Colloquia Archive
Productive Play: Three Threads of Research in Entertainment Computing
March 30, 2007
Host: Darrell Bailey
AbstractAs the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) move away from a focus on productivity and efficiency to the domestic, the subjective, and the pleasurable, digital media and interaction design are converging. One area where this convergence is particularly visible is in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), which are more than "mere" games and rather represent some of the most immersive and socially sophisticated possibilities for learning, simulation, and digital design in use today. MMOGs blur distinctions between work and play, user and publisher, artist and consumer. In this talk, I outline several research threads that explore the domain of entertainment computing, including virtual collaboration and cultural production within game-related environments, visual analysis of virtual community residents' profile pictures, relationships between affordances and meaning in 3D environments, and ethnographic observations of a sophisticated fetish subculture.
BiographyShaowen Bardzell, Ph.D. is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University, where she co-directs the Entertainment Computing Research Group. Her research centers on interdisciplinary applications of approaches from human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and cultural theory to interactive entertainment, with a particular interest in the role of affect (especially desire) in distributed cultural production.
