So I am happy to announce and revel in the completion of my Master's thesis defense, where my 144-page tome was 'accepted as submitted', which is as good as it gets. I had a very lively and dare I say fun Q&A session with my committee which included Dr. Leslie Shade, Dr. Marty Allor, and Dr. Kim Sawchuk.Already moving on... my next beautiful, virgin research area will be the intriguing question of flow in video games. From what I have seen, most people are referring to the work of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Wikipedia, Csikszentmihalyi uses flow to describe "the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment". So flow would describe the engagement experienced in sports, playing an instrument, and the play of video games.
This leads to preliminary research in psychological research on affect, cognition, motivation, and flow. A tad dull, but I know it will be worth it for when I can move into computer and science and technology studies to get in deeper into this topic.
Jenova Chen's MFA research popped up, and I must say that game is very pretty but not altogether addictive. Her thesis looks fairly interesting though, as I think flow is an intriguing way to get at game design. I'll keep you posted!
Nice to be back...
