I am only 4 weeks into my master’s thesis and project, and I am already knee deep in technical things. I spent most of my working days in the last iteration to figure out how to make proper application bundles and installers for OSX and Windows. It was a lot of trial and error, but I should be able to tick off this task in one or two working days.

On the theoretical side, I was catching up with my reading. I finished to go over the book “Game Analytics” (Seif El-Nasr, M., Drachen, A., & Canossa, A. (Eds.). (2013). Game Analytics. London: Springer London. doi:10.1007/978-1-4471-4769-5) that is the most recent and probably most complete book on the general topic of game analytics I could find. Not all articles are relevant for my work, but there are a few very good ones in there.

The second book I went over is “Space Time Play” (von Borries, F., Walz, S. P., & Böttger, M. (Eds.). (2007). Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. Birkhauser Boston. Retrieved from http://www.spacetimeplay.org). It is split in three parts that roughly correspond to game design, architecture and urban games. The game design part is quite interesting to read, but in my case serves more as an inspiration.

I am still trying to find the general direction for my thesis. Finding the right questions to ask is hard, especially if one is rather new to the field. Over the next days I am flying to Copenhagen to participate in the exile game jam (http://exile.dk/). I hope to find a few questions there.

In the next iteration I will focus to get some technical issues out of the way, and work on having a real test application/game ready. I will keep you updated.

*) The image on top was not drawn, but instead happened to come out of a bug and random testing data. It’s a ‘happy little accident’. I take that as a good sign.