Another cyberstalking case in Texas, this one has a twist.
“On Monday, a Texas grand jury charged a Maryland man with “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon” after authorities say he tweeted an animated flashing GIF designed to trigger Newsweek journalist Kurt Eichenwald’s epilepsy last year, “immediately” causing him to have a seizure.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection wants to start collecting ‘information associated with your online presence’ from travelers from countries eligible for a visa waiver, including much of Europe and a handful of other countries. Earlier this summer, the agency proposed including a field on certain customs forms for ‘provider/platform’ and ‘social media identifier,’ making headlines in the international press. If approved by the Office of Management and Budget, the change could take effect as soon as December.
Privacy groups in recent weeks have pushed back against the idea, saying it could chill online expression and gives DHS and CBP overbroad authority to determine what kind of online activity constitutes a ‘risk to the United States’ or ‘nefarious activity.'”
As a cyber anthropologist who, at times, uses social media for research – I find this highly disturbing. Twitter is turning into /b where nothing anyone says can really be taken seriously these days. This is ill-conceived and lacks critical understanding of the platform and the culture surrounding it.
Opinion article on Wired concerning the expansion of government surveillance.
“That’s why it’s so concerning that the Justice Department is planning a vast expansion of government hacking. Under a new set of rules, the FBI would have the authority to secretly use malware to hack into thousands or hundreds of thousands of computers that belong to innocent third parties and even crime victims. The unintended consequences could be staggering.”
Fascinating look inside Def Con.
“When I received my press credentials for the convention, they came with a warning that all WiFi networks at the convention and in nearby hotels should be considered “extremely hostile,” which was to be expected at a hacker convention.”
An interesting article on how scientists are so easily dismissed.
“Becoming a professional scientist takes, on average, four years of undergraduate studies (note: science majors are usually rated among the most difficult/time consuming), 6–10 years of intense graduate training (most grad students work/study 60+ hours a week and rarely take holidays), and several years of doing a post-doc. Further, after all of that training, you spend your life actually doing science, which means that you are constantly gaining experience and new knowledge. The idea that reading a bunch of blogs and non-academic books will put you on par with that type of training and experience is the epitome of arrogance and hubris. It is just about the most pretentious thing that I can think of. Of course scientists know more about science than the average person on the street, just as plumbers know more about plumbing than the average person, and mechanics know more about cars than the average person. We intuitively expect that anyone who goes through that type of training will be extremely knowledgeable.”
The following are a list of key findings from my research on parental assessment of video game content appropriateness for their children. You can read the first round of published results here.
Specific answers to research questions will be published in a separate post.
It was mentioned to me that I should update this blog to reflect the fact that I have finally finished my PhD! It only took me 6 years or so, but to be fair I also got married, had twins, and moved to Hawaii in the middle of all of that. So overall, not too shabby of a timeline given those variables.
If you’re looking to get a PhD or in the process of attaining one and you’d like to chat or commiserate, feel free to hit me up on Twitter or in the comments here.
If you’re interested in video games and research in that domain, I’ll be posting results of my study for my dissertation in the days to come!
Here are a few stats from my research on parents and video games copied directly from my dissertation. This post will be the first of several where I talk about my ethnography and the results of my study.
Research Participants
There were 46 total participants in 30 interviews representing 26 households. As defined in Chapter One, a household represents parents who participated alone as well as those who participated together (in the same interview or separately). This singular unit was created to avoid inflation of the numbers where two parents were talking about their shared children and home environments, as that would skew the numbers against those where only one parent participated. Of the participants, 11 were children and 35 were parents. The 35 parents represented 39 qualifying children in total including the 11 who contributed. Of the 35 participating parents, 18 were mothers and 17 were fathers. The parents spanned in ages from 25 to 55. The youngest child participant was 4 and the oldest was 16.
This study afforded opportunities for additional analyses, given the rich qualitative data collected throughout the interviews. Each section below provides this additional information as a way to give context to the research participants and better understand their relationship with video games.
Video Games
Over 200 games were mentioned throughout the course of the interviews, not including the various versions of multiple game franchises. The top three most mentioned games were Minecraft (85% of households), followed by Grand Theft Auto (65%), and then World of Warcraft (42%). Almost two-thirds (64%) of the 39 children played M-rated games and over three-quarters (77%) played T-rated games. None of the children in the study were old enough to purchase M-rated games and only 31% of the 39 children were old enough to purchase T-rated games.
Video Game Devices
Participants played console, computer, and mobile/tablet games equally (88%). Handheld games (58%), followed by web-based (38%), and then educational (35%) rounded out the list. Over three quarters of all 26 households (77%) used some sort of cloud gaming services such as Steam, Origin, Xbox Live, or PlayStation Network. All households downloaded games digitally, whereas only about three-quarters (77%) still bought physical game media.
Video Game Spaces
The majority of game spaces (58%) were publicly shared spaces with the family. Very few (8% of all households) had completely private spaces where stationary devices such as computer towers or consoles were located in children’s rooms. The remaining households (35%) had mixed game spaces due to the use of portable electronics such as laptops, handhelds, and mobile/tablet devices. The majority of households (69%) had some sort of time restrictions placed on video game play; however, less than half of them (39%) considered them to be strict rules.
Parental Assessment
An overwhelming majority of the 26 households (92%) performed some sort of assessment on video games before their children were allowed to play them. Almost all of the 26 households (92%) discussed video game content with their children, and most (85%) stated they knew their children to self-regulate and/or they trusted their children to only play the games of which they knew their parents approved.
Parental Involvement
Almost three-quarters of the 26 households (73%) watched their children play video games and many (69%) played video games with their children. Over half (54%) of the 26 households allowed their children access to the Internet to either play online video games such as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG i.e., World of Warcraft) which can only be played online, or to play standard multiplayer video games with others online.
You can read about the key findings here. Answers to my specific research questions will be in a different post.
These are some notes I put together for my team last year. They are based off of a few books I was reading at the time and when I can remember those, I’ll post them for reference. We never made use of these due to reasons other than want and need, but others made find them useful.
These are just notes. Feel free to fill in any gaps as needed or ask questions if you have any.
Goal:
An experience strategy is a guide for verticals / projects to be referred back to and updated as the vertical and/or project matures. It is a way to maintain focus on the end goal, providing the user with an experience, and is to be shared with and used by everyone on the team. For our purposes, they would likely live in confluences and our bullets would be numbered so we can refer to a specific portion of it when needed. Personas and journey maps as well as other UX artifacts (research before release / usability tests after the fact) would be parts of the experience strategy.
Reasoning:
A strong plan will guide decisions about how the business executes, maintains, and manages experiences to create value for the customers and the business. These should be invested in and managed as well as cultivated and nurtured. A strong experience strategy not only makes it clear what to do, but also what NOT to do.
Start with:
An expression of the experience you hope customers will have. A statement.
Build up:
Bulleted list of experience requirements (not ui / developer requirements, not tasks / goals – it’s all about the EXPERIENCE)
focus on:
user behavior, motivations, context, meaning
usefulness / desirableness
how does it help the user accomplish what they want to get done
how is it (or can be) different / innovative
Big questions:
What do people want to accomplish?
How does this activity fit into their lives?
How can we help deliver on those desires?
Craft:
Hypothesis based on
personas – which are project based, but stem from our basic set
research – which is project based, but builds on all other research – must be actionable and durable
previous testing – which can come from anywhere, but should help craft project based
experience
best practices
analytics
Test:
Against user stories
Against designs
Against prototypes
With Users / Analytics
Iterate and Evolve:
Take all previous information, build on it, then start over if needed.
Strategy should bring clarity and should act as a sign post to show the company where ewe are going and what we need to do to get there.
Consider making it visual when possible.
Leveling Information – so we all start out with the same definitions.
Behaviors:
activities in which people engage
Motivations:
drive and shape behaviors
– understanding the basic drives that lead people to do certain things in certain contexts
Contexts:
help provide meaning to the motivations
learn by doing
Meaning:
worthwhile? important? necessary? required? needed? changes based on context and motivation
Consider:
A user’s experience emerges from:
Motivations
Expectations
Perceptions
Abilities
Flow
Culture
Perception is preceded by sensation and followed by cognition if bottom up, if bottom down – then knowledge influences everything (Gestalt).
Ability – consider memory, it includes sensory (get attention), working and encoding (requires heavy attention), long-term and retention (storage). Recall falls off dramatically after 1 day – this is an issue for users who do not / would not / don’t need to / shouldn’t have to – interact with us or a particular tool / experience on a daily basis. Always something to consider. Reduce memory load / ability requirement whenever possible.
Flow – form follows function. Affordance means there is no need to learn. Avoid multi-usability (modes).
Form hypothesis – test hypothesis whenever possible early and then test again with analytics later. (See my pyramid)
Users / Personas in terms of behaviors, motivations, context and meaning:
Who? – are they
What? – do they need, want, use, are they trying to accomplish and is there a better way to do it
Why? – do they need it, want it, use it, like it, dislike it
Where? – do they need it, want it, use it, expect to find it / access it
How? – do they need it, want it, use it, does it fit into their workflow
Complexity:
Theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Acknowledge and embrace the complexity
Look for differentiators here – avoid parity, novelty, and trying to “be the best” at everything – just boil it down to the essentials, and then go a step further into the murky and complex chaos of the user until you come out on the other side with something that resonates with the users behaviors and motivations while considering the context and meaning