Nia Wearn's Research & Tech for Teaching

So, I have a Games Studies research that somehow keeps giving as a topic of study – Esther and I have been looking at Hidden Object Games, initially as a way of showing our students ‘how the research’ and then, as well, actual research.

As ever when you start submitting to interesting call for papers, slightly like buses, they all come along at once so I’ve been out at a couple of choice, boutique conferences (my favorite kind) talking about them.

First up – the excellent Gaming the Gothic conference at Sheffield University – organised by the inspiring Sheffield Gothic  study group – held with great care on Friday 13th of April

This talk looked at Gothic literature tropes that turn up in Gothic Romance / Crime Hidden Object Games – one of my favorite things, apart from getting a chance to showcase the stunning art work featured in these games , was talking about my first steps into production studies and the data I’d been gathering on where the companies that make these games were situated – I’ve been collecting this on a Google Map and it’s been a great visual aid. You can see the slides from this one here and there’s a lovely write up of the session here

Secondly I was up in lovely St. Andrews for a few days for another little conference looking at Literature and Gaming – and this time I was talking about slightly trashy crime based hidden object games, and noting their similarity to both crime based serial tv and to genre fiction – that talk is here

In both cases it was wonderful to talk to people after my talk who played these games, or new people that did, and wanted to thank me for shining a light on them. Who knows where else this little research side hustle will take us? You can follow the research here – https://hiddenobjectfiles.tumblr.com/ (on a tech note I can’t tell you how useful having a collaborative tumblr of thoughts and images has been putting together things for conferences)

Since Esther joined in September she and I have been playing around with researching Hidden Object Games – first as a method of showing students the process of research (to this end with have a multi faceted Tumblr Blog – https://hiddenobjectfiles.tumblr.com/) and then, the more we researched the more interesting research threads that came out of it.

DigraUK2017 (the UK Digra Chapter) had a 1 day conference at University of Salford’s Media City UK site (so shiny!!) and we presented our initial abstract – with a title taken from the research twitter bot I created (https://twitter.com/NewHOGTitles)

I was also successful in being voted in as secretary for DigraUK – which was nice