It's Playing, Just With Research

Tag: Sense-making

  • The Whats versus Hows of Film Spectatorship

    [What follows is a 2007 paper I wrote for a graduate level course on film studies.  It was this paper that started me thinking about what I’ve come to term minutia reception studies.  I’ve edited the paper for length, and I’ve included a picture of the reception worksheets my brother filled out as part of…

  • , ,

    Making Sense of Entertainment in Virtual Worlds

    In September of 2008, with the ink on my doctorate barely dry, I jumped a plane and landed in Denmark.  I had accepted a post-doctorate research fellowship at Roskilde University with the Virtual Worlds Research Project.  My main research project with the group would turn out to be a qualitative experiment to understand how people…

  • ,

    The Metaphors of Virtual Worlds

    How do people make sense of a novel situation, such as engaging with a media product they’ve never used before?  If that media product is a virtual world, then it appears people may make a bridge between the virtual and the physical by using metaphors to compare their experiences in the virtual world to those…

  • ,

    Two Men and a Second Life

    As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I spent two years working on a post-doc research fellowship for the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University in Denmark.  During my time there, I conducted an experiment on how people make sense of two types of virtual worlds and compared these sense-makings to those while engaging…

  • Hybrid virtual worlds

    When I started with the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University in Denmark back in the fall of 2008, the project had just begun producing its public blog on all things relating to virtual worlds.  Being somewhat new to what virtual worlds are, and could be, I started familiarizing myself with the varieties that…

  • ,

    Superheroes Around the World

    Last fall, I was invited to talk at a science fiction convention in Copenhagen, Denmark, called Fantasticon.  My friend helped to organize the convention, and he knew I had spoken at other conventions in the United States.  When he asked what I wanted to talk about, I decided to go with a topic I had…