Jana Rambusch

About me in short

I’m a cognitive science Ph.D. candidate at the University of Skövde, Sweden (with a joint location at the University of Linköping, Sweden).

My work integrates the area of cognitive science with research on games and game play. Read more...

When I don't do research or teach, I enjoy playing guitar, riding my bike, swimming, and learning more about image manipulation, web page design and LaTeX.

I'm also an avid follower of popular culture, including video games, music, TV shows and movies.

Most recent publication

Rambusch, J. & Susi, T. (2008) The Challenge of Managing Affordances in Computer Game Play. Human IT 9(3), pp. 83–109. [BibInfo] [PDF]

This paper discusses affordance with respect to computer games and game play activity. The game environment, with its complex and seemingly multiple affordances, presents a challenge, for players as well as researchers, since it consists of two worlds: the virtual and the real one. For games to be played successfully, affordances of both worlds need to be integrated. However, since Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1986), numerous different opinions on what constitutes an affordance have appeared, most of them deviating from the original Gibsonian conceptualisation. This has lead to confusion and misunderstandings among researchers, and is now also spreading into computer games research. This paper aims to raise awareness of what the affordance concept can, and cannot, explain and of the fact that some of the possible actions perceived by a player in a game also are rooted in socio-cultural conventions and the player’s experience of having a body.

Keywords: action, computer games, sequential affordances, situated cognition

View complete list of publications.

People I know and things I like

Find out more by hovering your mouse over the linked images.
Drawings and paintings by Maggi Borg
Photography by Tarja Susi
A nifty BibTeX editor by Thomas Fischer