-gave up on WF’s Expressive Processing. I was tired of it.
-working through some of Donald A. Norman’s Emotional Design. It is mostly about design principles, but also contains a lot about affect and emotions (although, for Norman, affect is the part of the brain that assigns value to certain items or situations); there are a couple of chapters at the end of Norman’s text about designing emoting robots, which might be interesting.
-requested one of Antonio Damasio’s books and also The Affect Theory Reader, as I need to bring myself back up to speed on affect theory in order to work on the paper for Waterloo/Oxford.
-Norman’s book also contains a chapter on video games as literature, which should be interesting.
-found a book called Affect and Emotion in Human Computer-Interactions: from theory to applications, by Christian Peter; requested it (electronic version available through school website—each chapter downloadable; three chosen to have a look at).
-importance of affect paper: games and/or virtual spaces as teaching devices—how is affect transmitted in order to best promote teaching/learning?
-why haven’t educational games become popular or important? Surely the reason cannot just be because they are generally lame? Maybe educational games are just one medium too many (many other media could also be excluded for being one too many).
-got: Handbook of Affective Sciences, which is enormous and intimidating; Emotions: a cultural studies reader, which might be good.
-also got: Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, which will not all be useful but in parts.