Serious Player

Archive for the ‘serious game’ Category

Per Backlund holds a PhD from Stockholm University in Computer Science and is currently a senior lecturer at University of Skövde, Sweden. He is currently managing the InGaMe Lab (Interactive Game Media Laboratory) research group which is focusing on the fields of computer games and other interactable media. He has worked on different serious game projects within different application areas such as training, education and rehabilitation (health field). He is also the coordinator of the study programme of a recent Master degree in Serious Game at University of Skövde. He has kindly accepted to answer to my questions about it during an interview.

Simon Bachelier: First of all, thank you very much for accepting to answer to this interview.  The summary above is short and I’m sure there is plenty of things I forgot to tell about you, so what about a second informal introduction by yourself? What kind of interest lead you to study games for “serious purposes”?

Per Backlund: After I finished my PhD in 2004 I was in a position to choose what to do. I had good contacts with some of my colleagues who had just started to organize research about computer games. As our university had run study programmes in computer game development for a couple of years it was a good situation to do a real commitment to research within that area. At that time I had not done any research having anything to do with computer games. I had an interest as a consumer and parent so my thought was: are these possible to combine? My background is in information systems and to my mind a serious game (or any game for that matter) can be seen as an advanced information system. Hence it’s actually the case that moving to serious games has been a way for me to both broaden and deepen my filed of research.
Read the rest of this entry »