Cruise Ship Conference

I've never been on a cruise before. Who would have thought that my first opportunity to sail would be for an academic conference on videogames? Come on, admit it. You're jealous.

via Wikimedia

The conference is Foundations of Digital Games, and the photo above shows where we'll be living for about 5 days in April.  This past fall, my supervisor and I worked really hard to get a paper we'd been sitting on into good enough shape to submit, and wrote up a whole new paper on my thesis work.  I was nervous about whether either would get in, but lo and behold, both did!

The paper on my thesis work, A Framework for Coherent Emergent Stories, got in with generally positive reviews, despite the very embarrassing fact that two important diagrams ended up as black boxes.  The one more negative review was actually extremely helpful - we will definitely be improving our write-up with those comments in mind.

The other paper was about non-linear stories in traditional media and games.  It was hard to know how this one would fare since the topic is more closely related to games studies, making me a bit of an outsider.  It was accepted in the work-in-progress track, which I am definitely satisfied with.  Lots of really useful comments in those reviews, too, so while this isn't the more important of the two papers, we should be able to improve it.

I have to admit that these successes are really great news after a recent string of rejections.  My publication luck is finally beginning to pick up!