In plain English

The Sussex Library has a special area called the Research Hive for graduates and researchers. In theory it's supposed to be a collaborative space, but in practice it tends to be a very quiet area! They also put on different events and workshops for students. Currently they are 'inviting' (some might say challenging!) doctoral researchers to write about their research in plain English - or at least plain enough for someone outside their discipline to understand. And there's a slim chance of £15 of Amazon vouchers! Naturally I had to give it a go.

We all know that game play can be massively altered by the rules of the game. For example, deliberately kicking the ball off the pitch in rugby (where returning the ball to the field of play gives either team a chance of winning the ball back) is a much more acceptable practice than in football (where the team who last touched the ball is disadvantaged). Do the rules also change the way we feel about our fellow players?  

 

I am part of a project team that is trying to create an online multiplayer game based on two board games. These board games have very different rules around the way that players relate to each other. I am hoping to use aspects of social identity theory to analyse these rule differences and predict the effects on the game players. Social identity theory examines the effects different group situations have on the individual's commitment to that group. For example, if people cannot change their group membership they identify more strongly with that group even if the group is not doing well. In one of our games, players are able to change teams whilst in the other they can't. This suggests that players should bond together more strongly in the game where they can't.

 

I am aiming to test the two board games and also make two versions of the online game, which will hopefully allow me to compare the effects of these rule differences in both face-to-face and online situations. Ultimately this will allow us to choose the most appropriate set of rules for our game, as well as showing that we can use findings from other disciplines to shape social interactions in a game.

What do you think? Plain enough? English enough?! Too many commas is my normal problem! Actually, it took me longer than I thought it would to come up with that. Kind of sounds a bit too simple now. 

There are things afoot here, studies in the offing and things like the annual review on the horizon. Plenty to keep my little brain whirring, and hopefully more to post about very soon.

Presenting style

There's a kind of meta game to going to conferences, and that's looking at presentation styles and slide design. Looking back over my notes from multi.player, I have left myself all sorts of comments about the speed of the presentation, the slide design, the slide contents etc. 

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!

Profolio Course

I think one of the biggest surprises to me about this PhD lark has been just how differently the academic world seems to work compared to the commercial one. I picked up reasonably quickly that reputation plays a huge part in the academic world, but how do you go about getting a good academic reputation when you're just a lowly PhD student? 

So I went on a course. Sussex Uni run a whole load of courses for students. This one was the Profolio: for New Doctoral Researchers course. It was divided into two parts: one part keeping a personal record of the things you do and what skills you can demonstrate over the course of your PhD, and the other part about getting an online presence to demonstrate what you've done and what you are about to other researchers.

I'll be honest, I hate a lot of the personal record stuff. They have one of those lovely 'skills audit tools', full of such wonderful phrases as 'Engagement, influence and impact'. Instant loathing on my part. That's very unfair of me and it is good (I grudgingly admit) to keep track of these sorts of things on the way through. It makes updating the CV so much easier when the time comes! 

I found the outwards facing bit to be much more interesting. They had talks from a couple of other PhD candidates, one focussing much more on the getting out and meeting people through societies etc, the other on online presence and using tools such as blogging, twitter etc. to get your voice out there. We also got to grips with our profile pages on the University of Sussex directory. That's one of those tasks where I've been meaning to do it, but I really wasn't sure what to put in the various sections. I think I probably got more from looking at other people's but it was good to have done it before the session so I could get a second opinion on what I'd written. (My profile page - http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/196717)

I think one of the main things I'll be taking from the course is something I kind of already knew. I need to focus this part of my blogging down onto my research (my personal blog tends to veer all over the place!) and I need to blog more often. I think that will be a good habit to get into, to get used to writing something regularly.

The other thing I need to stop doing is actually being quite dismissive when someone asks me about my research. I think it's mostly because I'm not totally clear on my research question myself yet, but I must stop doing it! I think I possibly need to come up with a short and pithy way to explain the duality of the game production and the PhD research. I'll work on that.