobs over the next week here as I digest. 

More photos of Hohenheim and Plieningen can be found here - but it's just houses and greenery, no people. Seems I was too busy chatting to get my camera out when there were people around!

The course (led by the supremely over-achieving Martin Eve - I swear he has more hours in the day than normal people) introduced the idea of using an email-based todo list (producteev.com) to clear out your inbox. His reasoning is quite simple and straightforward, but was a connection that I have never made: any mail I leave in my inbox is actually a todo item. That's why I miss things when I move them to a different folder. The emails hang around forever, because I never get around to putting any kind of date on the todo item or defining what it is I have to actually do - they just sit there, making me feel vaguely guilty and think things like 'Oh, I must get around to...'.

I can honestly say this has been a totally revolutionary idea to me. I'm now aiming to spend half an hour first thing going through my mail (I don't get a lot of new mail now, fortunately, so this includes going through some of the backlog) and clearing things quickly as I need, or if they need longer than a minute or two sending them to my todo list and filing the email somewhere practical. Emails that don't have anything for me to do but I want to keep for sentimental reasons (e.g. from family) I file, so I know where to find them. (Actually, even with the family ones I've been adding a reminder to reply. Is that bad?)

It's working a treat! I'm down from 350 to 16 emails in my personal account, and 500+ down to 209 in my uni account. This is a triumph! I've even got round to doing things like reading papers that people have sent me (or at least filing them in the right place so I can find them later), deleting reminders that are well past their deadlines, and filing project-related stuff appropriately! I'm not sure how long this will last - I haven't quite got into the habit of adding in non-email related tasks yet, and my estimates of time scales are currently pretty rubbish - but it's a great start.

Strange how a small shift in conceptual viewpoint can make such a big difference! 

I'm not sure if these things work the same way everywhere or even in every subject, but in Informatics at Sussex the annual review includes a student report along with a series of questionnaires for you, your supervisor and your thesis committee. The thesis committee consists of three academics, which can cause some problems for organising a date when all three are free. The questionnaires don't take too long (although I guess they could if you had enough to complain about!), but that student report was a bit of a pain. Along with the 'what have you done this year' bit, I also had to do a detailed plan of what I was intending to do next year, and a slightly less detailed plan for the year after that. And then there was the small matter of the 10,000 word research proposal and literature review. 

*gulp*

I know that eventually there will be a lot more than 10,000 words in my thesis. I do, really. But somehow even though I honestly did start thinking about this 10,000 words quite a long time ago they didn't really start coming together until after the whole dream abstract thing. Of course, by then I'd written 3000 words or so, most of which ended up scrapped. And there was quite a lot of panicked reading to try and fill in some gaps. But I managed to get quite a lot written and sent off to my committee even if the actual research proposal was a little like bullet points and I hadn't quite got my research aims done and possibly my 2-year plan was a bit hazy. 

Of course, what I'd forgotten was that most people haven't spent the first 6 months of their PhD coding up the framework for a game. And because that wasn't directly relevant to my research, I'd barely mentioned that in my paperwork. Fortunately two out of three of my committee members did know that. 

The meeting went ok, although apparently the third member was a bit confused about why I hadn't got my paperwork finished properly. The reading I'd done was enough, I could answer a lot of the questions put to me (although new areas were mentioned). They thought my question/research area was interesting and had a lot of potential. But there were one or two things I've learned that I wanted to note down: 

1. I got really quite stressed in the end about this. I need to not do that. I think part of the problem was not really knowing if what I was producing was right (as in what I was supposed to be producing, not as in factually correct) or enough, so next time I need to get a little more of my supervisor's time (further out) and make sure I have something she can read well in advance. I checked my style with her, next time I need to check the content too. 
2. When there's two things listed on the requirements (research proposal AND literature review) I must not get totally fixated on one (the literature review). Yeah, yeah, easy to say. 
3. I need to put together a document template INCLUDING PAGENUMBERS! And use it for all of my documents. I thought I had, but I forgot the page numbers. 
4. When asked what I've done over the last year (which is actually only 9 months anyway), I mustn't ignore 6 months of work. I should have worked it into that report and make damned sure it was clear I hadn't just been twiddling my thumbs.

I think it's been really useful for focussing my mind on the PhD/research side of the project. I really do feel like I have a better grasp on what I'm attempting. Hopefully from here on I can do a better job of balancing the programming and the research thanks to that. 

And they let me stay for the second year! Woohoo! 

She suggested that I had a few different angles going on, and that maybe I needed to focus some more. She then suggested a way of getting that focus: write my dream thesis abstract. Basically, I had to imagine myself at the end of my DPhil, and write down what I did (in general terms), what results I got (assuming it all went well) and what that meant. 

So, I sat down and tried to remember where I'd started from on my reading odyssey. 

(This is how I think best. Pen, paper, arrows, circles. It works for me.)

From there, I came up with a short little abstract. I emailed it off. I waited. I was told to put more detail in. I thought a bit harder. I wrote a longer abstract:

Today I had another meeting with my supervisor. Apparently that one was fine. So from there she wanted to work backwards to a research question. We batted it around for a while, asking what kind of question would actually be interesting. After a bit (not that long actually, it was an hour meeting in total), we came up with a question that actually, I rather like. The wording may change, but at a basic level I am asking: 

It feels good for me, more informatics than sociology, and less nebulous and woolly than some of my other ideas. I can imagine a shape for the next two years coming from that, and while I don't expect my dream thesis abstract to come true it has definitely been a very useful exercise. 

Also: what a relief! Not having a specific question has actually been bothering me quite a bit. I know that's not etched in stone, but now I don't feel quite so much that I'm making up the question as I write the answer. Bring it on!

Erm. Yes. Yes, they do. A poster is a graphical representation of your work to date. Just like in primary school. 

Unlike primary school, there should be a reasonably clear structure to them. In fact, the information presented should be rather like an exceptionally brief paper, with snappy title, background, methodology, results and conclusions. The order of the names on the poster (and apparently putting only one name on the poster is very bad form - your supervisor's name should go on there at the very least) is critical. The acknowledgements section is important. And don't forget the (brief) references section (ideally less than 10). 

The results section is the most important - that's the bit you can't put any spin on, what you will actually be judged on. Even if the results are preliminary, which many are. The methodology should give an idea of what you are doing, but not spell out every step clearly to prevent intellectual theft (as posters are unpublished and therefore not protected). The conclusions should remind of the problem and the results, and show why the results are interesting, along with indicating the relevance to other published work and what your future work may be. 

Quite like primary school, a bit of polish goes a long way. Of course, what that means has probably changed since I was 10. It's no longer a lovely double-border with a decorative pattern made from joined up letters. Now it ideally means you create a large pdf file and pay someone to colour print it for you. Printing multiple A4 pages and glueing them onto some backing paper is apparently not a good option, and looks like you haven't really prepared. 

There was a link given to studentposters.co.uk for poster templates which may come in handy - apparently starting from a template is an easy way to make sure you get the right size when it's printed out. Also, different conferences have different maximum sizes and may have different requirements for anonymity, so it is really, really important to read the guidelines for the conference. And finally, work out what you want the result of the poster to be before you write it: if you want a job, focus on how your work is relevant for industry. If you want collaborators, structure the information to show where people could help. 

So, all in all a potentially-useful course. A good overview on posters, and what to expect. The venue left a little to be desired, but that building (Fulton - it's brand new, but I don't like it) has some technical issues. I'll leave those for another rant!

A while ago I came across the work of Ian Bogost on persuasive games. Bogost suggests that games are in a unique position to explore processes because by their very nature they are procedural. They can therefore be used to investigate the procedures that surround a particular situation, either by parodying this situation (for example, there are games written that try to expose the burger industry by forcing you to bribe officials into deforesting in order to produce more grazing for cattle etc.) or by making explicit some of the hidden items (e.g. a game written for Howard Dean's campaign for Iowa which exposed the mechanism of political campaigning - unfortunately while not really supporting Howard Dean's message!). 

My feeling was that there were some good examples in the book - the two I use above I think show where games can make things apparent that would be difficult to demonstrate in other ways. However, I felt that in places some of the examples that Bogost uses were very stretched. I had some doubts that the players would notice the things he was talking about in the game, let alone question the underlying social issues they were supposed to illustrate. 

Reading Lawrence Lessig's Code v2.0 started with a reminder that in the online world, code is law. Everything that you can and can't do online is defined by code, and all of that code was written by someone, somewhere. Someone made a conscious (or unconscious) decision to make it that way, and that code can be changed. However, Lessig points out numerous predictions and statements that suggest the online world is immutable and the way it is is a natural thing. People don't question the underlying structure, or wonder how it could be changed to do things that it currently isn't possible to do.

This lack of question of the structure for me exposes a problem with Bogost's argument. In order to use a game to make a system transparent and open for questioning, people have to be aware that the structure of the game is manufactured. They have to ask why the game was built in that way in order to then go on to think about the structure it represents. In fact, in some ways it could serve to reinforce the system represented. Players may just go 'oh, that's how it works', rather than really thinking about it.

Adam Greenfield in Everyware raises that point exactly in Thesis 23 (pg 84-87) when he discusses the JAPELAS system for teaching the Japanese language. He points out that the Japanese language has a system of hierarchy built into it, and worries about designing technology that reinforces this without question. Granted he is talking about a ubiquitous system, and suggests that PC-based learning systems may have less of that effect given how tied they are to the PC. But these systems do still have an authority, and we need to be wary of that. 

I still think that Bogost is right and that games do present us with a unique opportunity to explore processes. However, I think the other reading I'm doing suggests that a game on its own still requires reflection in order to really internalise the message (as with all learning). How to induce that reflection? The most obvious answer is to let a teacher point out the areas for discussion with the group. In fact, all of the board games we have looked at have a component of debrief after the event.

I guess I'm concluding that we have to be extremely careful with our game. We need to be very conscious of any figures we use about how different tactics (e.g. if we implement inter-cropping options or even certain types of fertiliser) are valid, so as not to suggest certain tactics 'always work'. And we also need to keep the teachers who will make the system most useful in mind when we are designing.