TLDR:
I computed the literature review cycle and have begun to code and exclude papers based on their abstracts. My Data Vis course team finished a visualization for game genre trends (check it out!), and my HCI group finished up an MTurk survey and created a poster based on our academic results from our literature review, interviews, and the survey. Three final projects down, two exams, a lit review draft, a scholarship to apply for, and one last final project to go: and that’s just the next 7 days!
For the Interested Reader:
Accomplishments
Lit Review
I have learned a lot about Zotero, scientific paper databases, and literature reviews these past two weeks. I understand now why there aren’t very many literature reviews. I pulled al the papers that I want (just over 100), and now I need to code (i.e. categorize) them and exclude several because in order to pull relevant papers from certain databases I had to be more lenient with my search terms (e.g. I removed a “forced” term to include more papers) and as a bi-product I now also have more papers that are not relevant to my research question. Rogelio gave me great feedback last week and suggested I aim for a first-pass read through draft by end of the semester which I feel is doable.
To give you an idea, even with the limiting search parameters I have ended up with just over 100 papers. Let’s say it’s 100 for now. If each paper is on average 10 pages long and I exclude 15% of the papers, that is 850 pages of technical writing I need to read to write the paper.
IEEE TOG Journal is having a special issue on serious games for health and I am wondering if they would be interested in a literature review… so at this point, I might pivot my research question to answer the special issue topic. It will be a tight deadline to hit.
Exploring Game Genre Trends
This last week my team for Data Visualization finished our project on exploring game genre trends. It was very interesting being able to go through and examine all the data with our completed visualization. I worked on the infobox, interactive (and animated) wordle, did nearly all the styling, and some supportive code structure. As a team, we designed all the visualizations and interactions together. I rather like how it turned out. You can check it out on Keith’s webpage (To launch the visualization scroll to the bottom of the page).
Psychotherapy Games
For HCI class I had the good fortune of having a team that was happy to pursue my interest in psychotherapy games. After reading over 20 articles related to the area we decided to explore, academically (not in a research capacity) the attitudes people have about games and how that may, or may not, influence their attitudes towards psychotherapy games. We conducted interviews and an MTurk questionnaire. As it wasn’t officially research I can’t share the results of our investigation (as human research has ethical standards to project participants, we would have needed to get approval of our IRB in order to share our results), but it did get me more excited about the idea of using games in psychotherapy and there is certainly plenty of room for interesting research in this area.
What’s next
Got to do these things:
- Submit my application for Google’s Women Techmakers scholarship (Due this Friday 12/6)
- Write up a first pass draft for my lit review (This includes completing the coding of the papers I pulled based on their abstracts) OR pivot and write a literature review for the IEEE TOG special issue
- Survive the end of the semester: two exams and one more final project to go!
- Finish registering for Spring 2020
- Read the many papers that have been sent to me to read from my advisor, Julian Togelius, and my peers.
Roadblocks
Still unsure what to fill up my spring semester with. Lots to do, not a lot of time and I am sick again — lost my voice. Should be a fun week.
Nancy Games 