First strike!

We are now working with the first working report and with couple conference articles. The first working report will basically cover concrete examples of explicit games and implicit play in social media environments. For the report, we’re also planning to write about preliminary design implications which will be taken into focus on the second phase which starts in June.

We are also working on our first conference articles from SoPlay. We’re planning to release three articles which cover following issues:

• Mapping social play in games
• Three layer model for analyzing play in different contexts
• Grief play

In other news, we were hosting three short two-hour workshops in the Tiedesuunnistus 2009 event. 54 teenagers (age 13 – 18 years) participated into our workshops and filled a questionnaire form which was used to map their habits with social media, games and play. During the workshop the participants were introduced into game research in general and into SoPlay project. The main event for the participants was to ideate and present new playful applications for their favorite social media platform. Overall the workshops went well and we got valuable data through the questionnaires, which will be analyzed later in the project.