I find the transcendental nature of game playing fascinating. The ease with which people can be transported out of their bodies, overriding time, meals, appointments, social interaction tells me that this must be a significant phenomenon. As someone half a step from OCD, I have to keep such things at arms length apart from the occasional 20 hour Civilisation session. The fact that books, music, art, films, so rarely grip us in this way is not necessarily a positive thing, but it is important.

In addition to the normal turbulence and buffeting my most recent blog ‘sabbatical’ has seen me increasingly thinking about knowledge exchange and the role play can have in this. A few things prompted this.

I have established a new relationship with a game design studio set up inside Huddersfield University. Run by Damian De Luca and Ruth Taylor, these guys have some interesting ideas about how games and visualisation can contribute to research and we are actively pursuing collaborations on a number of fronts.

The second prompt is the work of a colleague of mine in Imagination. Valerie Carr is an interior designer and researcher and is working on knowledge exchange through designing games with healthcare professionals. She has a completely different and very interesting perspective on knowledge exchange, drawing on Organisational Development (OD) as opposed to my post-structuralist ‘meta’ interaction design. Big thanks to her for giving me a guide into this (superficially dull), area, by giving me some good stuff.

The final area that was pretty new to me was Eva Brandt’s work on play in participatory design processes. Even though I met Eva in Hong Kong fairly recently, I was not aware of this aspect of her work.

I’m enjoying learning more about play from these and other dimensions. It’s time to ease off the intellectually draining running of events with companies for a little bit (as much as I can), and get back to some more abstract, enriching (fertilizing?) research.