Community

There are a couple of related communities that I'm interested in targeting, academics from game studies and HCI.

In terms of conferences my background in video games suggests DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association, which is the premier academic game studies event but it's only bi-annual with the next conference coming in 2009.

Given my new-found involvement in Human-Computer Interaction, HCI 2008 would have been a good option but it's now too late to submit a Full Paper. The subtitle for this year's event is "Culture, Creativity, Interaction" so I'd like to attend anyway as it sounds very interesting. They do accept Short Papers on the topic of "Users with unusual requirements", but these are only 4 pages long which is probably too small for my project.

Fun and Games 2008 is my target conference, and I intend to submit a 6 or 12 page Technical Paper to reach them by their deadline of April the 18th. Second Life is not a game per se, but could fit into their interest ins "Serious Games", " Games and Rehabilitation technologies" and "Multimodality interaction and games".

There are several journals which have expressed an interest in my work,

Convergence
which describes it's interests in the "creative, social, political and pedagogical issues raised by the advent of new media technologies", and lists relevant topics to include "Video games", "Internet studies", "Digital/new media art", "VR", "New media in cross-cultural/international contexts" , "New media products".
Relevant papers include Lee, Alistair, Morrow, Guy. "Disabling Web Designers: Issues Surrounding Disabled People's Use of Web Related Technology". Convergence 2005 11: 19-24.

New Media and Society also includes papers on video games and is interested in the cultural implications of technology, though they don't explicitly reference these things in the way Convergence does.

Games and Culture
"theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within interactive media". Their emphasis tends to be more focussed on games per se and the issues around ludology, narratology, violence, gender, aesthetics, critique and design.

Another Sage publication, The British Journal of Visual Impairment is clearly relevant, and they even include "technology" as one of their interests, though there is as yet no discussion of computer games or Second Life.

The ACM also have a couple of interesting journals,

Computers in Entertainment
Volume 5, 2007 featured a "Special Issue: Interactive Entertainment" and issue 4 October / December promises to have "Full-length interviews and papers on accessibility, technology, history, and branding of computer games", but this issue is still unavailable.

Interactions also appears to be somehow interesting from an HCI perspective. Their subtitle is "Experiences, people, technology". They even had an issue on "Funology" which considered computer games, though it was more from a design perspective and I couldn't find any work around visual impairment.

I feel that I have a very good appreciation for my community, especially thanks to the year of research I conducted on my MA in New Media prior to coming to Sussex. I'm very comfortable with the language of game studies, though am aware of plenty that I still need to read up on in the HCI field. Interestingly both disciplines seem to refer to similar issues but by way of different authors. For instance the Interact lab recently held a presentation by Rob Clowes on embodiment, which was a subject I dealt with during my MA thesis, "Embodied Evil: The Aesthetics of Embodiment in Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition". It was interesting to note that a lot of the audience who came from an HCI background referenced many similar authors that I'd never heard of before, and similarly that many authors I would consider to be fundamental were excluded from their discussions. For example while talking about cyborgs it seems to me that Donna Haraway's 1985 Cyborg Manifesto would be fundamental. However Haraway's work is largely associated with feminist theory and so would not necessarily be something HCI people were necessarily interested in.

To conclude I'm looking forward to consolidating my current knowledge with some new perspectives on familiar themes, and hope that by so doing I can bring something new to the mix that others might not have access to.