Our lab bought a new Flip Mino video recorder today. I was sufficiently impressed with the sleek style of the packaging and the look of the recorder itself. Also, it’s fairly simple to operate, you just hit the red button . This recorder is much more like my portable audio recorder then an actual DV cam, which we have been using for a study in my lab. There are no settings for you to deal with, besides zoom, while you are taking videos. The videos are also saved in separate files which can be played back on the LCD screen on the back of the Flip.

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A presentation format is a presentation format. Whether I give a talk for 15 minutes or 6:40 minutes matters very little because I still have to make a condensed version of my work. I, personally, always try to use images before text, usually with great results. Beyond the use of images and a quickened pace that Pecha Kucha offers, I think the real problem is that there are good presenters and bad presenters. I’m not saying I’m in the former group but more often than not the latter group will fail no matter the format. Pecha Kucha or not.

With that said, I see two main problems with Pecha Kucha, in contrast with the obvious benefits of more speakers, concise talks and audience engagement. First, the talks are not in-depth. 6:40 minutes is not a lot of time and thus it is hard to go in-depth into any topic. Having an engaging presentation could lead to more audience questions or conversations after the talk but when do those occur? Does each presenter get time for questions after they present or are there ten talks in a row where the first few get lost in the fray. If the Pecha Kucha method is used there would have to be a way to address these issues, especially if the talk was so broad and high-level that people just do not know the right questions to ask.

Which leads me to the second problem, the talk cannot be referred to after the fact. I know I struggle with my poster design more-so than my 20-minute presentations because a poster is often experienced by the viewer at their leisure. Posters often have something that gets the viewer’s attention but then provides information or ‘talking’ points that can help the viewer understand the poster’s project without someone there talking over it, like a presentation would need. Therefore posters can be hung after a venue is over and still be useful. This can also be said for presentations that have actual text or substance on them as well, for instance placing them on slideshare.net. Pecha Kucha presentations would have to be digitally recorded in some format, otherwise I feel they would just not achieve the same resonance as the other formats can achieve after the presentation is over.

Though I think the format is useful. I was reading an old post over at Presentation Zen about the format where an example was given, students in a classroom can give a Pecha Kucha talk but then have to field in-depth questions for 20 or 30 minutes. This would help them create tight, brief talks but still have to talk intelligently about their topic afterwards. I also think that this kind of format would be beneficial for graduate students to give every year at the end or beginning of the school year, just to give everyone a clear picture of where everyone else is at.

In the end I really think that presenters need to be critiqued on their overall performance, not given a new format to screw up. Too often do we see a bad presentation at a conference and then just brush it off, with no further help to the one presenting. I know some conferences have feedback forms but an internal critiquing panel would be useful at conferences as well. Again format is format, a 20 minute talk can have the same feel as a Pecha Kucha talk if presented by the right person. The actual presentation skills of the presenter is where we should be focusing our attention.

I recently attended the Meaningful Play conference where I was giving a talk about recommendation systems and games. In addition to mine, there were a number of sessions at Meaningful Play that covered games and social networks: The Intersection of Social Networks and Games, Social Play, and Emerging Flash Game Industry. A lot more people have been talking about finding the intersection between these two areas beyond just the ones that are trying to build social gaming platforms, like Raph Koster and MetaPlace.

I see this combination as containing a number of interesting areas: online games, social networks, recommendation systems, game/web analytics and game adaption. And here are some initial questions that I personally am thinking about as it relates to my work in this area.

1. How to build social networks in games?
2. What game mechanics work in social networks?
3. How gamers and web users “game” the system?
4. Where web and game analytics are headed?
5. What types of recommendation systems would be useful for games?
6. What problems with privacy or trust (or other topics) will evolve when game adaption or recommendation systems become ubiquitous in games and social networks?

Check out this awesome quote from a recent article where Obama speaks about what he was thinking when he was out campaigning and answering questions:

“ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.” “

I could just see Obama swearing at Brian Williams

Well I think a month is enough to break my vow of silence.

What an historic day. And I was able to be in Toronto, Canada today talking about conflict at the Future Play Conference. I was presenting my work on using conflict theory to build conflict systems in digital games. I can think of no better day to have talked about the concepts of human conflict.

In the last month I have presented work both at Meaningful Play and Future Play so I will be adding my papers and slides from those conferences shortly. And actually I was lucky enough to have two papers, from Meaningful Play, be accepted as journal papers. One of which I was the single author on. So October was a good month