Can't wait for this dissertation and SUMMIT push to end so that I can finally get around to updating the projects section and share some SCIENCE. Stay tuned.

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.