Two Weeks Till Friday (?) welcome to ambivalence.

01022010

So I guess the date today was 01022010 which explain why I felt like I was doing everything in reverse. Some days you just need to stay in bed.

On a cool note however, it looks like I'm published! Well, kind of. I'm a co-author on a paper that was submitted for review to a conference scheduled in Atlanta. It’s the CHI 2010 Workshop on Brain, Body and Bytes: Psychophysiological User Interaction. That's a mouthful.

Its funny how this came about. I'm not sure if you remember but I blogged, probably back in the summer, about taking some initiative around usability testing for our sports games. Basically, I wanted to know if we, through design, could manipulate players arousal states and in doing so, develop games that would turn kids into hyperactive zombies. Errr. Scratch that last part.

To be honest, there are tonnes of research books out there on the subject. Using science to develop games is not necessarily new. Well, it is new but not by me. They have been developing new and exciting ways to do it though. Besides the fact that I find this subject completely awesome, I noticed through my research that none of the known practises have been applied to the sports genre. First person shooter? Oh sure. But not sporting games. Which I find incredibly odd as we know what kind of arousal states we get into when we watch our home team crush the Toronto Maple Leafs.

So I threw together some requirements and mock-ups (thank you Paul Hibbitts) for a tool that could be made in-house by a couple of guys (who have since been laid off... and now being developed in India). In these economic times, I've had to do some creative accounting to get the project done but that's neither here nor there... I won't go into the specifics of the tool that captures this data but take it from me, it's pretty darn cool.

So it was mentioned by my manager that we should think about getting a co-op student to come in and assist me with the project. Fine I thought. Our University liaison put out some feelers and SFU came back a little more than interested in what we were doing. Then next thing I know, I've got a PhD student working for me developing a research paper on the subject, a grant from the government and new hardware to play with like eye tracking hardware and biometric sensors that hooks up to record heart rates and the like. Not to mention a certain amount of recognition in the studio (not necessarily good recognition... but recognition).

So no pressure...

So my PhD SFU student has somehow persuaded me into submitting our 'plan' into the GDC which is the game developer’s conference here in Vancouver. Well, a small one is here in Vancouver, the large one is down in San Francisco. If we get accepted (we submitted a proposal in January) we'll be presenting in May.

While this was going on, around the New Year, my friends from Vancouver Island were visiting. He's a biologist at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and she's a scientist there, both very academic people. I happen to mention what I was doing at work with my SFU person and they convinced me that as her sponsor and the person who was actually organizing the research, I should be getting my name on any paper or research document that is written. Wow, it had never occurred to me to ask for this. They insisted that any student submitting paper(s) would expect this to happen. So, sure enough, after getting back from the Christmas Break, I spoke to her about it and she was totally fine with it. My name isn't at the top but that's ok. I only want to review what she writes and add my comments/edits to it.

So fast forward to today. The first of many papers that my SFU student is hoping to get recognized for was accepted by the workshop down in Atlanta. If all goes well, she'll be flying down to give the presentation. I mentioned this to my manager and he just gave me that look that says "don't even think about asking for travel money...".

While I'm not too sure about how I feel getting noticed for work that hasn't proven itself yet (and may be a complete bust), it does feel kind of cool going down a path, like co-authoring research papers and presenting at conferences, that had never even occurred to me before.

But life is funny like that. One minute you're testing video games, the next minute you're trying to measure arousal peaks in 13 year old boys.

Wait a minute...