I have returned to ITU for a day to attend "the first european symposium on computer games & emotions", organised by Olli Leino, a Finnish ph.d.student at ITU doing at ph.d. on emotion in games. Speakers include Marc Hassenzahl who has done some interesting work trying to describe (emotional) interactive experiences in general, Jakob de Lemos from a new Danish company producing emotional entertainment technology and Martin Pichlmair who is speaking on design instruments for games.

The talks so far have been interesting, but somewhat hampered by the fact that apparently all speakers feel a need to explain what emotions are, starting from the bottom-up, before they go into their own research. I think this is a typical problem and/or occurrence at "first" conferences. But also interesting to see that people from different academic define and describe emotions very differently.

Puzzling (but not surprising?) fact is also that only 20% of the audience are women (roughly 10 women and 50 men), I would have expected more at an event like this.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:11