Tag Archives: Social Group

Research Interest Group on Video Games/Virtual Worlds

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Last December, I initiated a Research Interest Group for Video Games and Virtual Worlds in my institution. We were finally able to meet this month. (Note to self: Spring may not be a good time for this kind of meetings, as we are all busy with reviewing conference proposals, reading thesis/dissertations, and attending conferences).

Our RIG currently comprised of the following members:

  1. Michale Young, from Brain & Cognitive Science (military training games)
  2. Shawn Cheng, from Computer Science (data mining)
  3. David Rakowski, from Finance & Business Administration (business and finance games)
  4. Regina Kaplan-Rakowski, Curriculum & Instruction (SecondLife), and
  5. myself (serious game assessment)
Research Interest Group Meeting

Research Interest Group Meeting

(There were a couple more who came for the first meeting, but have not shown up since; so I don’t know what to make of their status. Perhaps it is time commitment, and then may be it no longer interests them, who knows?)

As Shawn put it, it doesn’t really matter if others are no longer interested; what’s important is for those who are really interested in (the matter) to continue meeting, and make something worthwhile out of it.

In this economic climate, I’d say that’s a good attitude!

Twitter Streamgraphs

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WebMonkey has a short write-up about Twitter’s StreamGraph. This is a new text-mining product by Twitter (after it acquired Summize. It visually maps the latest 200 tweets containing a particular given word/phrase. One can also mine a user’s Twitter contribution using the “@user” search function call.

StreamGraph for "Serious Games"

StreamGraph for"Serious Ganes"

“The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph. You can click on another word series or time period to see different matches. In the match list you click on any word to create a different graph with tweets containing that word. You can also click on the user or comment icons and any URL to see the appropriate content in another window. If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods it will be useful to click in the area to the left of the y-axis in order to change the vertical scale.”