Now that I'm nearing the completion of my Ph.D., the job hunt has begun. Finding a job doing usability work in the game industry is tricky. Few leads. I think the way to go may be to simply do standard HF work and try to begin consulting in order to expand the chances of working in the field I want to work in. Bootstraps!

Revisions to the proposal have been approved. Happy days! Data collection has already begun -- I'm about a third of the way through the first study. Waiting on the developers to add in the second-by-second data recording feature to the game for the second study.

Interested in what the studies are about? You don't say! In the first study, I'm testing a scale of play. Participants engage in one of three tasks. The first is a hyper-boring task that I'm particularly proud of (participants have to find every occurrence of a particular letter in a nightmarish block of letters). The second is Jenova Chen's game flOw. The third is Tetris. Ideally, this scale of play will differentiate between the boring tasks and the game tasks. It'll also have a pattern of correlations with some other known scales that suggest it's measuring play behavior. Turns out, there's no scale of play behavior that exists! We need one. This study makes one.

The second study just investigates flow in games, focusing on the relationships between flow, play, in-game performance, emotional experience, and a few individual differences variables.

The momentum is carrying through. The job hunt has begun.

Today was the dissertation proposal. It wasn't quite what I expected, but it was very useful. I came away with tentative approval. Basically, revise the second study a bit, pare down the elements of the model that are examined, and then we're good to go.

I was very pleasantly surprised at how well the idea of play as a central element of the dissertation was received. I figured I'd have to defend using something as atypical as the experience of play, but the first study was barely discussed. Only one minor revision to it, the addition of an outcome measure of enjoyment.

I revised the model to account for the dynamic nature of flow, and am working on the experimental plan tomorrow. With any luck, final approval by the end of the week.

Dissertation proposal is in five days. June 29th. For those of you not keeping up with the minutia of my life, the proposal presentation is the climax of grad school. After that, it's all denouement. You get through the proposal, and you've basically got a contract for your dissertation. As long as you do what you and the committee agreed upon, you win.

Naturally, I'm hells-of-excited. Not too anxious, really. The dissertation is on topics I've studied heavily: flow, serious games, play, learning, motivation. I feel like I could talk about these things in my sleep. Today, I practiced the presentation on an exercise bike.

In five days, I'll be done with it. Then I can focus my efforts on landing a job. User Experience work in the game industry, por favor.

My dissertation proposal is written, but the actual presentation portion still needs to be done. And it's going to be done soon. June 29th. That's two weeks away. Apparently, this is the hardest thing in grad school -- once you're done with this, it's smooth sailing.

It's exciting to think I'll be done soon. More exciting to see all the possibilities that lie ahead.