This year’s PAX will be my last PAX as a full-time Ubisoft employee.  At the end of this month my fancy Online Marketing Manager and Community Manager titles will be handed over to another, and on September 8th I will move multiple vehicles worth of stuff down to Southern California in preparation for the start of the next stage of my life:  graduate school.

I’ve always seen graduate school on my horizon, but when I graduated from college I wasn’t quite ready to go back.  I felt I needed some “real world experience”, so I got a job in an industry that peddles electronic fantasy escapism in all shapes and genres (irony).  I’ve had an unfair and unorthodox amount of fun during my three years with the marketing department at Ubisoft in San Francisco.  I got to work on fun games, work with crazy people who have always made the office an interesting place (I’ve developed a sixth sense about nerf missiles), and of course I got to help start the Frag Dolls, a project that has provided legendary shenanigans and life-long friends.

Ever since high school, online gaming communities have been an integral part of my life.  All the games I got hopelessly addicted to were games with rich social structures that would suck me in and not let go.  I spent enough time online in-game that I convinced Ubisoft to hire me out of college to be a community manager.  After several more years of intensive involvement with online communities, this time as a community manager and professional gamer, I had amassed a large store of knowledge on the subject.

The great realization about my destiny came when I went to a conference at UCLA about gender and games and I was one of the few industry representatives there.  Two days of workshop later I concluded that I knew as much (if not more) about online social dynamics as/than any of the academics there and that I might actually be able contribute something worthwhile if I only had their research tools…

This fall I will begin the process of earning my PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and I plan to focus on online culture in games.  I’m extremely excited about getting into Irvine’s anthropology program because one of their professors studies cybersociality, specifically within Second Life.  My biggest challenge was finding a program that would understand and accept my interests as legitimate for anthropological study, so I got extremely lucky to find such a perfect fit.

I will of course continue doing Frag Doll stuff; you all will hardly notice the change.  A great majority of the stuff we girls do is either done remotely from home or at events we’re flown to anyway, so being in SoCal will hardly matter.  The major differences will probably be what hours I’m online, my nerdier jargon, and me whining about having too much reading. 

Oh, and feel free to practice calling me “Dr. Rhou”, you know… just to get used to it.  I promise I won’t mind.  :D