About Me
I am a New Zealander. As a Kiwi my grandfather was a sheep farmer and I was an extra in Lord of the Rings. (As a Wildman I helped burn down the Rohan Village near the beginning of the Two Towers.)
I started programming games at the age of 10 on a ZX spectrum, and did my first commercial programming at 16 (an invoicing system for a local hardware store). At the University of Otago I studied Computer Science Psychology, and Philosophy, with a bunch of math thrown in for good measure. I continued on in Computer Science and eventually became a full Lecturer and finally passed my PhD.
In 2007 I moved to Norway to work commercially as a game developer in a small startup company. The timing was not the greatest and I became a casualty of the credit crunch, being made redundant from three different companies in under 12 months.
I am back in academia now working at Gjøvik University College in Norway. I have started a Game Technology Lab which will allow us to focus on research related to game development. I have and ongoing project on Augmented Reality gaming for stadiums called Ball Bouncer. The area of AR gaming and the overlap with serious gaming has become my research focus in the last few years.