Vacation & Looking Back

I'm going off on vacation for about two and half weeks. Most likely there will be no updates until I'm back. Unless I feel some strange urge. Anyway, now's a good time to recap what's been going on since I started.

A lot of progress has been done in the reading department. 8 trade books on usability or game design related topics, and I'm now going through Rules of Play (Salen & Zimmerman) I've also been digging through any articles I was able to find about combining games and HCI. There were some, but not that many. So definitely there is still work to be done in this area.

In this blog, I've been outlining things about playful usability, and bits and pieces about interactive spaces as well. The ideas are at this point still all over the place and I haven't landed on an actual topic for my doctoral thesis. But I have time, and I think I should explore a bit of everything just to get a feel of things. I do have a much stronger idea now than I did three months ago, so clearly there's been some progress.

Experimental interfaces are raising their heads. After vacation, I'll try to find some time to work with prototypes using various kinds of controllers. I'm not going to unveil which ones at this point, but I'll be sure to make some noise here once I get to work. At the moment though, these are mostly something I have to do on my own time, and on my own computer at home which is a bit lacking. Probably I'll need to get a new one sooner than later.

At my actual job we're going to finish our prototype in August, and during Autumn there will be user tests and paper writing. And of course, there's the XNA programming course looming ahead, which I'm really looking forward to. If that experiment goes well, we can try and introduce other game related courses. And I do like teaching as well, although I don't have that much experience, yet.

So that's it for the recap. More posts will follow after vacation.