I am interested in joining the DiGRA board for the simple reason that I think DiGRA has an important role to play in supporting the development of the still relatively nascent field of games research.

A central challenge for DiGRA in coming years is to prevent disintegration of the games field: Games research has expanded dramatically in the past five-ten years. As more and more researchers from a continually widening span of fields have started working with games in one way or another, games has been taken up as a subject in many HCI, media, psychology and humanities-oriented conferences and journals. This is all positive, but it creates a situation where it is important that DiGRA exists as an organization to bind the many aspects of games research together, to provide a common forum for expression. DiGRA should form this central locus of the field, but also provide and facilitate broad access to the various applications of games research, fostering international collaboration and supporting students and other wanting to break into the field.

The DiGRA conference is an umbrella conference covering a variety of research fields and traditions, in a similar way to ICA and CHI for communication and human-computer interaction. Developing the DiGRA conference to a yearly format with supporting more specialized conferences is essential, and the conference should aim at attracting papers not only dedicated to games but those from tangential fields as well. Experience has shown that this has a tendency to happen anyway, but the process should be supported - it is usually when fields of research cross that the really interesting results appear.

I would like to work for the development of DiGRA into an international organization along the lines of IEEE. DiGRA will need funding in order to grow and to expand its ability to support and service the members, and that means developing funding applications. I have substantial experience in this regard and will apply this experience to assist with the building of ressources for games researchers and international collaboration.

On a final note, for those interested, my research is generally focused on user experience, design, user-oriented testing, user-driven innovation and similar empirical research involving games, including work with interactive storytelling systems. I collaborate heavily with a range of game development companies and with colleagues internationally on these topics.