Calling all game players, from Angry Birds to WoW

Whether you only play something like Angry Birds on your phone every now and again, or you regularly pull all-nighters playing Call of Duty, do please help with Jo's PhD by completing the survey linked below.

What do people get out of playing games?

Hello

I'm a final year PhD student in IET looking at involvement and learning in digital games. In the last few years, games appear to have exploded in to the mainstream. So in addition to the more traditional first person shooters and adventure games, we now have families playing together on the Wii, not to mention people playing Farmville on Facebook and Angry Birds on their mobile phones. My research aims to further our understanding of how and what we learn from our involvement with games by considering exactly what it is we seem get out of our game-playing experiences.

If you’d like to help me out with my study, please click the following link to fill in my questionnaire: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/involvement_games. 

It’s about different kinds of game-play activities– so whether you only play something like Angry Birds on your phone every now and again, or you regularly pull all-nighters playing Call of Duty, do please fill it in. I’m interested in getting as wide a range of responses as possible, so feel free to pass this on to anyone you know (over the age of 18 and in the UK) who might play games. It should take about 20 minutes to complete. Your participation would be much appreciated.

Many thanks

Jo Iacovides

PhD student

Institute of Educational Technology

The Open University

Invitation to OU staff to attend a discussion on Gaming Research on 21 Oct

On Thursday, 21st October, Jo Iacovides (IET) and Marian Petre (Computing) are hosting an informal discussion on gaming research, with the aim of getting people from the OU who are interested in the area to meet up. Whether it’s using games for learning, considering game design, using gaming as a medium for understanding strategy or interaction, or anything else game-related, it would be great to hear from you.

The meeting will be in Room 1, Jennie Lee Building, at 14:00. During the session, everyone will be asked to introduce themselves and their interests in brief, before the floor is opened to more general discussion. Are there any topics you’d like to cover, or questions you’d like to pose? Feel free to help shape the discussion.

If you’d like to join us please, send email I.Iacovides[at]open.ac.uk to confirm, along with a couple of sentences which describe your specific interests.

If you’re interested but can’t come on the day, please send us a couple of lines of description anyway, because we would also like to compile an informal ‘directory’ to help people plan future discussions.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch.