Articles this year, so far so good

I wondered where I was when I got my copy of our lovely WoW book, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader, since I didn't blog it. then I remember - I was travelling, Umeå, Volda, Copenhagen, New York, and too much was lost in transit. No not physically, but things to which I should have paid attention.



The book is a wonderful object to hold, both because it's packed with work from people I know and respect, and because it know so much about the rest of it. I was there in that taxi in Copenhagen when we came up with the idea of the book. I read the early drafts of applications and suggestions that Jill and Hilde sent off, I was there while we discussed it in the different lists, in game, out of the game and when the call for paper went out to more than the guild I felt still involved in the process.

Not to take the glory from Jill and Hilde, they did an incredible job in getting the book out, but I feel like this is my baby too. And the baby of Lisbeth, Charlotte and the other authors as well as the ones who were somehow inside the process but never got to present their work here. This is a book that comes from a game researcher's community, not a collection of strangers who happened to write something relevant, and so it carries with it an odd flavour of nostalgia.

Another anthology I was represented in this year is written by exactly such a collection of (to me) strangers: Handbook of Research on New Literacies.

This is a very different beast. It's a huge brick of work which can easily compete with Lord of the Rings in size, and it sprawls all over the place. I did find the articles of some friends here too though, and it looks like it has the potential of being a very useful reference work for the topics in new media research in this decade. I do have some fondness for it. Not because the articles make me remember great conversations and happy moments, frankly, I have not been able to take in all it contains, but because this book too has led me to meet great people. Interesting, sharing and generous people - in a way those people are more important to me than the stack of books and journals that is accumulating on my CV. I like doing this work. I just need to see a physical result once in a while to remember why.

Don't you hate epiphanies?

Sometimes, as my sister says, "the coin falls down." You know the feeling, it's when you get the joke and you see how something works. But that's where the image ends, because you can't really talk about coins falling slowly or coins falling quickly - gravity is gravity and me being slow to realise something does not keep a coin suspended in free fall for ever.

Sometimes though, the image of coins falling is spot on, and today the coins were falling too many at the time. It was like I pulled a handle and they all came rushing - sadly not to stream into my hands and leave me rich and happy, but to cram themselves into the same little slot before I had a chance to appreciate any of them.

I had an epiphany. I have started to hate those, but it's how my research brain works. I sit around, looking at a stack of books, then I read them, randomly, looking for - something - then I write a little something totally unrelated, and I play a game and I surf online and I get involved with finding a pair of purple pants for my rogue (she really needs a pair of pretty epics, you know), and then I go listen to some lectures and before I know it time is running out. Do you think that's the stressfull part? Nooo, the stressfull part is what comes next. Because I start doing all kinds of stuff so I won't feel I have wasted my time, taking on work and booking trips and such, and THAT is when all the coins drop at the same time. Suddenly I see what I am looking for, and it's right in front of my eyes and I have to write it down NOW, but I have said yes to so many other things and I can't...

I hate it. But I live for it. Ambivalence and contradition. They feed me.

A confusion of seasons

I am deep in the process of translating something I wrote in Norwegian into English, and having an interesting insight. While I have become fairly confident about writing in English, I realise that my Norwegian is so much richer, subtler and also more precise than the English, it's embarassing to know I considered myself almost fluent in English. Luckily I brought a Norwegian-English dictionary.

I am in my usual "let's get away from everything" spot while writing this, and it's autumn in New York, not yet winter.


When I left Sweden for Australia in September, it was autumn, too.


Going to Perth, Australia, I came to a somewhat feeble spring, although the spring flowers were busy blooming once we got outside the city.


It did however warm up once I went north (which is still a little odd to me) and reached Tokyo. The japanese were making excuses for the weather being so unseasonably warm, and the early autumn felt like treasured (if somewhat overwhelmingly hot when in the lecture halls) summer.


But back in Umeå, the temperature dropped quickly, so when I left for New York in November, winter had settled in firmly. My son was visiting just at the right time to run errands for me and get winter tires for the bike, so now I am the proud owner of a bicycle outfitted for winter biking. Scary, but I will try it as soon as I am back there.


And this is what I left when I went to a New York that is cool, moist and very autumn like. A total confusion of seasons, from September to November.

WoW - an anthology!

Jill Walker and Hilde Corneliussen, our hard-working and eminent editors, have just sent off to MIT press a big fat stack of paper with the articles grown from our contacts and network in World of Warcraft. They have done a great job, and so have we all! I am just going to lean back and wait for the release party now!

Player's Realm

Another anthology is on the market: The Player's Realm with Jonas Heide-Smith and Patrick Williams as editors. It's published by McFarland, and should make an interesting addition to current game literature. It's been a while coming, but it's on topics which should be able to survive the time lag. My article is on the player's situation and connection, placing gaming in a wider cultural field, connecting to a wide range of literature.

I have no idea what the picture on the front page is supposed to relate to though - unless it's that same literary connection: Fantasy and science fiction.

Finally done

Among the tasks I have struggled with this year is the article for the WoW anthology we are writing with Jill and Hilde as editors. First I didn't manage to get into the flow of writing, then it all exploded and it grew to twice the size. Today I managed to slice it down to an acceptable format, and I almost understood what I am writing too. Not bad, really.

This article has been haunted with problems. I started with an idea which turned out to be really hard to confirm. People do way too much more stuff ingame compared to what I thought they did, and they all wanted to talk about it. I got a lot of great information from a wonderful bunch of people, when I went to Holland to interview the guild I played with. Not much of that was about the topics I wanted them to talk about though. Oh well, it's what I get for interviewing real life people, I guess!

When I finally got time to have the interviews transcribed (and here I again had the pleasure of getting help from the guild: a member did the transcriptions, and I am not sure if he ever contacted the college to get paid for it. I hope he did! He deserved every krone, because it turned out that the quality of the interviews was really lousy. And as if that's not enough:) all the interviews were cut short. I cried when I discovered what had happened. The recorder I had borrowed at the college after many negotiations (I wanted to buy, they wanted to save - familiar story) had some weird malfunction, so not only was it a poor recorder, it also made me lose the end of every single interview.

So, patching this optimistically together, I kind of lost sight of what I was writing about. The first draft of the full article was more about "all kind of human experiences in WoW." Fun stuff, but babies had to die. 1/3 of the babies, really.

That's what I have been up to the last week: killing innocent idea babies. The blood was seeping into the keyboard, so I had to get it replaced. Also the touchpad and the main card of my brand new Dell XPS M1210 - the cutest and most powerful laptop I have ever had. I am absolutely certain it was the cruel attacks on the text with axe, spells and swords that shook everything lose inside.

Today I got the text down to less than 8000 words. I feel like a human being again. Tomorrow, after a final proofreading, I'll send it off.

Lagged - again

Exhausted, jet-lagged and writing.
I have no idea what this will be like. Somebody will read it and wonder what the author was thinking. I can't answer, sorry. It is just happening. Much of my best writing happens like this, when I stop trying to be clever and just dig deep into the forgotten resources of my mind. I am not sure that this is one of those occasions, though. Only the reviewers will know.

Deadline tomorrow. I'll get up at 6 am and finish. Part of me wishes I'd have stayed home. The other part knows I can never work as intensely and intently if I don't go away.
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Done. And I am done. And it is done. Tomorrow I will definitely not write.