Everyday Sims

I have The Sims installed on at least one computer in the house. I have a little family. They live in a little house. And that's it. I can't make myself play it. I spend a lot of time wondering why I hate playing The Sims. My daughter loves it. My son plays it to understand it. I look at it, and turn it off.

Today Stewart Woods gave me a hint in his playful comment below. I play with real people every day. "I have 25 new students, and I make them read these books and do these tasks. I give them this much time and I reward them like this. What will they learn in three years, how will they relate to each other, and what will they make of themselves afterwards?" Only... this isn't a game. I don't change the parameters of the study in order to "see what happens." I do it because I want real people to have real experiences and give them the knowledge they need to deal with the real tasks they will be given when I can no longer help them.

In my spare time, I want a dagger in virtual hand and a drow to backstab.

Re-organising

Going home to cuddle a report on how my colleagues feel about the college at present, tomorrow will be spent planning how to proceed in the re-organising process of Volda College. I actually hate responsibility, I try to flee it when I can, but I have this thing about not wanting to let down people who trust me. And now there is a college full of people who trust me to do my best - or at least an honest attempt.

I want to do something else. I want to play games. I want to read books. I want to write chapter on chapter about communication theory. Instead, I'll change people's daily lives. Scary.

Way Back When

One of the really good web resources for internet researchers is the wayback machine maintained by the Internet Archive. I have to admit I am not good at using it, but I really should. This was pointed out by David Brake, PhD researcher in London:

You suggest in Personal Publication and Public Attention that "the only traces of this story exist in the blogs of those who blogged about it at the time (Mortensen, 2001). Damn the Pacific is no longer easily available". You should note that the Internet Archive keeps records of many things including the site. (It disappeared when the couple broke up).

As you can see by looking at the last archived post, July 1st 2002, by stu, updates are on their separate blogs. Later on the internet archive has saved a short explanation, telling how they have broken up, giving an email for people who have donated money for the trip to write Lane to have them back. Sad, but very human. But anyway, this means that damnthepacific.org is fairly readily available, and that the world wide web is not quite as loose and transient as it might seem.

Basil

It is a rare luxury as far north as this, but there is a pot of healthy basil blooming in the kitchen window. This energetic little bush has survived a summer in the boathouse, where I left it at the mercy of my family after a visit early this summer. Everybody visiting took care of it, used it, watered it and occasionally left it for days or a week until the next users showed up, and then when we closed the place down in the late summer, we brought the plant back to Volda - healthier than when I bought it.

I love basil, I love the scent and the taste, and living in NYC as a visiting scholar at New York University one of the affordable luxuries was to go to Union Square and the Farmer's market to buy a fresh bunch. The subway car would be filled with the fragrance of the fresh sprigs, and back in Bay Ridge I would indulge in tomatoes and basil to my heart's content.

Of course, when I followed Clancy's latest quizlink, this result delighted me:


YOU ARE BASIL


What herb are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

November

The autumn has settled in, as unpleasantly grey and dark as only November can be in this part of the world. Sunrise is 8.50 and sunset is 15.52 today, so it's dark when I go to work and dark when I go home. This small window of daylight will shrink more, but for some reason November feels darker than any other month of the year.


December has Christmas lights, January has cold clear nights when the Aurora flickers over the skies, February has snow and a multitude of birthdays. November has storms, rain, accidents and nothing to look forwards to but longer, colder, darker days every day.

November 2004 promises to be as bad as ever. This weekend saw landslides blocking the road south of here, boats running ashore north of here and tragic accidents happening to students west of here. I haven't dared check the roads east. A kind of bone-deep exhaustion has settled in to stay, and all the slight allergies that I keep trying to control through diet and clean healthy living are back with a vengeance after weeks of carpeted floors and bread for lunch while travelling.

On the upside: This makes me enjoy being back at the college, back at the office, back with my bookshelves and familiar tasks. Now: to organise them and get stuff done, and to let the impressions of this hectic autumn sink in.

Anda's Game

If you have a Salon account or don't mind reading their obnoxious ads, read Cory Doctorow's Anda's Game, a fiction story of a gamegirl after some initial stupidity leading to being at the bad side, gaining weight, contracting diabetes and annoying her family, working to liberate the sweatshop slaves in some unnamed online world.

It's a nice story, and it is a quick lecture in game-talk. A lot of the words used in this story were also freely bandied about at State of Play II - such as noobs. Thanks to Cory I now think I understand them.

Although I have to say that the solution was - well, politically correct, but also slightly simplistic. But I am not giving it away just for the pleasure of a critical thinking I-am-a-good-socialist show-off.

Swedish blog popularity contest

By way of Francis Strand, a link to a ranking list of Swedish blogs. No female bloggers among the ten most influental. Why are we not surprised? Just because Sweden has exellent female bloggers and researchers working on blogging, is that a reason for the established media notice and perhaps for once show us some real news?

Taken by the sea

Volda is not a happy place today. A student challenged the power of the nature, and lost. He went with several friends to see the waves breaking over the breakwater by Stad, the West Cape of Norway, a place where waves can rise to sudden, immense heights. One wave grabbed five students - four crawled back up. Then the four who ran to help were taken by the next wave, but managed to get back out of the water. Three were hurt, broken bones according to the news. The bay where the students were taken by the wave is used for surfing by tourists, students at the nearby school, and students from the colleges within a reasonable distance.

But this loss, so sudden, so potentially a much larger disaster, is a reminder of the indifference of the nature we live in here, the speed of the wind, the hardness of the rocks, the weight of the water, and the frail humans making a living. And it reminds us how few people live here, how precious each individual is. Voluntairs have been looking for the missing young man all day, despite the storm and sleet in one of the world's roughest and least hospitable waters.

Suicidal librarians

Tron Øgrim, radical journalist and selfproclaimed technofreak, ended the conference by provoking the audience to activism and to fight for the free literature distributed through the libraries. Although I am not entirely sure librarians would choose to bomb the library or burn themselves alive.

The conference has been interesting, intense activity on a small area, with only occasional trips to the University to provide some exercize in the rain. I like the style of intense lectures, workshops and open periods of coffee and lunch. I have given one lecture - and what was supposed to be two half workshops but timewise it ended up with two whole workshops. So I worked every day, and now I am shot. But there are people who now know how to blog, who did not know before.

So, fun all around, and not least nice to see Jill, Hanne Lovise, Sarah and Lisbeth again, Scott for the second time in a few weeks, and Cory Doctorow for the first time ever.

Remembering Arafat

The official memorial service happens right now in Egypt. Norwegian Broadcasting has the pictures on their website.

Downgrade in the upgrade

Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing and Electronic Frontier is putting digital copyrights and copyright law in the context of other media. As he says: all media technology is originally pirat technology. To use technology to force people to obey laws - by, for instance, making it impossible to copy a movie on a DVD - unless you hack it - and then making hacking it illegal - is in his opinion the same as saying that blacksmiths have the right to control all transportation, and cars should be outlawed unless they use blacksmith approved wheels.

An interesting perspective, definitely. And so is the information about "upgrades" fixing "bugs", which really is downgrades removing features - because the features can potentially be used for things like copying music off the internet and distributing it. His example is iTunes upgrades - sadly I don't know enough about Apple and iTunes that I caught the precise reference.

Doctorow mentioned public broadcasters and how these should open up the archives - and how Norwegian Broadcasting can set the standard internationally by opening the archives. From what I know, sadly, that will not happen. NRK wants to make money off their archives, and offer to sell the old programs to users. This is a problem for scholars as well as for anybody who would like to use this material for learning or for artworks. I am afraid NRK will not turn out to be the progressive spokesman for the freedom of information that Cory Doctorow speaks for.

Fett

"Fat" is a Norwegian feminist magazine. In Norwegian, "fett" means something is good, in a kind of retro-hip way. But it can also be an acronym from FEministisk TidsskrifT. Norewgian reader? See if they manage to provoke you - that's what they want, the naughty girls!

George vs John

Did you wonder what would happen if George Bush and John Kerry had to live together? In the sims, this can become truth (scary truth?) Link by way of Francis Strand.

Blogging workshop - bloglinks

We just had a fun workshop, and I taught all the people on it how to make a blog with Blogger. It did make me feel slightly as a fraud, since I think blogger is so simple nobody needs my guidance, but I guess it's a good thing to have the time to actually sit down to do it and the motivation of company while doing it, both of which the conference provided. And my presence provided somebody who could say: "oh, but we can change that if you want it differently, now just look here..."

So, a whole lot of people got on the blogging workshop, and made nice and interesting blogs. Some of them wanted to have the other blogs collected in one spot. That is what I hope this post can become.

All of you who were at the workshop: can you please leave a comment, containing the link to your blog?

Pretty please?

Yesterday and the day after tomorrow

The day before today was my father's birthday. I deliberately did not dwell on it, although I did remember. He would have been 80 years old. There would have been a tremendous party, because he loved parties. There would have been food and wine, speeches and songs, guests and party-crashers, flowers and bonfires and lots and lots of presents.

It did not happen. Instead the day is flavoured by a feeling of loss, of something bright and warm gone from our lives. And the 10th of November is a day to be passed by quickly, silently, all of us looking forwards to the 13th and my little sister's birthday. Born on Friday 13th, remembering her day is a sweet celebration to jag me out of melancholia and loss. Life goes on. It can go no other way. And I am waiting for this month's paycheck to hit the account tomorrow, so I can go present shopping.

Links for the talk Wednesday

Some of these links lead to Norwegian chat and discussion sites

Anja Rau - a blog without comments
Alex Halavais - a blog with a sidebar
Lilia Efimova - Where is Lilia?
Stephanie Nilsson - wrote and article about dialogues in blogs
Bitch Ph D - anonymous and personal
Terra Nova - a groups blog with a particular topic

Touchgraph - A visualisation of blog links
Technorati - shows new links
World as a blog - geographic positioning of blogs
Blogdex - shows the most linked pages
Blogosphere Ecosystem - ranking blogs according to linking
Blogshares - a game of blog values and blog ranking (the value of my blog in blogshares)

Social chats - Blink
Topics – Motorbikes at Sol.no
Community - Young Mothers
Information collection - lommelegen.no med diskusjonsforum
Common interest – Min hest med debattsider

Friendster - social site, a dating game - which Danah Boyd mentioned Thursday as well
Orkut - professional network
Flickr.com - for photographs online
Second Life - social game, 3D world with its own newsblog
There - a 3D world with stores and bars

Young Voices

Marit Bødtker, who told me in the car yesterday morning that she started blogging because of me, edits Unge Stemmer - young voices - a blog where she publishes the texts of young Norwegian writers.

She has taken the writers seriously, and when she then asks about their feelings and experiences as writers, she gets very serious and open responses.

Danah Boyd without subtitles

I am listening to Danah Boyd in the webcast, and she speaks about very interesting subjects. One of her references is Burning Man, a phenomenon I have been peripherally aware of for years. This is, however, also an example of how the cultural distance makes it hard to understand her.

Now she is talking about dating - a phenomenon that is mysterious and alien to Norwegians, as we have no dating culture that can be compared to the American dating routine. But I used Friendster as one of the examples yesterday, so the digital area she talks about should be familiar. Jill is also projecting Friendster on a screen here, and she just showed my profile and Lisbeth's profile through that. Danah's story of how Friendster was used for diverging profiles like drug-dealing, data-trading and fraud is fascinating.

Norwegians are used to subtitles in television screens, and now with the chat, as Jill types in questions, there are a kind of subtitles. Still, it is hard to respond to a face on a screen, even if I argued yesterday that people are supposed to be able to take the role of the writer or sender when facing the modern media.

Now Jill was very strict and wanted everybody to log into the chat. First, I logged into the wrogn chat that did not work. Then I logged into the right chat, and it still didn't work. Not much I can do about that. I'll try to catch Jill on AIM and catch her there!

Dinner happening, talking done

There's a video, somebody gratefully turned the light down, so I am this dramatic shadow against my slides. People ask how it went - I have no idea. But I promise, tomorrow the links will appear on the blog - for those who are actually trying to follow what I am saying.

Dinner is just about to finish, I hope I am not missing the coffee. I did catch the shrimp, the reindeer and just a slice of the cloudberry parfait though, so no big loss really.

We all know about technology

The first thing you learn when you plan a lecture or a conference or just about anything that involves making modern technology work, is that something always happens to make it NOT work. And so it did. I am at the WiKi workshop, and there were too many of us (and the wiki was set up wrong), so we had to change the focus from hands on to listening. Oh well, perhaps I can check in to the hotel now, earlier today there was a fire-rehearsal. (I hope that's the right word.)

Collective Action

Rheingold speaks about technology and collective action. It is pretty familiar stuff, but still interesting, particularly as he points out some of the practical advantages connectedness gives groups of people who we would not think of as typical digital technology users. Examples are fishermen, migrant workers and part-time working mothers in the Fillipines - at least as interesting as the flocking of mobile-connected youths in Finland and Japan.

Wisely, Rheingold also points out the aspect of the flocking, smart mobs which ought to be considered by the potentially overly eager fan of the modern technology: Smart mobs are not always wise mobs - so although cooperative action supported by technology can work for democratic action, it can also work, for instance, to instigate non-democratic riots.

Sosial og Digital

I am in Bergen, at the conference on social and digital. I have just been handed the smallest conference program ever, in the form of a memory key, and I just hope the batteries (boosted the poor dell by taking out the CD drive and putting in an extra battery) will last for all those little checks of what happens next. If not, I guess I can just ask Jill, Thomas or Jon. But now: time to listen to Howard Rheingold, who, like me, has fond memories of librarians.

Unlagged

Seems like I have found the perfect cure for jetlag. Be exhausted, be too busy to do anything but follow the local time schedule, collapse about 7 hours before you have to start working again. Repeat the next day. This should get you on the local time in two days.

I have never before wanted so intensely to go to bed at what is about 4 pm New York after only two days on Norwegian time. Now I will pack, and then follow the demand of the body. See you in Bergen.

Digital and social

Tomorrow I will be in Bergen, at Digital og sosial, with Jill and the rest of her fabulous crew. But it is no longer possible to just link you all to their pretty nice homepage, as it forwards us all automatically to the wiki. Sure, I like wikis, but when I don't want the wiki, only the name of the place where the conference is, that gets a little aggravating.

But I can't sit around being aggravated for long. I have to catch up with the work I ignored for three days during the State of Play conference - part of which involved preparing for Bergen. Or, I may have made the preparations a lot bigger than they need to be, because there is an article I just have to write lurking just beyond this conference.

So, I am scouring the web for examples, taking my time to put it all together in powerpoint, pictures and all, in case the net does not cooperate with me. And I am tempted to download and play both there and second life, because I ought to test it before I use it, don't I? When was the lecture again? Oh, right, tomorrow...

Quick visit home

And last night and today was spent with the board I am in on the Norwegian Board of Research. Starting to work the moment I am home is one way to cure jet-lag - I slept at the right time and all night tonight - I am dead tired now, but that's normal around this time. Continental Airlines have a long way to go before they are as smooth and professional as SAS, just being treated efficiently and politely is worth paying for. Yes, I want the direct flights Oslo - New York with SAS back. (insert whine here)

Now it's one day in my office (dear, familiar, comfortable office), before I am off to Bergen and Sosial og Digital. Hopefully, some more nights of comfortable sleep before that.

I heart existensialism

Do you need the answers to the really big questions? Like: why am I here, what is the meaning of life, and why did I meet the same person three times in places of significance to me? That's when you take your case to the existensial detectives. In I Heart Huckabees you get all the answers to how life connects - and a good dose of wicked nihilism too, from the sexy French seductress. The reception of the movie has been a little mixed, but I liked the New York Times review, where the reviewer is as exstatic as I felt when I sat laughing through the credits, waiting for my company to wipe his tears from his eyes.

I was planning to see Shaun of the Dead, but Francis Strand emailed and asked how I liked I heart Huckabees, so of course I had to find out! And Francis, I loved it. I didn't understand every reference in it, but there were moment of such amazing, sublime sillyness that it didn't really matter. At times it did threaten to tip over into too much slapstick, but it was pulled back neatly by the good-natured ridicule that ran through everything.

Where Team America was wicked to the point of sadistic viciousness and Sky Captain had a story that held no surprises after the first introduction of the blonde, the hero and the mad scientist, the free-roaming philosophy of this movie held new twists to the lives of the main characters every time I thought I knew what was going on. And while it was both warm and funny and had a pretty explicit sex-reference, the irony was smeared on heavily. Laughing at the movie I also laughed at bad poetry, nature preservation fanatics, small organisation politics, big corporation politics, the political abuse of a good cause by corporate america, angstridden academics, overeducated philosphers on a quest for the really difficult answers, models and supermodels, self-righteous men, plain stupid and aggressive women and rocks. "You rock, rock."

On Eight street afterwards, in Yaffa Cafe with my favourite Japanese/Finnish couple, we started talking to a woman at the next table, who, for some reason, had seen the movie with her Swedish girlfriend. She was learning Swedish, but only knew the dirty words yet. So, I went to see the movie because of an email from an American male who is learning Swedish because his husband is Swedish, and immediately afterwards started talking about it to an American woman who is learning Swedish because her girlfriend is Swedish. Coincidence? Not after seeing this movie!

Do anybody have the phone number of Jaffe and Jaffe?

Manhattan-French

I survived the trip to Balthazar. This summer I had bought a pair of pretty black shoes with a quite high heel - and wearing them the first time I immediately got blisters on both feet. So they stayed here for emergencies, and perhaps later discreet destruction at a point when I had forgotten I had spent money on them. Since Tuesday was an emergency, I tried them on again. And what a difference weather does! Cool as opposed to HOT and HUMID made the shoes fit like a glove, and stockings rather than bare feet eliminated the chafing problem completely. And so I was about 7 cm taller and felt like my legs were a mile long when I walked to the subway.

It was election day, and we were a little early for the largest crowd. Balthazar is an attempt at a french restaurant on Spring Street, and not a bad one at that. The room is large and spacious, with a very high ceiling. It's kept in colours of brown, smoke-yellow and white, and the decorations - specifically the two figurehead/kore figures on the wall over the bar - are carefully painted to appear stylishly gritty from what I guess is an American idea of French lack of cleaning and ambience accumulated since Matisse had his anisette there. With the ornate ceiling which my New York Connection claims is made out of tin and my host for the evening, the British/Canadian/Cosmopolitan claims is covered with thick embossed paper, the room took on a kind of hyper-frenchness, somehow like the cloisters and its hyper-medievalism. Somebody had stolen bits and pieces of French restaurants and put them all together under this American overdone ceiling, including the handsome waiter from Bordeaux - while the sassy chic frenchlooking waitress was all American under her black and white french maid uniform.

The menu was similarly immaculately french, as was the wine-list. I did however miss the cafe au lait and the chocolate croissant for breakfast, but I guess they leave that to the next-door bakery - also a part of Balthazar. Food was nice, I had foie gras for the first time, the lamb had been spoiled silly in some green, idyllic field - no climbing hills and developing stringy muscle for this little lamb - the wine was a decent Burgundy (which means quite good), and the company was nice... only we forgot all about talking and were basically just people-watching. That's the most fun part about large, spacious restaurants when it's packed and the waiters are busy. You get to see how the staff cooperates, watch the guests in their interaction with each others, see their reaction to the food or their lack of such... like eating snails with a bored expression, or making an onion soup last through your partner's full meal.



Did I pick the right shoes? I guess less would have worked, but apart from the table with four tourists in bluejeans I saw no sneakers and no hiking boots, so in this case heels were definitely more appropriate. The heels were even comfortable enough for an after dinner stroll hunting for a bar and a last drink before I got back on the R line. And the dinner did make a welcome change from slimburgers at the Tiffany Diner.

Out of the US of A

I am leaving Saturday afternoon. Got to start packing. Guess I will not be leaving much behind for the next visit. Good thing I have somewhere else to go. Entering the states again, I will travel light. There is no privacy crossing borders, and I don't foresee the personal space and privacy of visitors being more respected in the next years. Things have changed dramatically since my first visit 5 years ago, and it isn't just me.

Culture shock in progress

Are you a fan of Will and Grace? Did you see the episode where Will for his birthday had to choose between going to the Ice capades which Jack had tickets for and where Grace really wanted to go (probably not a vintage show, but I am not really sure what would be the right link) and Balthazar where Grace had twisted Karen's arm to get them a table?

If you did, you understand that I am a little apprehensive tonight, as I have been invited for dinner by a friend who knows both how to reserve tables and pick up the tab afterwards. Balthazar is a long way from Det Grøne Treet, geographically, socially, culturally and economically. And I have just given both my nice pairs of boots over to the Russian at 95th street for maintainance! What do I do? It's NOT a place for sneakers or hiking boots!

The Knight of the Net

I am sure this is old news for all of you net-savvy readers out there, but I thought it was kind of nice to discover that Tim Berners-Lee has been honoured with a knighthood. Don't know what that entails? Brian Grainger explains it to us laywomen.

Beyond the United State of Play

After days of low-energy, panel-based presentations in State of Play II, the high-point of Saturday for me was the lecture of Leo Sang-Min Whang from Yonsei University. He started ut with correcting several of the other speakers who had been talking about the situation of games in Asia, and correcting them with updated numbers on for instance broadband penetration in Korea, the number of gamers and the use of games in different Asian cultures.

Whang also delivered several very sensible, almost common-sensible statements, which keep being forgotten in the gaming culture debate. He addressed addiction, multiple personality disorders and culture shock, and had an extremely down-to-earth view on this, which was funded in his training as a psychologist. I particularly enjoyed the way he pointed out that to be addicted to novels is a good thing, while being addicted to games is considered bad. Addictions are culturally defined. If we looked at all the important things in our lives, most of us are probably addicted to a great many things - it is just that our addictions are socially and culturally acceptable.

For the numbers he quoted, I recommend you all to go watch his presentation in the video time capsule. The research he is doing is ambitious, and the results are interesting. Comparing gamers from Korea, Japan, Singapore and China, from 2001 and through 2005, all playing Lineage, he has his job cut out for him. I am waiting with happy anticipation for the results to be published in a language I can read. Until then, I am happy I got to hear Whang talk, although I think he had definitely deserved a better slot than the lunch hour.

We are all sinners - somewhere

And in quite a few places we are criminals - or at least felons - too.

China, internet and censorship

According to this news story, China has shut down 1.600 Cybercafes since May. In Norway, that would be a huge number, but it is out of 1,8 million Cybercafes checked. It is slightly less than one in thousand. A larger number, 18.000, have been shut down for "rectification" and will (may?) reopen.

I am actually a little positively surprised by this. I'd have thought the Chinese would have been able to find a lot more cafes making available "violent or pornographic content, and other material it considers harmful to public morality." Seems like "harmful to public morality" isn't that strict after all. Or, perhaps the 1.780.400 other cafes are really conformist and really boring.

Lovecraftian pages

I never read anything by H. P. Lovecraft, despite many urging me to. However, I do recognize his influence on fantasy and science fiction, and through that, on gaming. So for those of us who need to get names, titles, times, references and myths right, here's the H. P. Lovecraft Archive.

State of Play Videos

Some delayed videos, more are added while we blog. And when it's out I may be able to find and link to the piece where I interview Betty Books and David Myers - which is what I was up to between 14.20 and 15.00 East Coast Time.

Virtual Identities

One of the things that always makes me pause and frown (being the shy quiet Norwegian, that's a strong expression of - umm - anything from insecurity by way of thoughtfullness and way over to annoyance), is when the discussions of identity and virtuality take off and people start to make sweeping statements about life in Cyberspace.

As a player and as a scholar interviewing players, I found that identity is extremely stable. The players had certain limitations to their identities which they would not be able to transcend. Examples are for instance how it is impossible to pretend to be more intelligent than you really are. It is possible to appear to be more intelligent than you appear in real life, particularly as there are different skills required in the flesh world and the game world. An otherwise socially insecure and unskilled character, can bloom in the game. But this can not happen unless the potential is within this person, embodied, as it is, in the physical body carrying the wetware of the brain around.

I also found that the flesh world has a very powerful influence on the game world. The game would work around such things as chores, meals, social obligations in the flesh, timezones and repeated stress injuries. And so the body and our physical lives influence the world. I entered as an adult in control of my life and time, with an agenda that let me put other things aside without being accused of neglecting central western social values such as work, duty and ambition. The body is caught by these considerations and so the players' actions will at some level be influenced by this.

For instance, Celia Pearce is just now demonstrating how her research avatar functions. But her avatar interacts oddly with us, broken up and haltingly, and even if she has Mary Flanagan reading for us who can't read the text on the screen, the delay of typing colours the communication. And Celia Pearce is a fluid typer, Mary Flanagan is a willing interpreter, and the audience is patient, but still the physical and the digital does not merge fluently enough to make me read the avatar as anything but an annoyingly slow and actually quite boring filter between us and the real body, and not a value of itself.

The actions in digital worlds are not something "different", they are a same which is edited and limited, the same way a blog representation is limited by the editing activity of the writer. Reading outside of the represented text is so much less rewarding in digital spaces, due to the more narrow bandwidth. It is however the same individual behind all actions, and while different aspects are activated in different contexts, this was observed quite keenly by Erving Goffman in his 1959 Presentations of Self in Everyday Life.

While the discussions of roles, identities and human interactions have developed since Goffman, I miss this background material in the discussions. The digitally mediated interaction areas (aka virtual worlds) are just new contexts for human interaction, and what we do is studying humans, first of all.

And now, as a white arrogant female, rather than bringing to you all the very interesting and important discussion of how ethnicity and gender influences, I have written out my own issues on virtuality and identity in this line of study. However, as a female representative of an ethnic minority I can play the race and gender card and say: my voice has a right to be heard! But I don't know, really, which voice I speak with here, the working class girl, the half-blood sami with nomadic kaukasians on the other side, or the over-educated doctoral one?

And Celia Pearce by way of her avatar and given voice by Mary Flanagan just stated the same as I me: that identity online is aspects of the offline personality.

Game Studies

Just a quick link today, as I am still at State of Play II, but Game Studies Volume 4, issue 1, october 2004 is out. Time for celebration!

Gaming Cultures

Almost too late, that's what I get for trusting a watch, and not any of my many electronically updated and connected gadgets.

Greg Lastowka was opening the first panel, talking about the connection between game and law, and suggesting to his audience that scholars of law before saying anything about how the legislation of games should be constructed, they visit "the foreign country of games".

Betsy Book ran quickly over a few historical overviews about the connection between chat and games, and discussed the difference between social spaces and games, drawing very strict lines and claiming that gaming is very different from social interaction. At this point I itched to protest, but I never needed to, because the next speaker was T.L.

T.L. Taylor talks as I write about the importance of the culture of games, and points out what I wanted to point out during Betsy Books presentation, that games are social spaces, and that the dichotomy of social/gaming is in the way of understanding both games and chatrooms. People play in chatrooms and chat in games. She also points out clearly that players are fundamentally producers, that the labour of other players makes the games playable.

Play is Diverse - same game can be played in many different ways. Players create the game, the game culture and the game life - the structure and design is nothing without the players themselv, and T.L. wars against fine-tuning the game until the structure is so rational there is no space for the humanity of the gamers.

Perhaps most important in T.L.'s presentation is her warning against a dualistic, dichotomous understanding of games. Perhaps my sympathy is caused by our common academic understanding of the human culture as fluid and manysided, not stagnant, simple and black/white,

Constance Steinkuehler opens by saying "ditto". I understand the feeling. She talks about her experience from Lineage II, and the issues of "game sweatshops", in this case in China. The "farming" of certain objects in the game for sale in real life economies outside of the game has caused an inflation of certain parts of the economy, and the characters that have a crafting advantage (girl dwarves) are being treated as symbolic representations of what the gamers assume is chinese players, and racism is expressed as a discrimination of the girl dwarves.

But the community is reacting against the racism, and the issue and the discussions change the gameplay and the community.

Dave Myers is the last to present at the panel. He focuses mainly on the cognitive play behaviour, play as a semiosis, a manipulation of sign and symbols.



T. L. Taylor at the panel.

Backchannel?

Jill asks: is there an im or irc backchannel? If there is one, I am not connected to it. But now I have turned my aim on, and the name is implisitt. If you want to im me, I am still awake.

Coffee was not just coffee, but giant brownies, chicken wings, large trays of vegetables and dip, muffins, sandwiches - the generous side of US cooking. Energy is up, particularly after I met Scott Rhettberg, hugged Mary Flanagan (now with white-blond hair), chatted with Ren Reynolds and was introduced by TL to Celia Pearce.

Game or work

The discussion is flowing back and forth about virtual property and real world markets. In the discussion about the limit between work and play ended up more or less uncontested defined as "It isn't work if you enjoy it". At the same time there seems to be a problem with people making money off the games, because that ruins the borders between the games and areas like ebay where game objects are sold.

I miss an important aspect here. How does all of this compare to sports? Are sports work or play? Are professional athletes sportsmen or labourers? Is the player who makes money the dystopian gambler or the ideal athlete?

I think I want somebody, soon, to discuss gaming and sports. There is a link there which might be beneficial to the game studies.

Freedom of Speech in Sims Online

Professor Peter Ludlow, editor of the Second Life Herald, formerly Alphaville Herald, the blog/newspaper that used to cover Alphaville, a place inside The Sims Online (TSO), just descibed his run-in with TSO over a case of prostitution he pointed out in 2003.

Electronic Arts and The Sims Online have repeatedly tried to shut down Professor Ludlow and the Alphaville Herald, after banning him from the game.

Interesting story, for many reasons, and for bloggers of course the connection gaming, blogging and cencorship is eyecatching.

________________
Update: an article from Wired on the Free Expression panel.

State of Play II

OK, I am here, in a large, pretty room with wireless connection, television, events filmed and supposedly streamed. If I find that link, I'll pass it on.

The form is very dense, no time for casual chatter. Somebody are at the end of the room, in the panel, talking, constantly. Each panel is set up like a conversation between the members of the panel, rather than as presentations or lectures. I normally like this kind of panels, but during the third in row, this is straining my attention. There is something to be said for the thought-out presentation, the rhetorically considered talk.

I also fear I will be exhausted before the day is over, and starved of social interaction. How can it be possible to talk to others and discuss issues when there are talks through every meal? And then the lunch period is supposed to be organised as well, as people sign up for "birds of a feather" tables during lunch time. Perhaps will this work wonderfully, certainly somebody thinks so, as it is organised this strictly, but I already feel rebellious, the rebellion transmuting into a desire for alternative activities, for reading non-related books (perhaps a tiny little thing on Derrida hidden in my notebook - at least it looks kind of polite to be intensely busy with my notebook...). Last night's talk during dinner was very distracting and distracted, I wanted to chat with the people on the table I was at, T.L. Taylor, Richard Bartle, Greg Lastowka and several other interesting people, many from Terra Nova, but instead I was captured, listening to anecdotes of Second Life.

Although some of that was interesting. Check out Wagner James Au's Second life blog.

And the man in the panel just said "This is the first time I have ever sat next to a socialist." I am a long way from home. But closer to Kansas than Volda.

Dark Moon

Dark Moon, originally uploaded by Rotill.

The dark moon, not black but ghostly, bloodily red.

partial moon

partial moon, originally uploaded by Rotill.

Taken from by the Verrezano Bridge, the moon is a wedge, partially eaten by shadow, as we wait for the dark of the moon and the release of magic.

Bay Ridge to Union Square

The weather is just too good to stay in and finish all I should today, so I have charged both batteries in my laptop, charged the big camera and cleaned out the memory sticks. I have checked for wifi on Manhattan, and planned my trip.

I am using the NYC bloggers by subway map, and have picked some of the more interesting (to me) blogs along the route from here to Union Square. The list is:

95th street (Where I am now)
Opened Source

86th street
600 seconds
86th Street

Court Street
Ambulance Chaser
The landlord's black-eyed daughter

Rector Street
Games*Design*Art*Culture - An old familiar one there - didn't know he claimed Rector street as "home" for the blog.
Rachel and the City

Prince Street
Wooster Collective
What I saw - A dead weblog, but interesting for the last observations.
Biz Stone, Genius - Another name we have heard before.

Union Square
Lusty Lady
City Cynic

Today's plan, before I go to the State of Play II, is to get a subway pass, fill the backpack with all the things I have not been doing because I have tried to work, and go prepare the presentation and the article I have been saving for later. I will also be shpping for drumstick for the drummer boy, something to wear for a party this weekend (the suitcase was almost empty when I left this time. All work and no play makes for a dull wardrobe), bring a map of NYC, a list of restaurants I haven't tried, a card that will get me into Bobst Library and the cash I have left. Did you by the way catch the weblog of Steve, who lived in Bobst Library?

I'll have to live on what's in my NYC connection's fridge for something over a week, but at least then I don't bother you all with worries over my diet. Oh, and somewhere along the line I will try to remember to post the pictures from the eclipse tonight. I saw it down by the Verrezano Bridge, the weather was beautiful and the college camera, bulky as it is, caught the red moon. Ooops - I am running late. We'll see how much of this I get around to!

hawairose

hawairose, originally uploaded by Rotill.

Den blomstrer igjen og igjen - tar en liten pause - og så blomstrer den videre.

Sassy young man

Just because he thinks nobody will ever be interested in his blog, I, the evil Dr. Mortensen, will put in this link to point you, my fifteen readers, in his direction.

If you read Norwegian, you may enjoy to have a look at Thomas' blog, and learn about how to love a VolksWagen, how to survive a media theory exam and how to dream of Cuba. And if you read English, you can enjoy the two posts in there which are in English. They happened through the inspiration of this blog. Sensibly, he returned to our own language, which he uses with flair and delight.

The distractions of cake

What do you get when you have two workaholics, a ruined hot water valve, a not-too-active landlord, a plumber who will show up "sometime this afternoon" and a lagging and drooping wireless network? Well, the potential for a mess is endless. People like this have to be distracted, or disasters will happen. As they did, even as I write, the drooping wireless network flicking on and off, my laptop occasionally shut off from the world, occasionally connected at monstrous speed, as the person at the controlling computer is doing who knows what. I managed to postpone the disaster until after I was done working on the articles I have to write these two weeks, and I managed that through some ingenious manouvers early in the day.

I started planning for this already while shopping for groceries. Getting ingredients for work-intensive food was the plan. And the menu this evening was to be roast beef, guacamole and almond-orange poundcake. My NYC connection hates having anybody working in his kitchen while he is in the vicinity, and as he makes good food, I don't complain about being made superflous. The pound cake was created from this basic recipe, and adjusted to fit what was available and my particular diet.

1 cup butter
2/3 cup fructose
5 eggs
2 cups almond flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
zest of one orange
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:
Cream butter and fructose well. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each. Mix flour with baking powder and add to egg mixture a little at a time while beating. Add orange zest and vanilla extracts. Blend well.

Pour into greased 9-inch cake pan and bake at 350-degrees F for 50-55 minutes.

This cake didn't rise too well, but the taste is rich and luxurious. The almonds and the orange zest makes it juicy, while the eggs bind the whole thing together. With a glass of port (barely on the diet, but since red wine is OK, port almost is...), it made for the perfect dessert after a simple meal of meat and guacamole.

So what's going on with the network? Well, my very sweet but very wannabee geeky host bought an airport express to extend the wireless network and enhance the signal in the far end of his apartment, as well as use it (once I am out of here) for playing music from his laptop to the livingroom speakers. For some reason he decided that the way I set it up was wrong, and he has been trying to repair that for days. Today's attempts closed the whole wireless network down for the laptops (his apple, my dell), so since after dinner I have had extremely patchy access. He is still working on it, and with the same propriety air as in the kitchen. Perhaps, if I start doing dishes I will have a chance to fix his wireless network...

The Technology Limit

I love my digital camera. So I ought to love a better digital camera even more. But the better camera comes with a bulkier lens, a heavier case and a lot more options than I can quickly learn.

I love my cellphone. So I ought to love a better cellphone more. But the better cellphone comes with a manual as thick as the phone itself, but much much bigger.

I love my computer. So I ought to love a better computer more. But the better computer has so many other uses, a webcam, the possibility of making a network where I would like, a snakes nest of wires and extensions that weight almost more than the computer itself, and which I need a consultant to set up.

So what am I saying? I am saying that everybody have a certain level of "couldn't care lessessness". At that point we stop wanting things to be better, and want them to be simpler, lighter or smaller instead. Technology is at the moment exploring this edge, and the competition is fierce. In which direction can the limit be pushed? Who can do it? How? Who ever pushes in the right direction first, and can make people see it is the right direction, wins. If they know their advertising.

Interesting time to like technology.

Batman meets Jurassic Park and James Bond

I went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow yesterday, in the East Village. This is a movie for people with special interests (or in need of not-too-challenging entertainment). What you need to enjoy this movie is just the right balance in your preferances, and you need to like Batman for the visuals and the mood (love the blimp mooring to the top of the Empire State Building), James Bond for the beautiful women, the fantastic vehicles and the sidekick, and Jurassic Park for - well, of course, the Dinosaurs! If you throw in a touch of King Kong, a lot of dystopic war movies and some Russian poster art, you have got it.

Story? Did you say story? Eeehhhh, well, that should be easily covered by just about any superhero comic strip from the 60ies. Actually, Superman gets a link as the female reporter is Lana Lang if she was played by Greta Garbo, and with some goodwill you can see a touch of Godzilla and some War of the Worlds there too. But somebody got so busy just quoting the classics of pop culture that the story shrivelled and died somewhere around the third "but I told you not to come with me" scene.

For a barbarian like me, that didn't matter though. I like pop culture collages.

Generation defining itself

A project where the editor collects poems and short stories from all over the world, from people born between 1960 and 1982. Some volumes have already been posted, and a good chunk of the writing is online. Would you like to participate? The submission guidelines are there.

Life in an appartment building: hot water

This building runs on hot water. In the morning I wake up to the sound of four crazy percussionists playing dangerously close to my ear. First time I heard this sound emanating from the radiator, I thought something was going to blow, and it would be bad. Later I learned that there is no danger, it is just steam hissing through old pipes. Right, the thought of steam under pressure causing that much noise behind old pipes was not reassuring at all, I can tell you that much.

Most of the time there is plenty of hot water. My frugal shower habits learned sharing a tiny hotwater tank with my then-boyfriend-now-husband as students in Bergen hardly taps into the supply. As a matter of fact, the water isn't even warmed up before I am out of the shower. Normally. This weekend though, the water is always warm. The secret: it is constantly running.

The bathroom has been transformed into one of those indoors fountains, and a hot one at that. Running in an even, peaceful stream from the hot water tap, we are wasting this building more than I care to think about in fuel and water bills. In an attempt to stop this waste, we called the supervisor of this building. This is now a day ago.

He was supposed to show up this morning, but by now it is afternoon, and no supervisor. The mailbox on his messaging machine is full, no chance to leave a message about the leak. I have wasted the morning sitting around waiting (and when I am waiting for something else, sensible work done doesn't count, we all know that), and I have considered doing violence to the tap with my own dainty hands.

But you don't do that in apartment buildings in the states. Because if you do and something is less than perfect, or something happens later, you will be held responsible. So your main maintanance task is calling the super. Who has a full message machine. Who does not pick up the phone. Who does not show up when he said he should.

I am done listening to the warm-water-fall, and am heading out of here. There's a city to explore out there, and more stores than there are potential customers in Volda.

Playing the dark side...

By way of Lisbeth, this delicious little comic from Infinite Lives album:

State of play

With the support of my darling department, I will be able to attend this conference while I am in NYC anyway. It looks like fun, three days of familiar names finally getting attached to real life people rather than little pieces of writing or large chunks of software.

SGS day two

Started out late from Baltimore, but I managed to get to the two main events (for me) on the second day.

The panel on Games as Mass Media Dialog Devices was, however, a disappointment. With a title and a write up as it had, I expected most of the presenters to talk about games, mass media and dialogue. Ian Bogost was first off, and he scored one out of the three, as he was presenting what is best described as a persuasive games manifesto, a description of his view of how games can be understood and created to be persuasive. At the end of his manifesto, I started wondering if what he was describing is games at all, or something else: ergodic persuasion, perhaps?

The second speaker, Cheryl Bernard, had been in Afghanistan, and obviously had a little culture shock. One of the things she had discovered what that media literacy is not instinctive or intuitive, but learned. I am very happy that she discovered this, but a little sad that she needed to go all the way to Afghanistan and feel like she was meeting natives willing to sell Manhattan for glass beads, in order to learn this. But she did get around to games in the end, and spoke with great enthusiasm for using games to teach particularly science in arabic countries. My question at the end of that was however: are games the logical solution to lack of just about EVERYTHING you need in a school, from teachers to paper.

America's Army with Chris Chambers scored a full house though. That was an exellent example of how a game can also be an arena for exchange between humans, a site of learning and a presentation of an ideology. I think they discovered that in Greece a few thousand eyars ago, but America's Army has brought it right into the electronic age.

As for Nico Mele - at this point I was exhausted by taking notes, but I did note that he went on the subway with a game in his pocket, and it beeped when he met a kid with the same game, on his way to school. A gaydar, Nina Wakeford style, but for gamers.

The keynote that day was however worth the wait. Johnny Wilson's keynote is supposed to be out there. If you can find it, read/listen to it, it was the talk to summarise a sensible, informed view of computer games and their development.

And one observation: Gamers use ALL kinds of computers, the variety was much larger than the mac-dominated academic conferences. Fun, really.
The Hot Spot

Museum of the American Indian

Luckily, not all the sessions at the Serious Games Summit were equally interesting, so I hurried off to lunch and a quick look-around at the Museum of the American Indian. Lunch elsewhere was a brilliant idea, the lunch-boxes at the conference contained nothing I felt comfortable about eating (exept the apple, that was nice), and I needed motivation to stay away from the way-too-nice cookies. So I had American food, south-west style (I think), tamales and a nice apple and orange salad.

The museum was interesting, but I should of course had a lot more time than I did. Most of all I looked at the building itself, a lovely warm yellowish stone building, all curves and natural materials. The entrance faces the White House - a pale structure fading into the mist, from that vantage point.

Baltimore Station

Tuesday morning in the lovely railway station in Baltimore - late for the train, with time to take pictures.

Serious Games Summit lecture

SGSlecture.JPG, originally uploaded by Rotill.

From behind a lot of backs. The rooms I have been in so far have all been packed, and with the options of either seeing only half the room (in the larger room) or only seeing backs (In the smaller rooms), somehow I have a strong feeling that not all hotels are ideal venues for conferences. They serve nice cookies though!

At the Serious Games Summit

So managed to get here, almost in time for the first keynote with Jim Dunnigan. The bit I managed to catch was "Gamers are workers. If you get a person who wants to go through hundreds of pages of game manuals, organise a myriad of little pieces on complex maps and keep track of a complex, evolving story, that's your man!" I guess it can't be said too often.

Ben Sawyer and Ian Bogost (of Watercooler Games) spoke of Project Connect: from A to Z, and spoke warmly of flash games and small, short games. For their use I think the small games are a god way to go, as the games basically demonstrate complex, but finite processes. Their session was however a little sale-strategy heavy for a poor academic, who feels that the point is the games and their structure and function, not whether or enough Ben Sawyer is a good salesman. To this audience that may be the main point, though.

Next session was How can games change future behaviors. This was a both frustrating and interesting session. In a way this put the Serious Games approach sharply into focus for me. The speakers in the panel treated games as algorithms, as training environments and as persuasion tools. And by using all of one side of the media theory, they showed how games can be powerful and influental, and why that is the reason why they should be used by schools, the military and everybody else why might want to influence a game-friendly target group. There was absolutely no mention of the theories and studies used by other academics when arguing that games are not dangerous: in this case they wanted to prove that games can be dangerous, but with a beneficial content, they are good. Only one question really addressed this issue, when a gentleman towards the end asked a validity quesiton:

Validity questions: Teaching Americans about Arabic culture through multiplayer games, why do we find that people either behave like american, Arabians or a third party, independent of both other cultures: Gamers. How will gamers in this case learn anything but gaming culture?

A long and interesting discussion which relates to this came from the "Real Rules" post on Terra Nova.

I met two nice young men immediately after the keynote, and had their company for lunch: Jason and Dennis are both here. I also hooked up with Stuart Moulthrop and met Eric Zimmerman before I hurried up to Monet IV to catch the next session.

The last session before this blogging and breathing break (this is the least airconditioned conference in quite some time) was a panel on Game Based Approaches to Story Based Training. A refreshingly narratology and ludology approach to the role of story in games, it lacked a common understanding of what the story is in a game, how it is represented, whether stories are linear or not. The most useful distinction emerging in the panel was between embedded and emergent stories, where embedded stories are the stories built into the game while emergent stories are the stories the players perceive and create while playing. Nobody disagreed with the idea of games having stories, but I also missed some talk on how stories work as training environments - why is it so great that the games tell stories?

Now I am in a comfortable chair in the lobby, accompanying several other serious gamers who have found a place where to connect. There are all kind of computers here, but interestingly much less macs and more PCs than in the academic conferences.

Team America

Before returning to the Serious Games, I want to mention a movie I saw Saturday: Team America, jet-lagged and wanderign Manhattan in the early afternoon.

I loved the movie, but tired as I was I managed to register that it may be offensive. So, for the sensitive osuls out there: If you get offended by joking with the American armed forces, actors being called F.A.G.s, the UN portrayed as impotent and Hans Blix being treated horribly by a North Korean dictator who is desperately lonely and distributing weapons of mass destruction, by cultural stereotypes and the streets of Paris paved with croissants, explicit sex between puppets and overly explicit use of goo in unappetising scenes with some of the same puppets, extreme violence against puppets and really bad lyrics, then you should not, I repeat should not, see this movie. Not a lot of blasphemy though, so religious people should be able to see it. That is, unless they object to the offensive language. For a preview of the offense, see the clips.

I found the hotspot!

It's in the lobby, and does not reach all the way to the back of the Loews l'enfant Plaza Hotel. But it's here, it's free and I can pick up my email. Am I addicted? No, I have just made myself depend on wireless technology. That's not the same thing, and a distinction we should make before talking about "addiction". That is a word that's frequently used here, and I am longing for a touch of reason in the use of it.

Fear of Flying

The airport in Volda/Ørsta was always this open, friendly place. It was small but felt much larger, as the only enclosed spaces were the ticket office/rest area for the crew, and the toilets. The windows opened up towards the airport as well as the parking lot, it was easy to see which planes landed and which cars came to pick you up. Passengers and their company alike could move freely from arrival to departure, and it was a meetingplace where you'd chat with neighbours coming and leaving or dropping off or fetching.

Notice the "was".

As I arrived early Friday morning it was an ugly, dirty building-space. Walls had come up to make it a maze, and sawdust irritated the eyes and lungs and covered every surface. The people working there were still as amazingly nice. Jokingly they asked if I had a lot of stuff in my handluggage. "Sure, it's packed" I replied. With a touch of genuine concern they asked: "Can't you check that in?" "No way," I replied, "It's a computer." With a smile and a shrug the man behind the counter let it go. "Then the plane will just have to be delayed. Hurry up and you'll be first in line." I had no idea what waited after this, but I kissed my husband goodbye in front of the counter, uncomfortable, and turned to go into the maze of temporary walls. I came to a dead end in front of a door that had never been there before. A security person came out and called the man waiting in front of me, and left the door slightly ajar. As I tried to walk through I was immediately told to go back. Beyond the door was a comfortably familiar waiting room, and reassured, I stepped back and waited patiently.

When it was my turn, I was led through the door and into an other little temporary space. A small room where I was told to submit my backpack and handbag, and to stand in the corner, legs and arms spread. The female security officer frisked me, while the male went through my stuff, carefully but thoroughly. He poked into every book and every wallet and pocket, his touching of the insides of my wallet feeling a lot more intrusive than the hands stroking down my body, arms, legs. But they were both very polite and very nice, chosen, perhaps, for their easy courtesy and matter-of-fact attitude rather than intimidation. Because there was none, just an air of "we all know why this has to happen, let's make it as painless as possible."

The plane WAS late, but not due to me. A gaggle of men who started out with beer at 6 am came just after me, having waited outside as long as possible before they went through. The waiting-room had been stripped of the television set and the artwork, probably to save it from ruin during the rebuilding, and we all waited in uncomfortable silence, even the slightly drunk men being impressed with the gravity of what had happened, the change in our lives caused by terrorism somewhere far away, and one lunatic with an axe - not that far away.

Our local airport staff hasn't quite lost their touch of friendly concern and personal service though. I was warned Thursday night, by a text message to the cellphone, that I needed to check in half an hour before the flight. Now, I know EVERY airline says this, but in Volda/Ørsta nobody really ever cared. We'd come strolling happily in ten minutes before takeoff, and still make it comfortably, Hence, the special care for the passengers, a little warning that the world has changed and the ripples have reached this remote corner.

Time to go west

And since I live at the edge of the west coast, that means getting on a plane and going far, to New York in my case. It is weird that one of the world's largest cities gives me the peace I need to write. Perhaps I need to focus to create my own little pool of quiet in the middle of chaos, and so I am not that easily distracted by the flutter of a bird, the sound of the wind?

Or is it simply that in New York I am so far away from the responsibilities of everyday life, in time and space, that I manage to focus on my own work?

Whatever, I am off tomorrow morning really early. Time to pack, I guess.

Internet Archive

A link that's long overdue for mention here: The Internet Archive with the Wayback Machine. And here I found a link to Alice in Wonderland in TextArc. TextArc is an application that represents books in one page by putting all the words in the book on that page. Weird, interesting and puzzling, perfect for making linear texts dissolve in all directions.

(Blogger is acting up, so I may have published this five times already. But one more attempt, first saved as a draft this time, and now hopefully it will publish...)

Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!

I don't want ANY spam. That's got spam in it! I don't LIKE spam!

Brittle Bones

Today, just an old link that bears repetition. I found brittle-bones.com by Marc Striklin years ago, but it is still out there and still fantastically whimsical and quite a little morbid.

Sage journals

Until the end of October, Sage offers free access to the full texts of articles in their journals. Thank you for the tip, Anne!

Blogs, games and advertising

The red assed baboon has an article on why blogs are good for advertising. A link I may return to soon! Link by way of Jan Fredrik.

Papers at Other Players

15 papers have been accepted, mine is one of them. I am quite happy, also at the reviews, which rate from "exellent" to "work on this, you lazy slob". Considering the pressure I was under around submission time the last review is the response I expected, so I'll try to keep the qualities pointed out in the "exellent" review and get more of the precision demanded in the "work on this" review.

Still - being peer reviewed is exhausting. It never becomes routine. I guess it should not, but I wish I could develop some calluses soon.

Serious Games = Military Games

The category "things I know nothing about" is big enough to fill the worlds largest libraries, and max out the internet storage capacity. So it's not news that I am finding new and interesting things to learn. Some of these things I expect to find at the Serious Games Summit next week.

The first thing I didn't know was that "serious games" are so dominated by the military. If you choose a track on the summit, your options are "military" or "education". If you choose "education" there are four sessions. If you choose "military" there are 31. I was aware that the military used games for education and development, I was not aware that they had been doing it for such a long time. It is however interesting to see what they define as "military". Let's look at the keynote speakers.

The first keynote speaker, Jim Dunnigan, runs his own gaming company started in a New York basement, and develops wargames - for the civilian market. He lectures to the military, and is an analyst of military strategy with a background which includes a period in Korea.

Second keynote is by Dr. Johnny L. Wilson, and is also considered part of the military track. Dr. Wilson is an author of High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, and speaks of how games impact perception.

Looking at the military track with new eyes, I find that it could easily have been dramatically reduced. How about this description:

It is thought by some that providing deep insight into complex subject matter, simulating interpersonal relationships and providing an interactive environment offers great opportunity to shape the logic that drives various behaviors. While there is much debate regarding games’ ability to cause behavior, there is no doubt that games have the potential to provide the learning that underpin people's attitudes about a variety of subjects.

This is the description of a military track session: How can games shape future behaviors? Of course, I haven't read the manuscript, it may be that everything they talk about is how to use games in order to make game-players into better soldiers and more efficient weapons. The three available bios of the presenters indicate a more diverse presentation that that.

So why is the military track so overwhelming? Is this an economical decision: If it is interesting to the military there is a huge potential market and it's easy to get support for the conference? Is it a political decision: The US is at war, and only an effort that can aid the military is worth supporting? Or is it a pedagogic decision: the scholars and educators are able to search through the material and find what is interestign even if it says "military track", while those who are interested in a military need to have it spelled out if it might be interesting to them?

Looking at the four "education" tracks offers a fourth explanation: Serious games are aimed at the military, and not at education. The Education track contains a funding and research roundtable, a roundtable for game developers to discuss how to attract more projects, a military roundtable (!) and one - 1 - lecture discussing how serious games can reshape education.

It is all about catering to the military, because yes, that is the big market. From the description of the military roundtable:

The military market for games is the leader in the serious games field. This roundtable is meant to allow for some freewheeling discussion about how this field of military simulation development will progress. Attendees are asked to outline the current problems, needs, and key resources that people interested in this market should know more about.

Why am I surprised at all? I guess I come from the land of innocence. The first game I studied academically was a game to teach young men about sex: sexually transferable diseases, safe sex, nice sex and some hints about how to treat girls. The work I have been doing since has been flavoured by an interest in how games can be a tool of development, freedom of choice and a way to liberate the learning potential of those who may not respond to standard procedures. Going to the Serious Games Summit makes me feel a little like Pippin returning to Bree. I don't think I will be able to find and uproot this Saruman. That, I suspect, will be up to the American voters.

My alternate life

Dennis G. Jerz describes his close encounter with an alternate life. It made me think about where I could have been. Or rather, where I at 18 realistically thought I would end.

At 18 I was a confused high-school student. In the week-ends I did my mother's cleaning job at the hospital, in the week I did the household chores. The summer I spent gutting salmon. With regular intervals I would have to look after my little sister while my father spent time at the hospital, and what I made in the summers would disappear for books and clothes and at times food when the adults were too busy surviving to remember that they still had two children living at home. In between this I struggled weakly to keep up at school.

My future was pretty clear to me. I would get a job cleaning or something similar, I'd marry a local man, have a couple of children, buy a little house in the area and split my energy between raising children, cleaning, looking after the house, garden and husband, and read trashy novels. On the coastal steamer some years ago I saw one of my old boyfriends and his family - a tired-looking wife with too much makeup and two stubborn, red-headed boys (just like himself). I pulled discretely further into the corner where I was seated and raised the book I was reading like a shield between the potentialities.

I have the house, kids and husband - and occasionally the trashy novels - but somebody else cleans my office, and the experiences I have through my work are way beyond anything I imagined. No, I don't ever want to go back. But I always make sure to be really polite towards people who do the kind of work I could have done, if I had not taken another turn at some point in the past. We could all have lived some alternate life - and not all alternatives are to be mourned.

Neverhood

Do you remember the Neverhood? I had almost forgotten the game until I found it among my daughter's CDs as I was looking for something else. At the time of the release in 1996 it was voted "Game of the year" by - somebody. The link leads to Gamespot, and I can't find anything about a Game of the eyar award there. But I did find an article mentioning a follow-up to the Neverhood: Skullmonkeys. Their website is down, but there is a link to a review - possibly from 1998.

So what about Neverhood? I just think it is the prettiest game I ever saw. The music is cool and funny, the clay figures are amazingly well made, the animation impressive and the whole thing just a pleasure to have running on the PC. And it's the best example I know of a delicious interface - and a really bad game. As a game it just doesn't work. The puzzles are so cryptic you have to be inside the head of the creator to get it, and even using the cheats heavily I never managed to finish the game. It is slow, not because it has to be, but due to the rhythm - it's a cool, laidback game with slow responses and long pauses. Good for contemplating the impossible puzzles... not so good for fun intense gameplay. In the terms of Huizinga: there is no tension.

Still, I was very happy when I found it today. Bad games can make good examples!

And while we're annoyed...

Have you tried ordering tickets online for Amtrak from outside of the US? The system demands an American or Canadian zip-code for your billing information. Somebody really should tell them that zip-codes are not universal. Or that foreigners might want to use Amtrak, for instance to get to conferences.

ICQ virus annoyance

Recently on ICQ I have received several different attempts at authorisation from somebody with a webpage that tries to install something on my PC. What happens is: I get a request to authorize this anonymous person. There is no information on the person following the request, but there is a second message. This message contains an URL. It's when you click the URL it happens. I do not know what "it" really is, as the virus software on my machine was going crazy, the Volda College network version of dropping steel doors to contain the damage.

So: for ICQ users out there: Don't click the URL if one part of the adress is "lonar". (As in the crater. Perhaps a meteorite carried the computer virus here?)

Who's the hunter?

Hilde links to this article on hunting and hunters in Norway. As Hilde points out, it is quite stereotypical and simple minded. I don't recognize my hunter friend in this at all.

If possible, we buy a calf or yearling deer from a farmer and hunter I have known since childhood. He owns the farm surrounding the house where my mother grew up - the land which today is our summer paradise. He is the same age as me, a man with a warm sense of humour, a generous attitude towards my nomadic family that occasionally spends a few weeks living in the middle of his land, and a friendly dose of curiosity towards what we do with our lives.

His passion (apart from his family and the farm itself) is hunting, and owning a farm on the Norwegian West-Coast lets him do exactly that. He has a quota of game as part of the land he owns, and as many of the other people in the area where he lives are too old to hunt their own quota, he also shoots for several other farms. This means that he spends the autumn weeks out in all kinds of miserable weather. It also means that the rest of the year he is studying the deer, preparing. Walking the mountains and fields about his farm he studies the deer. He knows their paths and where they mate, he knows where they graze and where they drink, their habits and their hiding spots.

When I come to pick up the meat, it hangs neatly cleaned in his barn. He can tell me where he shot the animal, and laughs and complies when I question him about its last meal. Over the years he has told me that "this one will taste less of game than the others, because I have seen it on the fields most of the summer" or "this is nice and plump, the mother was very close, we had shot her and then we had to shoot the calf as well - lucky we still had one left on the quota." It is all part of the ritual: visiting with him, updating on what we are up to, seeing how his children grow, asking about his parents, telling him about the failing health of my mother. He is a link to an area that somes as close as any for being where my nomadic family has roots, and we enjoy this little ritual from both sides.

This doesn't really say much about him as a hunter though, it is more about him as a nice person, somebody I like to have as part of both my past and my present. What speaks of his skill as a hunter is how the deer has been shot. Sometimes there has been some bleeding, and he tells me he won't really charge much for those parts. Sometimes the death has been almost instantenous, and he has a touch of price in his friendly face as he decribes the shot. But over the 15 years I have been buying deer from him, they have all, every single one, been killed with one shot. He never shoots unless he knows he can kill the animal as quickly and as humanely as possible. One shot to the chest, stopping the heart or filling the lungs with blood, causing the animal to collapse and die very quickly. He never brags at this, but takes pride in the meat being clean and as undamaged as possible.

This is the hunter for me, the man who supplies his family and his "tribe" with meat, expertly, quietly and with great pride in his skill but very little posturing. While hunting is a passion with him it isn't the passion of the half-skilled player of games, it is the passion of the professional, tempered with skill and knowledge.

Play it again

I am back playing two favourite games, Baldur's Gate (works on my laptop) and Neverwinter Nights, and today I even got time to play some while at work. The revelation today was that playing a game while I am in work-mode makes the analytical approach kick in rather than the "let's just sit here and kill some bad guys instead of watching television" mode. I have made a new character - a sorcerer rather than the fighter types I normally choose - and playing I noticed details in the game I never saw before.

First I started noticing the visual effects. Fighters have little of fancy visuals in Neverwinter Nights. There is a certain goryness and goo factor, but it's most about checking for damage points. The sorceress had interesting visuals, each spell different and with different words as well. It could be possible to recognize the type of spell being cast from the words spoken and the images accompanying the spell - the colour of the rays, the shape of the power.

Then I started noticing the consequences of the spells inside the game. Casting light caused the sorceress to be the source of the light. When she moved the shadows moved with her, long grey shadows creeping across the floor at some distance from herself. This was one of the really impressive effects to me. Flashy, short-term and highly demonstrative effects appear simple, but this kind of consistent and fairly long-term effect is such a showoff of the skills of the programmers. Subtle and unecessary detail which still flesh out the illusion - I love it.

I find I am a lot more aware of how this character performs. I have been in most of the areas already. I haven't gotten all the way through even the first part, there's a young man who hogs the one home computer I can play Neverwinter Nights on, but I have been through the early scenes. This means that I can focus more on the skills and abilities of the character and less on surviving. The challenge is actually to survive with the mage. After playing powerful constitution-rich fighter types that can take a hit it's a challenge to learn to send the henchman into danger and stay far enough away that my character will survive. At the moment there is this dire spider that just keeps killing us off, so I am haunting some other parts of the area, collecting some experience points and money, hoping for a new level and perhaps enough gold to hire another henchman, one that kills better and quicker than the current one.

And there are a few new quests I haven't been able to do before, as they are exclusive to the classes. This makes playing it again a whole new and different experience from reading a book over again. Some is similar, like discovering new details, some is totally different, like the class-exclusive quests. Fun fun fun - even if it is, actually, pretty painful to see the character die over and over again...

The Story was here!

Implementation may be slow when the photographer is busy, but here they are, fragments of stories reaching into the far, remote north.

Cheating and the system

According to this article in Dagbladet.no (in Norwegian), the number of students cheating for exams has multiplied since the quality reform.

The universities and colleges in Norway are starting to read the submitted exams papers electronically, to compare them to documents on the internet. They will be compared to Norwegian and English language douments, which means they will not just be electronically read but also to a large extent translated. This is an amazing feat for a computer system, and I am very curious about the efficiency of the system.

What the University of Oslo will be looking for is
1) immaturity - which is defined as quoting large amounts of well-known works, things which are so easy to discover that the student is not suspected of having tried to cheat, but just of not knowing how to write a scholarly paper. This will just lead to failing.

2) cheating - defined as quoting large amounts of text from unknown sources not cited in the bibliography and not marked as quotes or citations in the text.

Some universities and colleges will make the stakes higher for the cheaters, and hope that will have a preventive effect: if a student is caught cheating he or she is immediately suspended for the rest of the year, and may not make a new attempt at passing the test. The last part is the gravest reaction, because the student will have invested a lot of time and money in getting to the point of being allowed to take the exam, and also, with the new system, one exam can be vital to finishing your whole degree - which is a new situation in Norway.

That brings us back to the quality reform and why there is more cheating since the reform. I'll have to think a little about that one, but I have a few suggestions, and they are all based on the system, not on the lack of student morality. My basic approach to students is that they individually are as smart, honest and well-behaved as all other classes before them. Any significant changes are most likely caused by changes in society or in the system within which they function.

For instance: students today live so far below the threshold of poverty that it is more common than not to work while you study, making them all inn effect do the work of 1 1/2 - 2 jobs. Combine that with the increased pressure on throughput - students are rewarded for keeping within the allotted three years for a bachelor's degree, and punished for being slow - and the pattern is starting to take shape. Then add the increased control of the students' time through more emphasis on frequent reports rather than the liberal approach from when you could study for a year and then finish all your exams in one batch, allowing for very subjective time-management.

No, I don't think it's easier to be a student under the new system. It may be better for some, but it's still rough, and we get entirely new and unexpected problems, problems for which we have no routines in place yet. I also think this will be going on for some years, until we start to understand the new system. Until then, colleges and universities in Norway will look for those who cheat, in order to strike swiftly and deal with them harshly. Oh joy.