Career-change?

I am seriously considering a change of career. Particularly the dress-code is interesting, not to mention the fact that curses, nasty laughs, wickedness and mysterious behaviour is part of it. Also, I would get to have lots of cats at work, and run and hide if somebody got particularly unpleasant. Candles will probably be a work expense, and it ought to come with its own cauldron.

From heaven to frustration

Just before Easter this year, I bought a new machine, a big, powerful gaming lap-top from Asus, on Hilde's recommendation. I loved it, despite the bulk (which makes it more schleppable than portable); the speed, the power the graphics - yes, I felt empowered.

So, what happened?

The motherboard is most likely dead. I have to mail the big thing in for repairs. And to do so, I have had to fill in their forms, and read the language on their sites. Now, the very polite and helpful clerk at the helpdesk had an accent which, for dialect-sensitive Norwegians marked him as originating from outside of Norway. He spoke perfect Norwegian though, no problem with understanding there. I don't think the following issues originate with him.

Once I started reading on the Asus help site, the problems started. First, the site did not like the signs I used. I eradicated all the Norwegian letters, æ, ø, å, which so often create problems. My mail was still not accepted. Then I removed all the "", and if that wasn't enough, the () was going next. This time it went through, though. And then I got to see the high point of the experience:

Registreringen er vellykket!

Vennligst merk at ønsket dato for opphentingen kan variere.
Den endelige opphentings datoen vil bli bekreftet på en email som sendes tilbake til deg i løpet av de neste 2 timene. (gelder kun Mandag-Fredag 07:00-16:00.
Vennligst forsikre om emailboksen ikke er full, eller din spamfilter ikke filtrerer bort emailen.

Now, if you're not a fluent Norwegian speaker, there's no problem. But Norwegian has genders, which influence pronouns, and the word "opphenting" means literally "upfetching", as ridiculous in Norwegian as in English - unless they arrive with a helicopter and actually fetch the machine "up". Also, they aren't fetching the machine at all, I have to mail it to them. Not to mention the simple typos. So: Bad grammar, nonsense words, typos and imprecise content.

Right, my English isn't perfect, far from it. That's why I, when ever I have a chance, use proof-readers. It's part of being a professional in a formal context: you make sure you make a good impression, and you can't be misunderstood. (Before I get slammed to death with my own typos, I don't consider this blog a formal context, it's just my personal writing, my responsibilities, my errors.)

I have a bad feeling about this experience. Very bad. It's making me regret I didn't spend a little more and got the Dell which was the alternative.

I am crossing my fingers, hoping, and hugging the new, shiny, functioning machine the college got for me, just a few weeks ago. Also I am praising the fact that I did some maniacal copying of the most important files just before I went to the states, and my recent habit of putting the pictures on a remote hard drive. I just may have been very lucky with that timing.

Dear Expert

I suspect Ian Bogost has met the same journalists as I do, although I am baffled that they managed to track down Ian, seeing as they can't use google and he isn't in the Norwegian phone-book. From his post:

I wonder: instead of doing research myself on the story I am required to write, would you be willing to talk to me by phone for an hour about it? During this time, I would pose a series of basic questions that demonstrate how little thought and time I have given to the topic, not even enough to Google its key terms.

Orient Point

After an exhausting spring, I am having something odd called "vacation". You know, when you're not making excuses for all the things you haven't gotten around to doing yet, and you only need to do the things you feel like doing.

Anyway, what I felt like doing today was to go for a bike ride from Greenport, where I am currently staying at a motel which feels overpriced in this crappy weather, but which I guess would feel cheap if I was lazing in the sun instead of uploading pictures to Flickr on a weak wireless signal

(lovely beach site, fantastic view of the water, big room and immensely comfortable porch). The goal was Orient Point, the easternmost point of the north fork of Long Island.

At the point of the fork, there's a ferry going to New London,

and that's where I went on this rather exhausting ride. The bike I had rented had seemed fine the day before, but what is OK for a 3 km ride from Greenport to the motel, becomes exhausting when we're talking 30 kilometers. Oh well, I got my exercize in today, that's for sure!

On the way, I passed some wonderful spots, a couple of nature preserves with a fishing egret and an osprey's nest,

a public beach which was closed at the time (I find "closing" a beach slightly absurd, but Americans obviously don't),

and several very american buildings. Not American in an overblown, overexclusive, "everything is bigger and better" way, but lovely pieces of Americana - intricate patterns on railings and beneath roofs, comfortable, wide porches with chairs and decorations, beautiful windows. There's a love of decoration and a surplus of time and skill which comes out in these incredible details to small and big houses alike, and definitely in their churches.

Pointing to the side

What am I talking about at State of Play? Peek into my blog on the Gamers' space project.

4.49 am

It's early morning in New York. I am jet-lagged as usual on the first morning in NYC, even after a serious lie-in. I was, after all, wide awake at 1.30, already feeling like I had overslept.

For the next few days I'll be busy at the New York Law school, first with a Graduate Student Symposium, and then with State of Play, the conference, not the movie.

Touch me, la la la

I find myself sighing with pleasure, as I settle down with my new computer. I knew it would be nice looking, because if it was just half as elegant as on the pictures it would be a great upgrade, look wise. Inside it has twice as much of everything as the last machine, my much loved and much used 12" XPS, also from Dell.

I thought I would be reluctant to give the other machine away. After all, I had it set up just as I wanted, it could handle everything I threw at it, it was small and light and I had found the perfect sticker for it.



Can a machine be better, I thought, particularly after they quickly and efficiently exchanged the keyboard and mouse when the first one broke down from frequent use. "Do you mostly play with the left hand?" one technician asked, after they had seen how used up the machine was. I had to admit that yes, I play with the left hand on the keys, the right on the touchpad (yes, I play with the pad, no mouse for me unless I want RSI).

For a lot of different reasons, I invested in a monster machine for the home - a private computer for the first time in years. Here's a review of it, in Norwegian though. It's a totally oversized 17,1" lap-top which I would never have spent money on if I didn't have such a problem with my back and shoulders, to the point where I need to be able to have the machine on my lap when I work. As things are, that machine is just amazing!

I thought I was pretty much set by then. How could machines give me a new experience? High portability from the little Dell machine, extreme performance from the big Asus, and a hard working, decent desk-top in the office.

That was until I touched this one. First, yes that really is leather at the bottom there. It's smooth and begs to be touched - particularly contrasted by the steel. I find my fingers caressing the leather and wandering over the steel stripe to daringly approach the shiny black laquer finish of the upper part of the back of the screen. It feels like walking the edge, as I touch the place where brushed steel meets black laquer, in terror of leaving fingerprints, evidence of my dirty pawing.

But the tactile pleasures don't end on the outside. Last night, as I was busy raiding on the big machine, my husband, the "as long as it works" functionalist, picked up my new machine and settled down to see what all the fuss was about. He was tracing the details, exclaiming over the responsive touch pad, playing around with the control panel for sound and video where a mere touch to the back-lit signal is enough. And as his hands touched the keyboard he sighed, deeply content. I knew then that it wasn't just me. This machine is seductive, plain and simple.

I haven't REALLY tested it yet. No raids, no 12 hours of constant typing, no running of games, presentation programs and video projectors simultaneously. I may start hating it when it starts failing me at vitals moments like those. But at the moment, I find myself humming along with a-ha:

Touch me
How can it be
Believe me
The sun always shines on T.V

And I don't even like a-ha that much. Should I be worried?

Why we don't like cell-phones in class

Thanks to Pattie Belle Hastings for posting this link, to a study about cellphones, ringtones and recall by Jill Shelton.

"Many of us consider a cell phone ringing in a public place to be an annoying disruption, but this study confirms that these nuisance noises also have real-life impacts," Shelton said. "These seemingly innocuous events are not only a distraction, but they have a real influence on learning."

Titled "The distracting effects of a ringing cell phone: An investigation of the laboratory and the classroom setting," the study was conducted at Louisiana State University, where Shelton received her doctoral degree. Her co-authors in the LSU psychology department include Emily Elliott, Sharon Eaves and Amanda Exner.

Apart from being annoying, distracting and rude, ringing cellphones makes students forget what they learned before and during the ringing of the phone. If the ring tone is a popular, well-known piece of music, this is even worse.

So: That mute button? Use it!

Etiquette and netiquette

As new tools are available to us, we need to learn new ways to use them. It seems like cell-phones and text messages is the new "issue" in manners at the moment. The article in NY Times is a very good example of how we need to develop new ways to integrate the new technology in our lives.

At our table, texting is no problem. Not that it never happens, but if you receive and send a text message at the table with our family, you're expected to share the contents. It becomes part of the family conversation. Often the sent messages are communally authored, or the person may receive the response from somebody else than they wrote to. That's a pretty efficient way to limit the texting, whoever does it. Sometimes it's nice too. Discussing the most recent cute picture of my daughter's kitten or the urgent issues at work are both typical dinner-time conversation topics anyway.

So yeah, I am more in the Danah Boyd camp here, where technology is integrated in the rituals of everyday life, rather than one of those with tech-free zones and blackberry-free hours.

Just to hang out

Like so many others, I have a facebook account. No shock there, hmm? Also, I play games on it! No shock there either, I guess! The facebook games are small and fun, but most of the time I find that I play them for the same reason I play a hand of cards or participate in the yearly winter games at the department (last day before christmas). I play because I want to connect with the people I play with.

And so I send and receive flowers, I read and do quizzes, I buy and sell friends, I bite and get bitten, and I have a little dragon that occasionally tries to help her friends. Poor little thing, robbed of all gold and dignity, but she still tries!

It's quite amusing, really. This is perhaps the oldest use of games in existance - playing in order to enjoy connecting with others - and it is still a revelation to discover that we do it in yet another medium.

End of spring term

Just to let you all know, you who think teachers don't work when you don't see them: We do. So when you all have dropped off your papers and gone off to get a summer job and wait for the grades, we work day and night to get everything done within the deadlines. And if you feel the grades are published slowly, it's not because we're not working. We are reading like maniacs, right up to the moment you learn about your grades.

And then we do some more assessments, and start planning next term, so you have something to think we're dodging next year, too.

Yeah, I know, a touch bitter here, but after yet another student claiming that "a little bit more work can't kill you", it feels like yes, actually, a little bit more work is exactly what would kill me right now.

Introverts

And thanks to Alex Halavais for linking to this article, which finally made me feel understood.

Games Convention Online

Despite the title, this is a convention over online games, not an online convention. Yeah, it confused me at first.

It's a grandly planned conference over online games in Europe, taking place in Leipzig. Despite having travelled extensively in Germany at one point, I never went to Leipzig, and checking the map I realised why. Most of my travels in Germany happened in the late 70-ies, early 80-ies, and my only trip into the then East-Germany happened in 1981, with a trip to Berlin, East-Berlin and Potsdam.

This is an extremely interesting part of Europe, which I have neglected visiting since travelling with children made it harder to jump on a train and roll through Europe for days on end, stopping at random places to sleep whereever there'd be a cheap hostel. Now the children travel quicker, lighter and easier than me, being the age I was when I was exploring Europe by the railway, and I am worried about not having booked hotels in advance. Who'd have thought the map of Europe would change so much, just in the time it takes a child to be born and grow into an adult?

Anyway, this isn't about Europe, it's about games. At the same time I wonder, can it not be about Europe? Or about Asia, Africa, Oceania, Australia or America, for that matter - it's all about culture, change, humanity and society.

I'll be talking in this session:

„Nutzung & Potenzial“:
In diesem Themenblock der Konferenz bilden die Nutzungsgewohnheiten, -präferenzen und -folgen auf Spielerseite sowie die damit einhergehenden Erwartungen, Chancen, Herausforderungen und Risiken den Schwerpunkt. Faktoren, die die Angebotsauswahl und Spielenutzung beeinflussen, sind ebenso relevante Themenbereiche wie aktuelle Nutzungsmodi, Genrepräferenzen, tatsächliche und potentielle Vergemeinschaftungspotenziale und Spielzeiten. Damit einhergehend sind auch Fragen exzessiver Spielenutzung zu thematisieren. Zu beachten sind die Potenziale von Online Games und Mobile Games etwa für Sozialisation und Berufsfeldkompetenzen

However, when I can, I'll sneak over to this session:

„Gesellschaft & Politik“:
Im dritten Stream sollen die gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der steigenden Nutzung von Online und Mobile Games im Zentrum stehen. Welche Debatten in welcher Form in der Öffentlichkeit geführt, und welche Risiken und Möglichkeiten den Spielen zugeschrieben werden, können eine differenzierte Sichtweise auf das Phänomen erlauben.

Auch die regulatorischen Herausforderungen, die sich aus den Spielinhalten und -formen, der aktuellen Technologie, der Vereinbarkeit von Erlösmodellen mit dem Verbraucherschutz und den veränderten Rollen der Akteure sowie den sozialen Komponenten der Angebote ergeben, werden hier Thema sein. Zudem sollen die bisherigen Reaktionen von Gesetzgeber, Regulierungsbehörden und Politik diskutiert werden.

And if you want to see the topics in English, you'll find the program here. Me, I am taking this opportunity to start brushing up my German. It used to be much better than my English - before those two young adults were born.

Slowed shock

12 days ago my mother died. When I learned of her death, I sat there, expecting a jolt of some kind. Nothing happened. Then I started taking action. Apart from the persons who found her, two of the wonderful neighbourhood ladies who looked in on her after they started worrying, I was the first to get the message. I had to talk to a lot of people very fast, then figure out what to do about the practical issues surrounding a death.

It's not something you can rehearse. It's not something I had researched. Even now, when it's all done, I shy away from it. I don't want to remember the details of what I needed to deal with.

My mind is very busy shying away from topics right now. It knows there is this big minefield, and stepping into it needs to be done carefully. I loved my mother, but I was also incredibly angry with her. Much of that anger was justified, but now I can let it go.

All of this takes time, my mind tells my brain. The brain wants to get on with things. I have always had an impatient brain. But the mind has a - well - can a mind have a mind of its own? Not really, huh? Anyway - I want to move on, but since I am moving through this mindfield of issues that slip into the past with each step, everything is slowed down.

And that's actually what I was getting to today. Just takes some time to get there.

So, this post is to tell people who wonder why I am extremely passive and out-of-the-loop that no, I am not that passive, I have this mindfield I need to walk through. I am ok. Just slow.

(And yes, at first it was a typo. But sometimes my fingers are smarter than me. It is a minefield of the mind.)

The sense of the absurd

Sometimes, truths can only be spoken through the impossible, the absurd, ridiculous and surreal. For my funeral, I would like all to act like dadaists. Don't even try to make sense, and please, put the established objects to new use. And if you feel you need to throw something in some grave, don't use flowers. Throw seeds.

Out of touch

I will be unavailable for anything but emergencies until May first. That means most likely no internet, and very limited phone access.

Games and public relations

Most of my readers know I play games, write about them and talk about them. Some know about the blogs too. Well, the meta-part, not just the blogging. And then there's the group that mainly knows me as the teacher, occasionally leader, of a public information/public relations education.

I have been working with this side of communication since 1991, and it's how I entered into studying games. The original study I did of games was the study of one called "Det store manndomsspranget" - the great leap to manhood. This game was finished in 1998, and was just about to be published when it was said to be stopped by the the government which - at the time - had a christian people's party representative as the prime minister: Kjell Bondevik. Even before it was published, the game was critizised for the extreme effect it would have on young people.

The game was designed to teach young boys about relations to others, with and without sex. Mainly it rewarded communication, willingness to wait until both parties were ready, acceptance of alternative sexualities and different cultures. The critics claimed it would make young boys want to try out sex. Also it would lead to negative feelings about monogamy, and encourage polygamy and homosexuality. As you understand, an extremely dangerous game. If you would like to test your personal integrity and are willing to risk ending up polyamorous, gay and obsessed with sex, in 2001 the game was available from Helsedirektoratet, in Norwegian, of course.

My own work with this game was to analyse and discuss it's potential as a persuasive game. Since it was created by the Norwegian board of Health in order to educate and persuade boys about/into safer and generally more well considered sex, it was a very interesting experiment for me to write about. I was in general working a lot on health campaigns and information concerning gender, sexuality, abuse, pregnancies and abortion, using several large Norwegian campaigns as examples for my students. Most of the different aspects of these campaigns were however targeting girls. Girls are a lot easier to find, if you want to communicate with them strategically. They read magazines, they watch certain programs, they surround themselves with certain objects, such as school journals. Boys at the age of 13-17 are however much harder to reach. At this age they disappear into their own interests, and very little can pull them back out of it.

What I wanted to learn was if a game could do it. Could I expect a game to be a sufficiently strong medium that boys would be able to take their learning experiences from the game world to the real world?

My conclusion after watching the game, playing it, testing it on a few choice subjects, discussing it against theories of the formation of ideas and attitudes and in general using what tools I had short of a very big and long experiment, was that no. At least not this game.

What happens with games, even extremely pedagogic, educational games such as The great Leap to Manhood, is that when you start playing, you enter into a play sphere. It's more fun to see what kind of responses you can get out of the game (if I put the avatar's hand under the girl's skirt, will she slap him?), than to try and respond politically correctly. This could then encourage non-monogamous experiments in the game space (can the avatar manage to date both the girls?) Would this endanger the Norwegian core family? Hardly - the game was a point-and-click adventure which at no point let you forget that this was exactly that, a game.

I was thinking about this work now, because I was shelfing, unread, Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games. Spillets leser - leserens spill was in many ways before it's time, and it was looking at connections between games and persuasion which is frequently overlooked.

First of all, as public relations research shows us, it's not easy to create attitude change. It happens slowly, and the media have a limited influence on our attitudes and values.

Second, coming from reader-response theory, which I run into only rarely these days, the analysis of The great Leap addresses a theory which originally was abandoned due to the fact that "interactivity" in Iser's sense and "interactivity" in the game sense is now the same. Today it might be the time to go back to those topics and question the theories of the active reader more closely. What kind of reading IS gaming?

Third, boys know the difference between playing in order to satisfy the teacher, and playing to satisfy their own curiosity. The issues of oppositional readings must be huge with pedagogical, or "serious" games. Now, there might be a lot of research on this which I have just ignored as I haven't really followed the "serious" scene that closely, but so far I have seen very little on this.

Still, today I find myself thinking that going from Public relations to games was not such a long step after all. The theories I have explored, the problems I have written about and the topics I teach have changed, but it's still all about how people behave while they communicate. I may straddle a gap, but it's not as wide as it looks.

Researcher's retreat for you?

My best writing is always done when away from the daily running of the department at which I have now worked for almost 18 years. While I am here, I know too much about what goes on, and I care and get distracted by it. Away it is true: Out of sight, out of mind. This means that 3 weeks at the end of a publishing process normally is all I need to write a decent article. Three weeks, somewhere peaceful to stay, an internet connection and a library.

Now, thanks to the generousity of Volda College, specifically the Media Department, others can have exactly this if they want to come to Volda! We're formalising this as soon as possible, but the outline of what the department is offering is this:

An easygoing, if sometimes very busy and focused staff, with which to have lunch and occasionally even interesting conversations. The main topics of research and teaching here are journalism, public information, animation, television documentary and new media.

An apartment, at an extremely good rate by any standards, for three weeks (time depends somewhat on how many need to use the apartment a given month).

A desk in a common office, with internet connection.

An ok library (not the largest, but with an extremely helpful and friendly staff).

For this we ask one 90-minute lecture over a topic of your choice - your speciality, the thing you would really like to share with others, the research you're most proud of. If you can't make up your mind, contact us to ask what we need, and we'll slot you into one of the many courses running here.

There's no funding for travel, and nothing to cover your work here unless you negotiate that directly with an interested party. This is an offer mainly aimed at making your own funding go a little longer than it would otherwise. It's a way to make it possible to get away from the daily grind and stay for a while in an extremely peaceful spot on the planet. Fresh air, small community, very little crime, amazing opportunities for hiking or skiing (get a map, you'll need it!), a few concerts while the students are active and organising it, otherwise just a quiet place to be while you rewrite that pesky manuscript.

Volda is far away from everything, but sometimes, that's just where you want to be.

Skype television

There's a show on Norwegian state television (NRK 2) that I didn't know about, it's called Sveip, and runs in the afternoons. It covers net news, and uses the net to do interviews and reportage. My upcoming trip to The Gathering appears to be good news for them, so yesterday I was on the air, live from Volda. It's in Norwegian, but for non Norwegian speakers, I can tell you that we were talking about this research project.

I am fascinated by the ease as well as the quality of the transfer. There was a problem with the light, I drew all the curtains but the sunlight still made me look quite washed out. I don't mind though - not all the details about me look good on television.

And you wondered

why there aren't more women playing games? Perhaps "Shii", the Wii for women gives you the answer.

Professor plans World of Warcraft book

It's big news in The Post Chronicle, that Bonnie Nardi has rceived a 100 000$ grant to study the Chinese approach to playing World of Warcraft. The article focuses on the fact that she's studying WoW - from my point of view it's more stunning that she got all that money to do it!

It's going to be interesting to read her conclusions. The attempts I have heard of to penetrate the Chinese gaming culture have so far failed, and any information about what they do will be interesting. However, considering what I am writing about currently (the community practices of gamers), I really hope that she has noticed that a lot of the mods being used by her American gamers are not created solely by Americans. A lot of the modding spring out of European communities, and if she is to play the geographic differences card, it would be a good idea to remember that Europe still hasn't been taken over by the US - even if much of it is part of NATO. Is it an English language thing? Do Europeans and Australians mod their UI as much as the Americans? What about the Russian, French and Spanish servers in Europe? The Japanese?

And that before we start talking about co-use of machines. My small survey, where I suspect not a lot of Chinese are participating, shows that more than 80% of the gamers play on their own machine. I don't think that number is much smaller for US gamers, although Europeans, particularly in the Nordic countries, have a high saturation of technology. But if you play on a machine used by any number of strangers, to modify the UI can become a real source of conflict. There's nothing as annoying as taking over an interface designed for somebody else. Yep, even in the 20 minutes since I read that little piece of news, the questions are popping up like mushrooms - which is a good thing. Nardi has hit an interesting area to question.

Anyway, Mez sent me the link to the news article, and she asked if Bonnie Nardi is a gamer. What can I say but "I sincerely hope so"? It would be too bad if 100 000$ was spent on gamer scholarship ignoring the game.

------------------------
PS: Of course, I forgot to congratulate Bonnie Nardi. I am such a barbarian, I forget simple things like that. I was too caught up in the topic and the possibilities. But here it is, a few days late: Congratulations!

Overwhelmed by game research surveys

In my quest to find good places where to post links to my survey, I happend on gamesforum.com, which I recommend for discussions, but not for posting research questions! I posted without reading through the entire board, and the administrators received my post in a friendly manner - but noted that I'd probably not get a lot of replies, as they had been flooded with surveys lately. That's when I started reading.

If you're interested in seeing what kind of research questions the coming generations of researchers are asking, check gamesforum.com! There they are, the links, and the questions and the presentations. Finland and California, the games researchers unite in the search for good respondents. It's quite amusing as well as, of course, an extra challenge to getting my respondents. And it gives me an idea about what kind of questions students ask.

Tracking

While we all hate to be tracked, supervised or in other manners controlled (well, ok, not all, some need to know they are supervised to be happy), to be able to track other things is oddly satisfying. I am watching the progress of a package that's making its slow way towards me, from it's sent, through the many terminals where it's re-loaded. With some luck I should have it tomorrow, as today's stop should be the last one before here. It might seem slow - this is the third day I am tracking this - but I was told it might take two weeks before this arrived. So, I am delighted, and if it's as nice as I think, there might soon be a new exstatic tech blog post!

The Gamers' Space

In order to understand more about the way gamers integrate digital gaming in their everyday life, I have made a survey for gamers. I am also asking for pictures of the spot where you spend most of your time playing games. More information about this project is available at The Gamers' Space, the weblog I have created to promote, administrate and keep participants informed about the development of this project. I'll also post links at the participants boards of some of the big games out there. If you would like to participate or you would like to spread the word about this project, please link to http://roomforresearch.blogspot.com

If you would like to send me a picture of your digital gaming set-up, whether it's a laptop or a monster machine with specially built chair, please send it to research dot game at gmail dot com.

Finally here

Isn't it impressive? All black and blue with some touches of green and purple (like a bruise you'll be certain to remember for a while) Perceiving Play, the art and study of computer games.


And I sincerely hope the impact if this book isn't too painful. It's a slim little thing, after all.

Navel Gazing

From the world of amazing research: Belly-button fluff. The research of the Austrian researcher Steinhauser has revealed what belly button fluff is made of, and how come it migrates to the belly button. It turns out that it is avoidable, you just have to shave your belly, alternatively get a belly-button piercing. Knowing that the main carrier of belly button fluff is an overweight, middle-aged male, the image of shaved bellies and pierced belly buttons is perhaps slightly disturbing.

Georg Steinhauser does not only stare at bellies though. From the Technical University of Wienna, 2008, a report of his research on the chemical fingerprint of volcanic eruptions through studies of pumice.

Used book

I just bought a used book, Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop, after strong endorsement of it during a recent meeting. I am not working with games at the moment, lecturing on persuasion and democracy in the media mostly, but I wanted to write my name and shelf the book.

That's when I saw it. This book had a greeting written on the first page. In 2005, this book was a present from a loving father to his son.

What can I say - there's hope, when parents choose to challenge their children by offering them reading they can actually learn from, books that can give them structure and understanding of how things work. I do feel a little sad that the book is here. But it looks like it's been at least carried around a bit, although the back of it is unbroken - if he did read it, he did so gently.

In waiting

Today, in between preparing lectures and despairing at my own lack of discipline, I keep googling "bento box japan" or "bento lunch recipe". I have ordered a Bento box from Ebay, and am waiting, exited, for it to arrive.

Bento is a way ot organise a meal so that it can easily be transported. Many societies put a lot of effort into bringing meals with them from home. The Japanese bento boxes are the modern, often very high-tech (it's japanese), but always beautiful answer to the problem of bringing food. In India they have people who live from fetching lunch boxes in people's homes, dropping them off at work, then picking them up and taking them home. In Norway, we have two slices of dark bread, one with white and one with brown cheese, wrapped in waxed paper and eaten with coffee, milk or water, the infamous Norwegian matpakke.

With my food-issues, I haven't had a regular matpakke for almost 8 years. I have been lunching on salads or left-overs from last night's dinner, contained in tupperware type containers and sometimes, when possible, heated quickly in the microwave. This is ok, and works well, but imagine my delight when I started looking up different types of lunch boxes, and found the bento-boxes. Not to mention the community around them and the recipes and ideas this community generates: I love it.

While I am not all that picky about food looking pretty, and I don't think I'll be arranging pink bunnies or create desserts that look like cherry blossoms, I am looking forwards to a simple and easy way to separate foods which should not be mixed, this way giving myself more options while keeping the packaging compact and in one unit. Also, the boxes are pretty!

It's at Amazon

Not yet in a mailbox near me, but I can see it on Amazon. What? Oh, just the book of books: Perceiving Play - the art and study of computer games.

It's with very mixed feelings that I see it for sale. I have put a lot of work into it, and so have the editors and everybody else who have been in touch with the process. Now it's out there, and it is pretty scary, because that means others can pick it up, read it and tell the world everything that's wrong with it.

And I know it's not perfect. It's just the best I could do at the time, within the limitations I had given it. I think it should work pretty well to make people see that research on games is a lot more than researching violence and addiction (which does not happen in the proportions one might think from the media.) It should also be a fair enough place to start when you want to find other research on games. And perhaps it has an interesting thought or two. I hope.

But I am still pretty proud of it!
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A better place to learn about the book may be a Peter Lang's website, where you will also find links to many of the other interesting books in the same series.

Seriously, NSB...

I normally don't complain about the much-harassed Norwegian railroad. I love trains, and one of my big complaints about living in Norway is that the country is so hard to build railroads in. I want much more of it.

But today I realised that NSB really could be smarter than it is. I am trying to find a way to travel from Oslo to Karlstad. I know there are trains there. But NSB refuses to let me see anything beyond the Norwegian borders, and this is just at the other side, 2-3 hours into Sweden.

When I use wideroe.no, I can book tickets all over the world, whether Wideroe or SAS fly there or not. With NSB I don't get any help if I want to pass the border. Perhaps it deserves some of the criticism after all? When I checked the Swedish railroad, going from Oslo to Karlstad (and back) was no problem at all. Go figure.

Hey, NSB, how come the SWEDES can do it, and not you?

(Oh, and if it IS possible to check the time-table on this distance from the NSB site but I was too stupid to find it - well, then a hard look at the user interface would be a brilliant idea.)

Dead blogs

There are a lot of dead blogs out there, and some of them are in otherwise live newspapers. The norwegian paper Dagens Næringsliv - a wannabe Financial Times, right down to the pink paper - has an impressive list of bloggers. Sadly, the last blogpost was written in 2007.

This makes me wonder, again, about the weblog and its function in the public debate. In this case the high-profile, eminently competent people who were asked to blog obviously did not find it worth while to follow up the task. This, while others are still blogging in many a little corner of the universe, calmly talking from much lower soap-boxes in more remote corners of the online public sphere. Is the weblog the commoners' medium? Is the prestige gone out of blogging with the hype, now that the big agencies are all thinking about how to twist the power of facebook to their service?

Hmmm.

I know what to do now

This week-end, things fell into place. I know what to do now. It's a really odd feeling, kind of a mixture between waiting for a dentist appointment and being in love.

I have been trying to write abstracts for AOIR and the Nordic Media Research conference, but not successfully. Every time I have tried, I have ended up with this huge project that has been getting in the way of any small things, like papers and articles. The project is horribly ambitious, it's going to demand a network of researchers and lots of funding, and there's no way I can do any of it before either conference. But it doesn't want to go away.

So, I am giving in to it. I am going to start planning a large research project. OK, fates, I am giving in, do you hear me? Stop nagging!

And yes, that worked. Now that I have put the PROJECT into my schedule - my pretty immediate schedule - I can start working on other things. It's going to demand some compromise. I will, for instance, for the Nordic Conference of Media and Communication research, base my abstract on a talk I gave this fall. I have the material ready, the research almost all done, all I need is to write the paper/article. Easy-peasy, and I was planning to do that anyway. For AOIR I'll run with an idea I had quite recently - and nope, I am not announcing it here just yet. That would ruin the whole blind-review process. I'll let you all know if it's accepted :) If it isn't, I'll pretend I never meant to go to IR 10.0 anyway. It's in Milwaukee. How does one even GET to Milwaukee?

Well, now you know. I just wanted to say this. A purely therapeutic blogpost for me, but at least you got links to a couple of conferences out of it.

All your typoes are belong to us

Have you typoed an url lately? Where did you land? The last times I have tried that, I have ended up in a site of mega religion cristian somethings, where the big news on the first site is something along the line that the bible is true. They now have testimonies proving that.

I have to admit that while this is great advertising, I am shocked by the way one organisation, this time a very fanatic religious one, has been able to hijack the Internet. There must be a mechanism somewhere that redirects all typoes that would otherwise lead to a "file not found" to this site. How has it happened? Have they bought the spot? Can it be bought? If so, what did it cost? Or have they hacked it, planted a bug that infiltrates your machine, and then sends you off to their site, rather than just google search site or something. Are there thousands of religious fanatics that keep creating websites with typoed versions of every website out there, which then redirects to this page? Have they taken over explorer? Did Bill Gates receive Jesus in his heart, and started preaching through the error messages?

It's quite scary. Fanatics are no more reassuring just because they are Christian.

And yes, I deliberately did not use exact phrasing or links in this post. They get more than enough hits out of me as it is.