Hi Leonardo readers! My name is Jordan Hochenbaum and I’m a professor at California Institute of the Arts, where I teach in the Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence, and Design (MTIID) and Digital Media programs. During my Ph.D. I investigated the affordances of applying multimodal analysis to a musician’s daily instrumental practice. This approach demonstrated the ability to use technology to help a musician track their performance and training, while opening up doors that could provide pedagogical insights for more effective practice.

Ethnography is the field that turned my interest towards games in academia. As a lifelong veteran of MMORPGs, the concept of being a participant-researcher in this space was something I could really appreciate. One of the tenets of ethnography, as stated by Paul Dourish in Ways of Knowing in HCI, is that “ethnography directs our attention towards the importance of participation not just as a natural and unavoidable consequence of going somewhere, but as the fundamental point.”

Recently, I have been introducing myself to the variety of fields that are often included in the interdisciplinary area and related subjects of game studies. Of all these assembled disciplines, psychology has shown itself to be rather pervasive and useful, joining ethnography and human-computer interaction in a trio of methods with which I intend to study player behavior and social capital as I move into my PhD work.