GoodIT 2023 Special Track and other updates

I sure have not written a lot lately on here but I have been busy! I have successfully proposed a special track on “Games as Entertainment and Educational Instruments” at the ACM 3rd International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’23) which is going to be in Lisbon in September. The call for paper is out and I’m hoping to attract both academics and industry people to create more synergy between the two sides of educational technology and games.

In other news

I lied, I have been writing a lot, just not on here, and boy do I wish I could share this on here, but I’m working on a position paper for this project and, let me tell you, it’s not easy.

An academic literature review is never easy, if only because of the sheer amount of existing literature to sift through — and I have over 170 references between games and literature as of now, and the list is growing. The real problem is that, with every new references, the arguments and points one tries to make shift ever so slightly in a tense game of academic Jenga played against a cat. So, I’m trying a new writing technique: write. Just… write it all out, [citation needed] and all, and the references will come.

Two reasons why this works (for me): first, it’s hard to reason about things in your head and even harder is to organize them, create arguments, and make points while everything keeps bouncing around. Once you take things out of your head and place them in front of your eyes, they stay a lot more still and it’s easier to move them around. Second, if your arguments make sense, chances are someone else out there agrees with you and probably has written about it, so you can take their arguments to support yours, but until you have a clear picture of your own argument, there is no point in drowning in a sea of unrelated references. Caveat: none of this means that you should only pick the references that support your argument. In fact, try to think about counter arguments, make them too, make them make sense on the page, and then find references that support the counter arguments. If your arguments are strong enough, they’ll withstand the assault, and if not… back to Jenga, but at least this time your opponent won’t be a cat 🙂