Serious Player

Posts Tagged ‘Simon Bachelier’

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.
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Here comes the first lines…

It seems to be more and more trivial nowadays to write a blog about games, after all it begins to be a pretty common topic to talk about, don’t you think ? No ? Well, personally I don’t. Actually, my purposes are not to open another blog about video games review. Instead of that i would like to study relationship between games, art and education, and also think about games in our “modern society” in a more general way…

Having been a player for the last 20 years doesn’t made me an expert in this field, or a “veteran” to quote Leigh Alexander, the actual director of Gamasutra, about one of her recent blog entry, but it provides me my own personal background and a purely practical knowledge. As an academic, I also want to use some methodological approaches to analyse and observe topics I’m interesting in. These topics would be about serious game, independant production (sometimes mainstream prod.), digital art, experimental game, game design and a lot of other issues around games studies.

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