Be Careful

The Norwegian Journalist Union and the Editor's Union together with the The Union of Norwegian Press have since 1936 published a "Be Careful" poster: Vær Varsom plakaten. This is a long list of advice as to the ethics of good journalistic practice. It is not a set of laws or even rules, there is no formalised punishment if you go against this advice. All that can be said when somebody neglects this advice is "Oh no, you've been a really bad journalist/editor/paper, haven't you?" Sometimes, if the issues are severe, they may be fined and forced to pay some extra into their respective unions if they want to stay in them. Cases like these will hardly ever go to court, and going against the advice of the "be careful" poster is not a criminal act, merely a very rude one.

At the moment the most discussed piece of advice in this set is one that concerns the state of the sources journalists use. What has triggered this discussion is the way Norwegian papers increasingly use weblogs as sources: particularly as they have created weblog domains where papers can use the words of the bloggers freely in their news stream, without paying an øre for it nor needing to put it through the regular editorial process. It's not written by anybody in the paper, it's written by some individual who will then personally have to carry the weight of any imprecisions in the blogpost. So: No economic loss and no legal responsibility, just free, fun content.

This is the text in the poster, the text the general public keep refering to and ask why the media don't obey when it comes to a certain practice of the news houses:

3.9. Opptre hensynsfullt i den journalistiske arbeidsprosessen. Vis særlig hensyn overfor personer som ikke kan ventes å være klar over virkningen av sine uttalelser. Misbruk ikke andres følelser, uvitenhet eller sviktende dømmekraft. Husk at mennesker i sjokk eller sorg er mer sårbare enn andre.

To translate: Be considerate in the journalistic process. Particularly show consideration to people who can not be expected to be aware of the effect of their statements. Do not abuse the feelings of others, their lack of knowledge or lack of ability to understand the extent of their actions and words. Remember that people in shock or grieving are more vulnerable than others.

There is a popular belief that this actually protects people who are in touch with the press from things like their own stupidity. So if you post something on your blog (or elsewhere on the net) which you really have no way to understand the extent of, the journalists will be sensitive and understanding, adhere to the poster and not use it on the front page. Right?

Yeah right.

The point is: If you have posted something incredibly stupid on the net, YOU have published it, not them. Even if you write a description of your mental state (having just downed 20 pills of valium, just to choose a recent example which by the way seems to have disappeared without a trace due to what I hope is some lingering sense of propriety) it doesn't matter. You see - it's already out there. You did it, published it for the world to see with your name on it, and it's free to be used - at least cited if not just grabbed as is, if it's been posted on one of the paper-owned blog sites.

It's not the journalists' job to protect you from yourself once you decide to be your own editor. It's only their job to do that as long as you accept the restrictions of their particular news service. And even then, they are just adviced to do it. If your words would make the breaking news and up their numbers then sorry, but your tale was just too important to keep it from the public and you had to be allowed to speak, even if you were raging at the camera with your dead child in your arms. Particularly then.

I know, I have worked with public information and media in general too long to have a whole lot of illusions left, and I also know: there are a lot of decent journalists out there doing a great job. My heart leaps with pride when I read or watch something really good and I occasionally recognize the name of one of our former students (plenty of them out there). But it doesn't take a whole newsroom full of bad journalists to expose your particular tale of pain and suffering. Be your own editor. Use the "be careful" poster on your own publishing, and remember, you have potentially billions of readers, including a lot of people you don't really want to have reading what you just wrote.

Juba the sniper

It was luckily past seven when the Norwegian Broadcasting called today, and I was awake and about to get ready for the day. Their issue was Juba the sniper. Juba is a mysterious figure, an individual or a myth, who kills American soldiers in Baghdad. He never misses, he is never seen and he always leaves a little message. There are no civilian victims, and afterwards, there are videos of his shot circulated in secret on the net.

Or so the story goes.

Bagdhad Treasure blogged how Juba is becoming a hero in Baghdad. The Guardian wrote about him. There is a wikipedia page on him. Some speculate that he may not be Iraqi at all, but Isreali. People are using computer games to make simulations of the movies. And that's where I became an interesting subject to interview.

Since I do research on internet communication and computer games, I ought to know why this is so popular, don't I? So that's what the journalist asked - why is this so popular on the net? Juba and sniper gets 35000 hits on google. The journalist was impressed. And it had to be the internet that made this case special.

I was a difficult subject, and didn't agree with him (although I'd like to hear what comes out of the conversation - probably nothing, he forgot to confirm my name and title.) I think this is such a good story that if a regular journalist had got to it first, it would have been all over the mainstream news together with other grisly amateur film cuts. It is a perfect tale: the lone hero who fights the opressors singlehandedly by killing them neatly one by one with no civilian casualties. A one-man war, we love them whether the one man is Roger Moore, John Wayne or Jackie Chan. It is, of course, a little more problematic when the one man army is taking shots at our allies. They are however soldiers, shooting soldiers is an act of war, not terror. Terrorism is the use of force against what would otherwise be innocent bystanders - whether it's allied soldiers who use it or the Irish Republican Army. Who thought of themselves as an army of soldiers at war too.

So there is a certain narrative flair to the tale, one that understandably appeals particularly to the young and restless in Baghdad. Just think of Carlos the Jackal, and his type of horrible fame. Then there is the video game angle. The journalist asked me if it didn't look like a video game. I just realised what I should have answered. It's not the video faking a game, but the game and the video both relating to some idea about how a sniper shot will look like through the video camera of a sniper rifle. And so people have games available to let them replay and pretend the same phenomenon as they hear about through other sources, and make similar videos, one of them even using the game America's Army, thoughtfully provided by the US government.

As a phenomenon it's interesting. It's a story spreading and living on the net. Again, Gibson was there first, with Pattern Recognition - only he didn't write about snipers, and was a lot more subtle.

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And before somebody writes me to tell me how horrible all this is and how I should not talk about American soldiers being killed in Iraq in the same post as anything to do with fun, games and hero worship, let me say that I think all violent death where one human wilfully causes the death of another human is horrible. I understand the logical arguments for war and legalised violence, but I don't agree with it as a solution to anything - nor do I think it is a good thing that snipers shoot soldiers. I wish they could all have jacked into their different gamestations and let the best gamer win, then had a beer or a cup of tea afterwards.


Update: No, they didn't use my comments in the program. I guess I de-dramatised things too much. Sometimes not being mentioned means you did a good job, you know.

Winning Team

At the Game Developers Conference, I had just enough voice to participate in Eric Zimmerman's Game Show at the end of The Social Dimensions of Digital Gaming session, where game developers were coupled with game researchers. For the developers: Matt Adams, Ralph Koster and Heather Kelley. For the Researchers: Thomas Malaby, Suzanne de Castell and Torill Mortensen.

We were first asked a question. All researchers had to say what kind of research we would like to see, all developers were asked what kind of game system they would like to see. Then we were coupled by drawing names out of a hat - which resulted in one male male couple, one female female couple and one male female couple. Work the couples out yourself, I am giving you one hint by posting the picture of me and my partner. If the picture is blurry, blame Justin Hall, who grabbed my camera and took the picture (which was really nice of him).

And this was your winning couple, after the jury (TL Taylor, Beth Kolko and a gentleman whose name I didn't catch) had decided! We won the wonderful prizes of one Scrabble and one eeehhhh - well, it was a weird name and my partner did not have it, so I swapped prizes with him and got the american language scrabble instead. Will come in handy for English language training in long dark Volda winter evenings!

The rest of the day was interesting, but I was too sick to make much of it. What I did not know at the time, sadly, as I would have made the effort to get hold of him, was that at the same time one of the former administrators of Aarinfel was doing a presentation. He now works for Microsoft, and emailed me to ask if we could have coffee. I was already in Los Angeles though. Perhaps I'll have a chance when I go to Washington later this spring.

Take the F train

Jill already blogged this, but I will repeat the action and spread the love.

Hanne-Lovise Skartveit has made a lovely little animation/film/sound hypertext doumentary about the F train in New York. When I was last here we were shopping for the gadgets she needed to make it, and this time around the thing has been published. She has been recording sound on the train, interviewing people who use it and live in the different areas, and made it into a little game-like experience where you can choose which passengers waiting at the station you want to go with you on the train. Tip: Don't bring too many, you can't hear all their stories before you're at the next stop!

Do I or don't I?

An email from the past, one of the players/administrators of one of the MUDs I was in who was at the Game Developers Conference, made me start looking for one of the players who lives here in Los Angeles. This player has made enough tracks that I quickly found out that he still lives around here somewhere. Now LA is so big, "here" could be anywhere from next door to 3 hours driving away, but well, it's a lot closer than when I am in Norway.

I could find where he works and the general area where he lives, but no email for him, and not a lot of information on his work place. I did however get an offer to buy the information on him from a background check. For 7,95$ I could get his unlisted phone number and everything else, including his financial history and a list of former room mates.

It's not a big sum.

I would really like to talk to him.

I am not going to intrude that way.

But it makes me wonder about the legality of such businesses. Is it legal to sell that kind of information? In Norway I can run a financial background check on people by contacting a certain public office. It's done regularly by banks and others, and you are notified when somebody do it. For a while I was bombed with notifications, as different banks were considering me for approval for the mortgage of a house. But an unlisted number is often unlisted for a good reason, and that's a trust which is not supposed to be broken. You can't buy it legally from the phone company. I don't know if you can sell it legally if you have somehow learned it.

I miss my colleagues, investigative journalists know a lot of interesting answers.

Los Angeles

I am starting to accumulate a long list of things I want to blog about: Blog Hui, GDC, the hardships of travel, the joy of friendship and how extremely good it is to be sitting in a jacuzzi outside in the sunshine in March and not freeze anywhere, but I'll wait. First things first, and a guild meeting with my fellow Truants is more important than reporting. Which means I am not really a reporter, right? Well, I admit to that, quite freely.

Cold, so cold

Getting worse, not better. No inspired blogging from GDC, as I had to crawl off around lunch time. I am on in an hour, so I am going to lie down and read for a while, then take some medicine and hope it will let me behave almost healthy for my session. It should, I promised. And afterwards I won't have to talk for days, so straining the voice now will not be a problem.

And then I can collapse until I have to check out of the hotel. Need to check when that has to be. And check for a place close where I can get food I can eat. Had muffins from Starbucks for lunch, as the bread in the lunchboxes here would have been worse, and I had no energy to run off and get something I can eat. And I just can't afford to rely on room service. This is one of those moments when being so independent and travelling around the world alone is no fun.

Hopefully, more fun blogging ahead.

San Jose

I am in Hilton, San Jose, in a big room for which I pay way more than I can afford. But right now I am very glad of it. I have a cold which is rapidly getting worse, I have no idea what it is in my head, night or day, and I finally have a reliable internet connection at a decent price from a private location. It's wonderful. New Zealand was great, but going straight from campervan-life which wasn't even all vacation to work and then to 20 something hours of travel just to go 10 hours backwards in time is exhausting.

But tomorrow is GDC, and I hope this is just a light cold, passing quickly with some decent sleep. I have no idea if there are anybody I know already in town, there should be, TL, Eric and several others are to attend tomorrow, but I have made no connections before this. Hence I am stranded in a huge hotel surrounded by wide, car-filled streets. I wonder if I can have a chance of finding a mexican restaurant, nachos and a pitcher of margaritas? Or perhaps that's more for tomorrow night, when I can hopefully breathe through my nose again.

We can blog it

For those of my readers who read Norwegian, the PDF to an article I wrote for Kommunikasjonsforeningen, the Norwegian union of information and public relation workers. We got the file from the journal and published it on the college server while waiting for their updated website.

The article discusses corporative blogging and how weblogs may influence public relations practice.

Scraping data

Have a look at what Eric Nickell writes on Terra Nova. I am not sure what I think about this kind of research yet. It is interesting, and more than a little scary (where is the player consent to being studied in this?), but I'll shut up until I have read and thought a bit more. Until then: read and think for yourselves.

Is that WoW?

She leaned over and stared avidly on my screen, the chinese student at Wellington University. Busy making screenshots for the presentation tonight, I nodded, and let her have her passive WoW fix. "you have many many pictures," she commented as I worked, eyes taking in the secrets of my screen eagerly. I could only confirm - the computer is packed with them, I rely on my pictures, and explained what I was doing, as I saved a nice screenshot of Nuuna, the guild leader of The Truants.



"I try to play from here, but I can't" she mourned. Then she noticed that my latency was red as well. "No real playing," I admitted. "Ah, you just sell stuff and go to the bank." She needed sagely, and complained about the slowness of the chinese servers she plays on. She had surprised all her friends by logging on from New Zealand and getting on with them, playing the same game. "It is great, they were so surprised!" she beamed. "Yes, I am chatting with my friends in Europe and USA now," I answered, and opened my social list. By now she was almost on my lap with the laptop. Who says online games makes people asocial? The gamers certainly are ready to talk about their passion.

Passage

I am back in Wellington, from a journey that feels like a rite of passage. With a friend I have mastered several things, most notably my fear of driving.



I used to be a confident driver, until an accident. It was a moment of total loss of control, and I have tried to figure out what I could have done to avoid it, in endless self-accusations. I drove extremely slowly, and I did that because the road was slippery and very difficult to drive on. It was in the middle of the day, the car was in good shape, I did not fall asleep, I was not in a difficult curve. What happened was that the driving conditions were so bad my only option would have been deserting the car on the motorway and walking with my 4 year old daughter – a course I considered as dangerous as trying to reach the next exit. I never reached it though, the car slipped and I hit a car driving in the other direction, ruined my knee and disjointed a shoulder. Luckily my daughter was unharmed, but to this day I have never heard a more joyful sound than her healthy cries next to me.

This happened 15 years ago, and I have relearned driving since then. I have accepted that I somehow did something wrong, perhaps made a bad decision when I pressed on and did not just abandon the car, and have worked hard to become a safe, careful driver who learns from mistakes. But I have perhaps been a little too safe, terrified of new roads, new situations and unknown potential for accidents. And with this background I got into a campervan in order to drive on the left hand side in a country I have never visited before.

I am back in Wellington. I am alive. I have survived for a week, thanks to my own and my friend’s skill. We did it, each of us, overcame the dangers of NZ drivers, speed-limits 20-30 kmph above those at home and a car that swayed and shook at every gust of wind, rattled at every little bump in the road, was despised by all other travellers and inspired those who overtook it to neck-breaking passings. We founds places to sleep, to eat, to park, to shop, we got to see what we wanted to see, and we slept safely each night in the frugal comfort of our narrow berths. We didn’t conquer Mount Everest or even try to climb the elegant slopes of Taranaki, all we did was soak in a spa and gaze at some glow worms.



But I have conquered my own fear. I have taken back something I lost 16 years ago, the feeling of being independent and able to move about on the roads of the world. I relearned the freedom of private motorised transportation, at age 45. About time.

Me, the other

This is the title of my article in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's new book Second Person, which hopefully will be available this autumn. It's published on MIT press, and directly addresses gaming to a larger degree than First Person, I think.

My contribution is about role-play. I address the relationship between you, the human and you, the fantasy figure. It is one of my favourite issues, yes, I enjoy playing around with you/me relationships!

Waitomo Caves

Here I am, grinding in the shadow of the campervan, in Waitomo. I have been visiting the caves to see glow-worms, and now I am hiding from a sun too bright for my pale blue gaze. The camp has wireless internet connection, and I can touch the web.

I have been more or less randomly connected for more than a week, and in this time I have not missed the net once. What I have missed are the people I keep in touch with this way. There is a friend in Los Angeles waiting for me to send her my itinerary. There is an editor waiting for a book chapter. A colleague waiting for an article. A family demanding pictures – well, those find me anyway, as the demands tick in on my mobile phone. Is Lynsey in Wellington waiting for me at Blog Hui? I know he is, but does he have the program for the Hui? I am waiting for that.

We are humans, communication is our survival trait. Without it we would have been eaten by everything from polar bears to maggots millennia ago. I communicate, therefore I am. Now, to ponder the presentation in Wellington.

Boiling Mud

No, nothing to do with the MUDs I otherwise work with, although it is a severe reminder that I need to get back to work. The last few days have been chaotic. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday calling to find out what happened to my suitcase or shopping for clothes and other stuff to cover the dire lack of clothing. Got to remain decent and inoffensive, and I was getting so ripe it would certainly offend.

Thursday I gave up waiting, and we started for Napier. The ride was tough even for a road-hardened Norwegian from the west coast. Not that the road was that difficult, but I have never driven a camper van before. And here I had the pleasure of driving one first in town with a map-reader who I later discovered inconsistently confuses right and left, then on several-file roads (my nightmare) to crown the virgin trip with narrow, winding mountain roads. I finally understood why those campervans are so slow on the Norwegian roads, and why their drivers look consistently terrified. I promise I will be endlessly more patient now. But I will still curse if you don't pull over!



After Napier we made our way to Rotorua, where we are today. Yes, I am going the tourist route. I want to see Volcanic landscapes, maori carvings and glowworms. Napier was seafood and local wine, later today I hope to enjoy a nice spa treatment, and so after Rotorua it's only the glowworms left to do.

I hope this picture shows the boiling mud. I am outside, it's sunny, I have no idea what the pictures look like.

If it doesn't look like much, use your imagination. What I am trying to show you is bubbling mud, stinking like rotten eggs. Delicious, hummm?

Tomorrow we start the trip towards Wellington. I need to make some time to work every day from now on, now that I am no longer jetlagged, I have my suitcase and the most important tourist activity is done. I have even done laundry, there can't be any mroe excuses. Thursday we have to drop off the car and check into the hotel where Blog Hui is to be. Friday I will be back in a world with steady internet connection, I hope. Sunday I am on my way back to the US, hopefully my luggage will come too. Then next Friday it's NYC where I get to both rest and write.

Oh, and the fire hazard in the area? Relax all, as usual I brought the rain and put out the fires. Just one of the benefits of travelling in the hope of warmth and sunshine!

Land of the Lost Luggage

Although it's finally found now, I spent the first days on the Kiwi Island desperately seeking luggage. Romantically rewriting my plight, I imagined myself a heroine running from the government spies - only I left WAY too many card-purchase traces. When I come home I am sure I will enjoy the many nice little things I had to buy while waiting.

But now I am happily beneath a fig tree in Napier, typing as fast as I can before the battery runs low.

Rotorua Fire

Until November I had no idea there was a place called Rotorua, and now I am deeply concerned about the fact that the place is on fire. You see, this is one of those places which are definitely NOT like Norway, where I am planning to go before Blog Hui. I want to see something different. Well, it certainly will be, if it's still burning when I get there!

According to the news the sulphur in the environment makes the whole place highly flameable, and the Hell's Gate is closed due to the fire. I hope the woman wasn't hurt.


Well the spa is open, and they offer mud baths.

(More and larger Rotorua pictures here)

All of this is so totally different from what Volda is like at the moment, I am all aflutter about going. The temperature was down to -10 again today, after yesterday's heating up to -4. Large parts of Volda lost the water due to a break on the main water pipe, which resulted in total panic, as frosen water pipes is one of the main reasons for damage to houses in winter here. Our problem is hardly fire these days, and particularly not spontaneous combustion due to heat.

2006 1.2

The new year started February 11th, but the celebrations were modest. They did however include a shared bottle of wine and some heavy WoW-ing after the husband fell asleep watching the olympics, and that is bliss at winter time!

Two weeks into the new year things have noticeably changed. Today I am no longer leading the Information Study, and this will be the state of the world until October 1st. The bliss of not being responsible is immense. I can send all the mail and all the phones on. If I just got a phone right now, that's exactly what I could do!

Before the new year is four weeks old I will have changed hemispheres. I will start on something very new, the writing of a book in my own language, and I am really looking forwards to that. Hope I remember how to.

Apart from that there are no big adjustments to this year from the 1.1 version. It is looking good so far!

30 degrees difference

The weather is fantastic today, clear blue skies and light streaming towards us from all surfaces. in the pictures I can however see how little light there actually is. The sun is not yet up at 10 am, although the sky is a clear blue and snow reflects what little light there is. The vistas around Volda are breathtakingly beautiful, and little Volda College Campus shows off it's advantage over most other campuses in the world - the impressive, dangerous, but always breathtaking nature we live right in the middle of.

However...

If you peek at the thermometer, you understand why all students walk around huddled with their hands in their pockets. It's - 11 degrees Celcius. That's cold.

So rather than forcing myself to be outdoors when we finally have a clear day, I plan my trip to Blog Hui. I am leaving for New Zealand Sunday 5th. The 6th will disappear, and the 7th I am there, ready to explore. The 10 days before Blog Hui will be spent in a campervan with a friend. I am exited and happy, carry a digital camera and hope for internet connections on the way. Prepare for travel-blogging of the "what can possibly go wrong with two middle aged women driving a camper van for the first time on the other side of the road in a foreign country?"-kind.

(Although hopefully the blogging will be more of the "this is how far I have come on the introduction to my book on this smooth, easy journey through lovely vistas" kind. The journeying should be light and include lots of comfortable camping places, the laptop always with me and the deadlines within a foreseeable future.)

The main sights we want to see are volcanos. New Zealand has fjords, glaciers, mountaineering, rafting and splendid hiking paths in the mountains, and we both decided that we can do that any time (and do it - ok, perhaps not the rafting, Norwegian glacier-born rivers are cold!) we want, now we want different. Volcanoes are different. Warm beaches are different. Sunshine is different. Wine needs to be tested. Food needs to be tasted. And I really want to see a glow-worm cave. I promise I won't use a flash.

And it seems like I am not the only one interested in volcanoes, New Zealand Herald has conveniently volcanic "news" on the online front page today - although these are rather old news, and from Indonesia.

So I am going towards the southern skies, over the mountains and from freezing spring at - 11 to summery autumn at + 20.

AFOE Satin Pajama winners 06

Didn't check if I was even mentioned this year, but here they are: the winners of the Satin Pajama 2006!

WoW and golf, again

Another interesting discussion over at Terra Nova, this time about if you can really learn something about the people you play with, and do you want to draw conclusions based on their gaming style?

I have drawn quick conclusions about people online, and quick conclusions about them offline. Which is worse, to decide I don't want to cooperate because they can't hold aggro, or because they can't raise their voice enough to hold attention?

On the other hand, I have come to deeper understanding of relationships through playing with the people in question. Where I have been blinded by contextual data in dealing with a person offline, making constant excuses for their inability to communicate, seeing the issue transplanted into a MMOG crystallises the problem in ways endless face-to-face conversations did not. Also playing with people I have felt I should like, but where contextual data have kept us both reserved - well, there's something about cooperating in a battleground which shows me if I like how the other person reacts under pressure, and cheering about a victory together is bonding indeed.

But then somebody throws the issue of class into the discussion:

My point is that golf is golf because a certain social strata says it is.

This is of course true. WoW will not be the new golf until it also is the new opera. When you can rub shoulders with only the other WoW afficinados who have the same sublime understanding of the art as you - or are willing to pay a LOT to pretend they do - WoW will be a low status activity. At the moment it rides on the wave of innovation: To not know about WoW is to be slow and out of touch with certain trends. Once WoW and other MMOGs are firmly mainstream there needs to be some kind of development, or those who see themselves as the opera audience will never start to play.

Does that bother me though? No, I am a scholar of pop culture and mass media. Seeing the stacks of Ibsen-studies in Norwegian Academia makes me slightly nauseous. I want to understand something new, the dirty massproduced mire of low art is exactly where I want to be. So here's to seeing the lawyers move back to golf, leaving the dirt to those who knows that a bit of grittiness enhances both flavour and texture.

Blog Hui

Approaching fast - I leave for New Zealand Sunday, which is a little early, but hey, got to see the place when I am travelling to the other side of the planet, right?

The presenters look interesting, topics exiting, and I am in a state of intense intellectual confusion while preparing, so this has to be fun and great!

Corpse camping in Dragon Realms

Corpse camping in the MUD I used to play was really bad. Thinking back, that was one of the really contested practices, then as it is now. In WoW you at least don't have to move all the way up to your corpse, and you resurrect with your equipment on you. In DR you had to run naked through enemy territory, all your weapons still in the corpse you had abandoned. The trip could be very, very long, no convenient nearby churchyards. And when you got there the enemy would be sitting right on top of your precious corpse and equipment, waiting to kill you while still naked, before you got your stuff back. If this happened often enough your original corpse would deteriorate, your equipment would be all over the ground and free for the enemy to steal, and you would have to start over again.

In WoW you are a ghost as you run, you can resurrect as soon as you are a certain distance from your corpse, but you are free to find a safe spot, and you resurrect with all your equipment on you. Also, you can choose to resurrect at the graveyard. There will be a penalty, but at least you're not right under the nose of your enemy. I think that particular adjustment is a much better way to deal with death and ressurrection, but I guess the hard core gamers think it's whimpy. This is expressed through culture: resurrecting (ressing) at the graveyard is whimping out.

Zeppelins and war

Esther MacCallum-Stewart, whose weblogs I have followed for years, has written a wonderful post about zeppelins, WoW, Indiana Jones and war.

Environment PvP

I am writing an article which draws clear parallells between MUDs and WoW at the moment, struggling as I feel it's so obvious and I want to look brilliant, but at the same time: Somebody needs to do it, and this time I guess it's me.

BUT I can't just write, need to play some too. So I log into Argent Dawn with Agirra and set off to drop off some quests. PvP is on, but I am in the middle of Horde territory, and don't expect trouble. On the way, what do I see? I come just in time to see a member of my guild being killed by a paladin. He is standing over her body gloating. As I show up he immediately attacks. I get off the wolf and start hitting him with what I have, and as shamans actually have a bit in the book, I manage to take him down. Wait for my guildmate to resurrect, and hang out to see if he comes back spoiling for a fight. Which he does. Again he attacks first. Now we are two pissed and prepared shamans, so he dies in very little time. We decide enough is enough, and ride on to see what we can do about those quests, keeping PvP on just because turning it off right now would be cowardly and bad sport. We had after all just been corpse-camping and ganking, even if he did attack first both times.

We got into the quest area and started doing our stuff, who came back? Our paladin friend and a gnome mage, again attacking first. The mage was specced to the ears and all epic, so we were quickly toast, something the paladin just could not stop himself from gloating over. He gloated long enough for a friend to show up, and soon we were three. With some help from a friendly hunter we became four, and they were dead - again. Now we were getting a little more than annoyed, so we were actively corpse camping. When they both ressurrected close by, we immediately hit them again. I hardly noticed that I killed the mage, and the paladin was dead before the other shaman had gone through half her mana. No honourable waiting for regenerating anything now. Mext round they had turned PvP off, and fled towards the Undercity. We tried to catch them, but they snuck off. That is, until we asked on the local defense channel. The paladin had turned from ganking level 60ies to ganking level 12s.

So of course we found him again. And again. And when he turned PvP off again, we stuck around until he just couldn't keep himself from attacking, at which point he died again. And after I logged off, the guildmates had him on th Kill On Sight (KOS) list, so he kept being killed all over. Lucky for him PvP doesn't ruin equipment like PvE (Player versus Environment).

I normally don't like environment PvP. I don't sneak around in enemy camps looking for vulnerable strays to attack for honour kills. But when I can catch somebody else doing that they are fair game in my book. And then getting them feels good, really good!

Just as good as it felt 8 years ago during the wars in the MUD at the time, blinding a lev 100 ranger when I was lev 75. (The trick was blinding him and surviving.)

Yep.

Published?

I am looking at Henry Jenkins' article on 8 myths of video gaming, and trying to cite it. There is however no date on the site for the article or the production of the television program it obviously links into: The Video Game Revolution.

Does anybody have a clue for me?

Guilded Lilies

By way of Hilde I found the Guilded Lilies: Grown Women Playing Games, and through the Guidled Lilies I found New Game Plus and a survey on women who play world of Warcraft. This qualifies as a good day's catch on the net!

I found myself getting involved in the gamer's comments, some of their experiences were revolting. But some of it may be our own fault for beign too accepting. In one guild the other players happened to use the word rape - as in "we totally raped them in the battleground, it was great fun." When I pointed out that the words "rape" and "fun" did not belong in the same sentence, there was a long akward silence on the guild channel, and the word was then never used again in my presence. Now, they knew I was a grown woman, no little gamer chick, and that probably made it a lot easier for me to not worry too much about the reaction if they disliked me speaking up. But I did get my share of respect when I pointed out that they were disrespectful, and they were wonderful companions for playing a game despite their occasional thoughtless choice of words.

Travels this year

It's that time again, when the college asks which conferences we plan to attend. As I am going to the other side of the planet and back in a couple of weeks, I have been a little distracted from planning other conferences, so I don't really know. Brilliant suggestions are received with thanks.

But one conference I would like to check out if it is arranged again is State of Play. It's wonderfully convenient in New York, I get to meet a lot of the game scholars whose work I often read and enjoy, and it's a different perspective from what I otherwise see in games, so I'd like to know - does it happen again? What will the focus be? Who are they inviting? Yes, I know, I was a little unimpressed this year, but hey, I am not that hard to impress and the potential for interesting presentations and presenters is large!

If I am a very good girl and write a lot this year, the college is a little flexible about additional conferences, but I really should get around to it soon for other planning. There's teaching too, people tell me.

Norway, what Norway?

The internet is great, particularly for ordering tickets and making travel plans... all the way up to the point that you need to actually order the ticket. I have now tried three different carriers for tickets from Los Angeles to San Jose. The kind of errors I run into are:

They count Norway as part of the European Union, and don't distinguish between EU and EEC. Understandable error, and no big deal, until...

Provide your home address. Norway is not on the list, because Norway is not part of the European Union. And I can't say no, we are not part of the European Union, because through EEC we are covered by the same rules as EU, so legally, to a US carrier, we are. I guess they think we all use German area codes.

Provide phone number: see above.

I could slink around those by using my NYC connection's numbers - that's a tested way to get around it, and the only way for me to book railroad tickets in the US. But I can't use those when I try to use my credit card. That is really surprising, because normally credit card companies help their customers provide for payment from all over the world. But the same flaws were repeated, and here I could not enter my customary cheats - as they would be considered fraud.

So, thank god for local travel agencies. Same tickets, same prices, I got to speak to a nice helpful guy for 10 minutes and the ticket will be mailed tomorrow and be here Wednesday, paper versions so I have something to hold on to and show off when I get upset at the airport because somebody didn't register my reservation. Not everything is better online.

At least when your country doesn't really register on anything but the "safe to launch violent demonstrations against"-meter.

Seperate Channel

An interesting observation: Last patch of WoW contained a seperate channel for promoting guilds. What a coincidence.

Patch 1.9.4
General
A new Guild Recruitment channel has been added. This channel will be off by default.

I for one am glad. Guild promotions on general chat can be bad spam, no matter what sexuality they relate to.

Home

And I am not moving anytime soon. OK, not until 5th of March. Presentation went fine, exept that at first nothing worked, and some intense hacking was needed to bypass a firewall and be able to show the things I wanted. Thank the Goddess for a gamer audience. I also met two sisters, 2 1/2 nephew/niece, three former study mates (now professors/candidates), a handful of old professors, a couple of game researchers and wannabes, same number of people who want me to be involved in their projects, a lot of friends (several with overlapping roles in earlier cateories), a roomful of interested students and gamers, my daughter, her friends and several busdrivers in helpful supporting roles.

Now I am exhausted, have injured my hips (probably from running constantly on asphalt for two days) and need to change gears from teaching to writing.

Perhaps killing owlbeasts in Winterspring helps...

Trapped by the game

Tonight I am speaking in Bergen, at the student comunity. So if you are in Bergen at 19.15, have nothing else to do and an overwhelming urge to hear somebody ramble on about games, be at Kvarteret and we'll see what we can do.

"No, that's not my property"

The student who had asked a lot of questions concerning Volda College, our education and how we are thinking about marketing and promoting the study refused when I wanted to read the final work for which he was to use my answers. Why? BI, which is a commercial college, claims that the student paper is their property and they can't let the student give it out. Why not? Because they are planning to use it for their marketing.

That changed the entire situation for met. Had I known I was answering to research BI was going to use to develop their marketing strategy I might very well have refused to answer. I thought I was contributing to something which would be available to all the relevant colleges, in a general pool of knowledge to develop further understanding and cooperation. No such thing.

The student was a dear, he understood that I was upset and will do what he can to give me what he is permitted to give out. But if his work is an independent student work he should retain the rights for it, and be permitted to give it out freely (of course after suitable anonymisation of respondants). If it is something BI pays him for, he should have told me right away that it was not a student paper, but marketing research for the school. As a researcher, I am upset about the bad and dodgy ethics of the methodology, as a person I feel used.

And who will asess this? By refusing to give the information in that paper out to anybody connected to the information educations in Norway, they are effectively isolating the paper from being assessed from any of those working at or connected to the same educations. This means they will need to use assessors who are not in touch with the general level of student work at the other educations. They will of course find competent people outside of the colleges, but this sounds like unhealthy tactics: to be so competitive that they can not let they students be compared to the students of other relevant educational institutions.

Come here, public educational system, let me hug you!

Speaking in Bergen February 14th

I have been invited to talk to a student group - "Studentersamfunnet" - in Bergen next week. I am very happy about that, as I used to be a member way back when, and remember the intensity of some of those discussion nights. I hardly think my speech will be the most controversial presentation though.

What is of some concern is however the blurb they wrote up to draw people. I worry some may be really disappointed. That's why I am now switching to Norwegian, to give people with special interests - sufficiently that they actually find my blog - a heads up on what I will NOT address.

Det jeg har mest problemer med fra Studentersamfunnets side er dette avsnittet:

Dataspillere nevner både mestring, status, fryd og forførelse som grunner for å spille. På den andre siden hører vi historier om personer som har blitt så hektet på slike spill at de forsømmer jobb og sosialt liv i den virkelige verden. Spillavhengighet blir sett på som et problem på lik linje med andre former for avhengighet - det er ikke uten grunn at spillene blir kalt “cybercrack”.

Jeg har ikke gjort noe forskning på spillavhengighet. Jeg har ikke tenkt å gjøre forskning på spillavhengighet. Jeg tror ikke på noe så enkelt som avhengighetsskapende teknologi. Det kan vi for så vidt gjerne diskutere, men ikke opplyst av noe forskning jeg har fokusert på, mer på et generelt grunnlag. Her snakker vi om ting jeg tror, ikke ting jeg vet.

Det jeg helt sikkert kommer til å snakke om er puttet pent inn i siste avsnitt:

Kveldens innleder, Torill Elvira Mortensen, skal se på hvordan World of Warcraft inneholder elementer fra gamle data- og rollespill. Hvordan kan oppdrag løses individuelt og i samarbeid med andre for å gjøre spillopplevelsen så positiv som mulig for alle deltakerne?

Straks mye kjedeligere, men dette vet jeg i det minste noe om. Og hvis du har lyst til å høre meg si noe om ting jeg faktisk kan uttale meg om håper jeg vi sees i Bergen.

Should we have been offended?

No, no pictures of Muhammad here, I would not have put them in before this discussion - my main flirt with blasphemy was seeing Life of Brian while it was still outlawed in Norway - so I am not ready to do it now. I do however respect the Norwegian blogger Vampus, who did exactly that. She has received threats on her life afterwards. Also, her blogg provider, VG, has censured her blog and removed the original picture.

The events since a large Danish paper printed a cartoon of Muhammad have been surprising. Two embassies have burned down, and children in several muslim countries eat local, but expensive cheese since the governments have stopped all import of Danish produce. Obviously, caricatures have immense power. This makes me wonder: should we have been offended long before this? When the muslim fundamentalists rant against the western decadent pigs, were they expecting us to torch their embassies? Bomb their gathering places? Persecute the muslims in our countries?

Democracy is based on rational debate. You cannot have democracy unless the minority is allowed to speak. Yes, the freedom of speech has limits in the west: In Norway racist expressions and blasphemic expressions are outlawed. We are however allowed to discuss this, and continously do. When the extreme right protests, demanding the right to harass others due to race, they are not arrested for discussing the right to freedom of speech. If they burned down a synagogue, they would be, though.

Seen from a world where you can persecute minorities without being punished, this may however look like weakness. Muslim fanatics in Norway insist that they need to defend their honour with violence. This culture of violence has not been common in Norway for 200 years. Before that knives were easily drawn to prove a point, so to speak - and Norwegians still treasure their knives. They are even a part of the national costume: dainty, silvered and ornamented, but functional. And both men and women knives exist. How deep is our layer of rationality, our culture of discourse and non-agression, when we are faced with the challenge: Fight, or live with dishonour?

Let us just hope nobody starts playing Fanitullen.
------------------

Norwegian cultural note: Fanitullen is a tune for Hardingfele, and the words describe how the fiddler learned to play from the devil in the basement, while the others were knifing each other upstairs.

Danish cultural note, from Lisbeth: Jyllandsposten, the offending paper, reaches about 500 000 danes. It is one of the largest Danish newspapers, and it is very conservative and is considered to lean towards right wing views on foreigners and foreign culture. Sadly, as Lisbeth says, the issue of this debate is not their conservative views, but a silly cartoon.

WoWporn

In case somebody missed it: WoWporn, a music video with a surprising take on porn, modern technology and taurens.

Thanks Knud!

UI mods and HUD

The most used add-ons (user created programs modifying the gameplay) to World of Warcraft have as their main goal to make more of the information available in the game visible to the player. CTraid assist works to make the health, buffs and aim of each player visible to all and particularly to the raid leader, auctioneer gathers information about the auction houses and makes a lot of additional information available about each object you pick up, atlas offers maps of the unmappable instances, other options displays the time of spells put on you, benvolent or malicious, flightpaths, or your readiness to role-play or not. All of these and many, many more, are addons created by gamers using information which is hidden by the regular WoW interface but available behind the skin.

This is exactly the opposite effort of what some game designers appear to desire. Off with their HUDs is an article describing how designers want to improve immersiveness through giving the players less information: interface free, supposedly.

What can I say but: I hope the designers make it an add-on friendly game.

Inspired by Gonzalo

Definitions:
UI: User Interface
HUD: Heads-up Displays

First, it's important to answer the question, “What is a HUD?” A HUD is simply a collection of persistent onscreen elements whose purpose is to indicate player status. HUD elements can be used to show, among many other things, how much health the player has, in which direction the player is heading, or where the player ranks in a race

Donnie Darko

I didn't know anything about the movie Donnie Darko until this morning, when a colleague sent an email to all on the department to check out the website. Now I know a little more, and can repeat what he said: check out the website! It is an elegant story told with flash, game elements and little clues you need to find in the text. Enjoy.

True flattery

Although I am not sure I'd use the word Nemesis. Can't see that I wronged anybody, or if imitation is vengeance. But who knows - I may learn different when I go to New Zealand, the land of the latest thinker with something approximately the same bodyparts as me. She even lives in Wellington, where I will be speaking in little more than a month. Nice, anyway, to see that people are people even on the other side of the world.

That's so gay...

One of the most-used sentences on the general chat of most normal servers I have looked into with World of Warcraft. Now, are the accounts of the endless gay-bashers suspended? No, didn't think so. But when somebody announces that a guild is GLBT friendly (Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender), that's reason for a warning.

A lot more on this at Terra Nova, Boing Boing and The Guardian's gamesblog. **Update: I think Utopian Hell has an interesting take on this too. found by way of Dr B.**

I want to address the suspense of disbelief.

One of the most impressive characters I have had, in the manner that it made other people think, develop roleplay, plot, scheme and in all other manners get deeply immersed in the game universe, was a male gay elf. He never cybered (at least that I can remember), had no partner and was not looking for one. He was evil through and through, so not a gay posterboy for tolerance and loving understanding. What he did was to make people extremely uncomfortable, and in need of reconsidering what they offered him. Rather than offering their nubile bodies in trade for service and position, elf maidens had to work for it. Rather than assume easy manly understanding, male characters would find themselves at the mercy of another man who might have a sexual interest in them. He poked at their routines and assumptions, and the roleplay got much, much better from it. I have since heard of tributes to this character, as other players have used the name and created him the way they felt he should be played. I am quite touched.

I did get a chunk of gay-bashing aggression too. People who had no idea I was a woman, married and mother of two children, tended to get OOCly rather unfriendly. I never cared to enlighten them. The rest of the players bashed right back, and I felt it would have been too easy to take the easy way out: "but I am not really like this..."

Anyway, the point is: Anything we can imagine in human relationships is possible to imagine in humanoid relationships. And you can add some other perversities. Would human/tauren couplings be considered straight, or zoophilia? Gnomes, which look like children, with their pigtails and childlike bodies - are they an invitation to pedophilia? And the undead... really... Just don't get me started at the behaviour of the succubi. Wow is not a safe place if you start bothering about references and possibilities of sexual transgression, experimentation and deviancy. There is even a pool filled with deviate FISH! And for some reason, in this universe which is so thrilling because it is so rich on references to non-mainstream behaviour, one way of loving is discouraged.

I wonder if I should create a female gnome and start looking for a daddy for her. A guild for gnomes and their daddies. Although... how long before all the gnome players would be police hoping to catch somebody asking for a real world meeting? Would make for some really interesting guild get-togethers.

The soul of an enemy

Last night I played in Warsong Gulch with my lev 60 orc. Never having been in there for long enough to make sense, it was very interesting to see how it was structured. Two opposing holds representing the faction strongholds, a flag in each hold. The objective is to grab the enemy flag, and then run back to your own hold with it. For one group to win they have to a) hold the enemy flag and b) kill the carrier of their own flag, then c) plant the enemy flag at their own spot.

This sounds easy, and my raid group were all saying: this is just zerg, grab, run. But like all simple games, the strategy was a lot richer than that. Just getting from A to B was tough. Actually, just getting from A to A1 was tough, if I happened to run into an Alliance hotspot.

What did help was to team up with another player, and not run around alone. One of the guildmates I like is a warlock, and together we manage to do some serious damage. Warlocks do something neat: they make soulshards. They use the enemy as a source of energy: tap their souls and store them, then transform them to health and power - using them to call up demons to assist for instance.

There is something extremely satisfying in seeing an enemy die this way. After having been killed x amount of times by some hunter, I get to see it sink to its knees and die, drained of soul, and I know that into the bag of my companion clicks another little shard, a source of future resources I often get to share through healthstones and soulstones. Enemies turned into a renewable resource. Too bad my character is not undead, then she could have eaten their dead, soulless bodies too.

Been sick

Kind of back. If you missed me, I may not be all there yet.

Returning home

All these years on the blog, I have been writing in English. Most of my academic work and just about all the blogging has been in English. While still not perfect, even I can see that my language has changed and developed since the first posts almost 5 years ago.

Now I feel homesick. I feel homesick for a language that touches me in a different manner, a longing towards harsh consonants, clear vowels and words that bring to mind a wider range of meanings. The writing I am preparing for the next 6 months will be in Norwegian, and I find myself hungry for it, as if I am going home after a long, long journey.

Putting the blogs to work

Searching for a new cellphone, I spent some time drooling over the specifications of Nokia's N90. So, since I had just watched a program on google, I googled it (OK, I'd have googled it anyway, but I wanted to link that program, thanks Erling). And what did I find? The N90 blog-watch by Nokia!

Rather than creating their own blog to promote the product, Nokia has some clever marketing person watching the blogs for mentions of N90. And look, they have negative reviews as well! OK, boing boing can hardly be neglected by any internet-wise company, but I am still impressed by the ingenuity of this. After all, if they don't warn customers of the bad parts about this phone, they will just have a lot more dissatisfied customers. Not many marketing departments actually get that.

Still, their marketing strategy is clever: send a gadget to a geek, ask the geek to tell the world how the gadget works, and to be honest about it, geek gets to play with gadget no matter what geek says. Then link geek's comments. Money can't buy that kind of advertising, but fun gadgets can. You have to be pretty sure of your product, this would be disastrous if no geek liked it. If they do - well, you have a screen full of the kind of testimonials that readers trust a lot more than your marketing department.

Clever, clever Nokia. Now send me a 8800, and I'll put it to rigorous tests on several continents.

Did you think it was free?

In Norway, two newspapers are competing to attract the writings of Norwegian bloggers. These are Dagbladet and Verdens Gang, VG - "the daily paper" and "how the world moves" is an approximate translation. The many derogatory rip-offs of their names are untranslatable.

One of these papers is a little more openly commercial than the other. After heavy marketing for weblogs, free areas to make the blog in, lots of small print that signs the content of your weblog over to the newspaper for ever, and subsequent free content for the net edition of their paper, they have now found a new angle on making money off weblogs. You may pay for your blog. If you want one that looks a little different from the others, you can pick a blogskin, and have a "pro" blog. So, for about 9 US$ a month, you may donate your content to VG in a somewhat more stylish wrapping.

I don't know if I want to thank Thomas for the link, it was too depressing.

Library surprise

This year I am doing something I have not done before, I am teaching the students how to plan their academic papers. It's not a big deal, I have a very small, exclusive group of last year students, and I am working very closely with them - also to develop some new teaching strategies. They have been my guinea pigs for two years, and a teacher couldn't have a nicer group to experiment with.

Today we are going to look at how they can find their own literature. They have to find up to 600 pages of independent literature, and I have not given them a suggested reading list for that. This is for their final paper, and after three years they should be able to use the library and different online sources. At least: so I have always thought. The last-minute calls from desperate students going: "Torill, I need to find some literature, what should I pick?" indicates it's not that easy. And the recent news about bad research articles doesn't make it easier...

But be that as it is: Today I am going to do two things. First, we will lookat how BibSys (Norwegian library system) works, and how different parameters brings very different hits, and then we will physically WALK to the library. This is the blessing of a small campus, a small group of students and a nice library: I'll go over, and we will look at the actual books in the shelves, and I'll talk to the students about what to look for while searching through shelves.

In a physical library you have the chance of being surprised in ways you don't have online. While the responses to a search can be pretty surprising, the actual books on shelves can catch your eye according to very different rules. Walking past shelves is a very different experience from fetching information from a data base, and the physical arrangement of a library can lead your attention astray - or perhaps where you should really be going?

I think I am going to enjoy today's class!

Research and glory

Not long ago a Norwegian medical resercher, working on oral cancer, was found to have fabricated data published in an article in a prestigeous scientific journal. He had a long list of co-authors, and the Norwegian department of resarch and education are now investigating not just the researcher, but all his co-authors as well. This morning it was on the news that he had confessed to have fabricated data for several more articles. It was his lawyer on the morning news, describing the personal tragedy of this man, a man who received and spent 10 million US$ on research which was, it turned out, plain bad.

The lawyer spoke of the pressure in academia, how publications in certain journals is the measuring staff for your success, not your real achievements, and how important it is to have results which can catch the attention of the research community. He is right, of course: to not have found is not a finding - particularly not as long as what you do not find has been not found already.

If you do what I do, and google cancer research fraud, you will get several articles pointing out how all current cancer research is a fraud. I am not entirely sure of how seriously I should take Chris Gupta, a man propagating do-it-yourself electromedicine, but he refers to some interesting views on the connection between cancer research and environmental issues.

Since 1997, when that last article was published, we have achieved a greater understanding of the connection between the environment and cancer. We are still, however, spending research resources on solving the cancer riddle - because the answer is not accepted from the powers that be. If it was possible to isolate a virus that causes cancer, fighting that virus could become an industry. Fighting pollution, food additives, lifestyle choices, general health ignorance and social gaps does not lead to a marketable product, and so, while it might possibly cause 80% of the cancer problems today, it is a non-issue. And researchers know what they have to deliver, even Norwegian researchers in these days of increasingly grant-driven research:

This point is similarly expressed by Dr. Sydney Singer: "Researchers are like prostitutes. They work for grant money. If there is no money for the projects they are personally interested in, they go where there is money. Their incomes come directly from their grants, not from the universities. And they want to please the granting source to get more grants in the future. Their careers depend on it." (10)

By having a teaching position which includes research, in a field that does not generate the kind of money that the heavier industries does (when did hollywood, fox news or microsoft bother to buy up a Norwegian media researcher?) I feel pretty safe and non-prostituted. But this is the reality of a market-driven research community. Luckily Norway is still fairly innocent, hence we are still surprised when something like this happens, and it makes the morning news. Perhaps somebody will manage to point to some of our more recent changes in the financing and evaluation system of academic achivement, and say something like "hey, can't this system cause even more of this very embarassing situation?"

Let us hope, and dream of free academic thought, while there is still room for anything but black sarcasm.

Once a warlock...

In the researcher's guild, we now have three players whose main characters are warlocks. Two of them have created warlock characters, the third made a priest - because we REALLY need healers - but plays as if he was a warlock, only with the occasional heal tossed in when the other players' health drop too low.

As far as I know, all the rest of the guild have created new classes. Well, perhaps one of our warriors used to be a warrior, but I am just giving up on the female-game-researcher-and-warriors-romance... more than 1/3 of the guild are now women playing warriors.

What I am thinking about now, though, is class loyalty. Why do you want to keep playing the same class? I feel that I become a better shaman by playing a warrior, etc, I don't feel like I should perfect my shaman-play by being a shaman in more than one character. Are warlocks different?

Out of touch

This week and next, modern technology will strike back with a vengeance here. Today and possibly also tomorrow, the phones are all down. Thursday and Friday our email servers will be offline. Monday there are software updates. If you don't hear from me or can't reach me this week, this is why. If you have very important things to tell me, try to hold them a week - or try to find some other means to reach me. Looking for me on Moonglade might work...

Pathetic - or social?

From the next room I hear WoW sounds, and it annoys me. Why? Because it's my son playing, not me. He is even playing for me, offering his levelling services so I can get a buffer character fast. Yep, I am buying a personal trainer. I am still annoyed.

I try to figure out why I feel like this. I know I am not addicted. I don't stay home from work to play - it's not even the play I miss! And I think that is the clue to my annoyance. I want to talk to some of the people I play with. It's actually getting increasingly urgent, and if I just hang out in Kalimdor for an hour or two, most of them will drop by. I can sip tea, have my feet up and hang out, waiting for friends and colleagues to drop in and say hello.

It is an addiction to the social, not to the technical. It's a particularly fun social, yes, but games have always been a very important part of human social life, so what's new?

WoW and sound

I have found that I a lot of the time play WoW by ear. I am not always conscious of this, but I notice immediately if I for some reason can't have the sound on. If a party member is behind me, I notice the attack by the sound. If somebody tries to reach me, I hear the little ding announcing their whisper. If there is a rogue in the vicinity, I listen for the sound of the rogue fading in and out of stealth.

Right now I am fishing on the other computer. I don't need to watch it, because when the bobber jumps, I also get a sound warning - a splash. so far I have leveled my fishing ten points - five just during this post.

Sure, no pressure

Last night I went into Zul'Gurub with a group formed mostly by a guild I have raided with before. Their guild leader is one of my favourite role-players on Argent Dawn, and there was some question about letting me enter the guild. So, of course, one orc chick with a different flag and 19 of the same clan, who do you think they were watching?

I didn't screw up too badly. I almost got all killed right upon entering, by hitting a magma totem. Bad. I had not considered how crowded the entrance to that instance would be, and the totem ruined the mages' efforts at keeping the enemies sheeped. I was also too busy figuring things out to remember to transform it to a firetongue, or even frost resistance totem. Well, when I died it disappeared, so suicide was an option.

I managed to do a couple of close-up-to-fighting resurrections. Being a mail-clad healer has advantages, and the raid system allows one group to be in combat while another is not. Only time I have done in-combat resurrections, but it worked!

Ctra is a great MOD, but I need to work more on how to use it. At the moment the use I have for it is to find out who are the targets of main tank and main assist. I don't heal much and I don't lead, so I don't need to know who has a soulstone available and who doesn't.

Did some right things at the first boss-fight, and role-played a little while waiting for it. My friend wanted me to interact with the others, overcome my fear of spamming the different channels and become visible to the rest of the group. Since hunters in game are as proud of their pets as hunters in real life, that was not too hard. Then next boss fight, and I was feeling that I had started to learn how this worked. Kill small bats, then kill bigger bats. Spam with frostshock. Get out of the way when people yell "clear". Don't touch the jinxed vodoo piles. I also managed not to mistakenly claim any loot - not even the nice purple-lettered hauberk - or spam the different channels.

The group only got through two bosses. At the next bossfight - called "bat lady" - we got wiped. Not my fault this time, nobodies' fault, just bad luck. I reincarnated, and started resurrecting other characters. But have you tried to pick out a singular corpse on a battledfield? They say it's hard. I believe them. The rule is: res ressers first, but who are the shamans and priests? CTra can probably be modified to show class on the screen without opening another window, but on my screen they all just said DEAD. After a couple of mistakes, resurrecting a hunter I thought was a druid and then the druid I was looking for, rather than a priest or a shaman, I started to get the hang of it. I had to check in the normal raid window, then look around for the person I needed to res, then do the same again. Trying to target them through clicking their icon didn't work, as they were mostly at the opposite end of the battlefield from me. I kept getting "that target is too far away" - of course after a 4 second casting period.

This was second try at the boss, I was feeling like a complete idiot, and I started getting whispers saying: "People are forming opinions about you. Roleplay!" When I watch sports events, journalists push their microphones into the faces of athletes at all the worst moment, expecting them to be eloquent. I had just done a tricky task in a half-assed way, the situation was spammed with OOC comments and actions, and if I really was Agirra, the most realistic thing to do would be to pee in my pants or something similarly non-heroic. Anyway, gathering my rp-wits about me I wrote one emote, trying to sum things up in a satisfactory common-sense manner. Lo and behold, the whispers changed. Talk about back-channel pressure.

Too bad the others weren't there when I did the kind of stuff I really like - role-play with plenty of time to enjoy what goes on. The guild-leader and Agirra went off to a balcony above Orgrimmar after the battle, to drink and talk. Agirra went from philosophical to argumentative to happy to sappy and then to falling down drunk. I have to say: I'd never have hired a half-assed, drunken mercenary, but the guildleader player and I were giggling on our backchannel.

I realised that I don't need the pressure of perfect performance and reputation. I have got a lot to learn about how to play my character, need to gather a whole new set of equipment, and certainly need lots of experience in dieing in new ways before I become a good endgame player. But the fun part was getting drunk while totally bewildering one of the forsaken with Agirra's wild passionate orc nature.

Wow Europe researcher's guild

Tonight is a founding meeting, it's not too late to send me an email to introduce yourself and learn the names of some of the characters, borrow your newphew's wow account (he'll hate you later when you start arguing over playing time, so perhaps just get your own?) and log into Moonglade, Horde side, by 10 pm to be there from the start.

A lot of my favourite researchers are there already, mixed with some I am looking forwards to learn to know better. Some have characters in the 20ies, but don't worry, we also have characters which just started. All classes except warrior would be good - the way it looks now we will never need to go without a tank.

See you in Orgrimmar tonight?

***Update: we managed to get enough people online to create the guild. And we still miss one class: hunters.

It's cold!

This morning the central issue on our morning meeting was not how to further democracy through training better journalists or how to support communicative rationality and ethics - it was something closer and dearer to everybodies' hearts. It's cold.

In the middle of a long, stable cold period, the college has changed the system for heating our offices. This is an attempt to save energy by lowering the temperature when there are not a lot of people in the offices: after hours and in the week-ends. It also turns the temperature up in time to have the rooms comfortably heated when we arrive Monday morning. But this means that the control of our immediate environment - the temperature in our offices - has been taken away from us.

The morning was spent discussing different strategies for gaining the control back. One inventive strategy was taking the thermo-controller down from the wall where it is mounted, and put in the fridge. Others included removing batteries from the same thing, or hacking the control system.

Lately I have been interested in such alternative strategies in games: how players exploit loopholes in order to play the game in unexpected ways. And here I get the pleasure of observing the exploit options discussed in a heated discussion and with high stakes: our personal comfort depends on it.

Jesper Juul visits Volda

But my exitement was short: the Jesper Juul in question is a family therapist born in 1948, and not our Jesper Juul, the gamer born in 1970.

I am certain that the gentleman from jesperjuul.com is as brilliant as the somewhat younger gentleman from jesperjuul.net, but I suspect he couldn't care less about gamestudies.

Less is more

When asked about my new-year's resolutions, I was taken by surprise, and answered with a cliche: "I want to work less." Later I started thinking about it. Did I really want to work less? Underneath the reply resonated the response and addition supplied from a colleague - "and live more." I think that is what I really want to do.

I love my work. No, I don't love every minute of it. I hate the way stress short-circuits my short-term memory, leaving me stranded in front of the door to the room with printers, office supplies and mail, wondering what I am doing there. At times of high pressure I carry little notes to myself when I embark on trips outside the office: "printer, copy prints, drop off". Then when I have been diverted by the colleague in the office between here and the printer, the three students looking for another colleague in the hallway between the printer and the copying machine, the statements I have to sign when I get close to the mailbox and the dean who was on his way out for a coffee - I can look at the note and check where it all started and go back to start the whole dance over again.

Point is: when I do less of that, less aimless wandering with a sticky note glued to my fingers, I can do a lot more. I can do the part I live for. I can learn, I can connect the dots of scholarship through research, I can write the connections out and I can share what I learned with students and colleagues. I reduce the stress factor and increase efficiency.

I think I agree with myself and my colleague, I want to work less and live more.

Efficient morning

Another "Oh I am so busy busy busy I hardly have time to... post"
But it's not true. I do have time. I have had time to finish planning the schedule for a course (I am responsible for 2 out of 3 this semester), settle one appointment for travels, start scheduling two more, ignore a journalist (Jill, come back to Norway so I can channel some of that to you, please?) and finish the preliminary grading of a stack of papers. And it's still not 10 am.

To-do list for the next two months has hardly been dented though (regular teaching and administration exempted):
More Game Studies editing
Write a wow article
Start up the researcher's guild formally
Plan game research
Lecture in Bergen on weblogs
Lecture in Bergen on games
Meeting in Bergen on large community communication project
Game studies bibliography
Outline book on computer games
Outline Blog Hui lecture

My life is so full of interesting tasks, no fear of feeling unwanted any time soon.

And now, back to the regularly scheduled teaching - which starts today.

2006 version 1.1

As I grow older, new years don't feel so new any more. Take this year for instance, it is totally packed with teaching and other tasks until the 10th of February. In the first 7 weeks of the semester I will be doing all my teaching this semester and next (until 1st of October). I have known this since August, nothing new about it.

That's why I have decided to make a few adjustments to 2006, so it fits my life better.

New Year will be celebrated properly 11th of February, without a stack of papers to grade hovering in the corner.

My birthday, which is normally at the end of a looong line of other birthday celebrations, is moved to give the family a chance to recover before celebration. I have moved it a month, but this year March 6th disappears, so I have to move my birthday a month and a day to make it fit.

6th of March disappears due to international time-zone crossings. There is no March 6th in 2006. Sorry everybody.

March 19th has been expanded. I hope for everybody's sake that it is a good day, because it will last approximately 40 hours.

Since summer failed last year, it's being stretched this year. Summer starts 15th of May and lasts until 15th of September. Midsummer will still be in place, but on that particular date the coastline of Norway invades every other spot on the northern hemisphere. There is nowhere prettier than by the North Atlantic on the shortest of nights, and this should be shared. I have booked exellent weather, if the temperature falls below 19+, talk to your insurance company and demand a refund. Autumn lasts from 15th of September until 23rd of December, when a light snow is scheduled, with a quick and pittoresque winter.

Christmas is not permitted to be surprisingly early this year. Therefore the 24th of each of the months September, October and November are set aside for "cold runs". These are days for panick shopping for relatives on surprise visits and last-minute searches through the house (and in electricity stores) for lightbulbs for the Christmas tree. It is also good dates for testing out different menues and particularly for testing wine, beer and booze.

I am sure that I will be able to think of other improvements. We still have time though, as the start of the year has been moved out. This may make the year shorter, but I am opting for quality over quantity.

So, more than a month in advance: Happy New Year

Newspaper ducks

Did you ever hear about the crocodiles in the London Sewers? Fat, thriving and dangerous? Years ago I read an interview with a reporter who had worked as a summer intern in a large London paper, editing letters to the editor. One of these asked what would happen if a baby crocodile was flushed down the toilet in London. The intern thought this was a fun little problem, brought it to a local reptile expert, and found out that theoretically a baby crocodile should be able to survive. After the article had been picked up by a newsagency and it had startet its trip around the world, the crocodiles grew - until they became a menace to the workers maintaining the London sewer system. This taps into a rich tradition of crocodile myths, from several larger cities.

Urban legends, myths and hoaxes can live on because they confirm how we feel about the reality around us. The sewer system in major cities is something we would rather not think about, but we all know it has to be very sophisticated - and filled up with strange things. This makes it a land of mystery, terror and also fascination: the world below us which we cannot control.

A contemporary area we cannot control is the US homeland security. Since the 11th of september 2001 anecdotes of security gone bad have popped up with increasing frequencey. The most recent one is not yet totally debunked - I am talking about the story about the student who wanted to read Mao's little red book, and got a visit from Department of Homeland Security instead.

This was a very bloggable piece of news and as such may indicate that bloggs are the tools of media legends, but if you look at the boing boing discussion, you'll soon see that bloggers were working as actively to check on the story as they worked to spread it in the first place. At the end the student broke down and cried, and admitted it was a lie.

This is in itself a fascinating story, but as interesting is the general will to believe something like that. Why can we believe that an agency mainly concerned with national security would be interested in what a student reads?

For a foreigner it's easy to answer. Since 2001 it has become increasingly difficult to enter US. Firms of high repute and impeccable standards are unable to get work-permits for their foreign expert employees - not to mention the problems Universities face if they want to take on a visiting scholar. Normal travellers submit more and more information with each crossing of the borders, and the interrogations... I have occasionally written "business" on my visa waiver when I go to USA for conferences or similar events. Unless you want to keep the line waiting at immigration - don't do that. You will be interrogated about where you work, what you do, why you are there, details about your topics, tired, hungry and dizzy from 8 hours of travel you have to stand there and answer politely, clearly and correctly for 10 minutes. Say "pleasure", pretend your main goal is Bloomingdales, and you'll be fine.

Americans feel this increasing pressure towards more control every day. They need to carry some kind of identification all the time, identify themselves in order to get into the most mundane buildings, submit to having their picture taken and stored in order to meet a colleague or friend for lunch - the land of the free is becoming the land of the very carefully watched.

The world just beyond sight, the metaphorical sewer, is expressed as Homeland Security. In the name of protection, things we would rather not think about may grow, develop and suddenly leap out of nowhere to attack us. Innocent functions become strange and threatening, the pipes below your home, the information given to the library - who knows where it can lead?

Christmas presents

The College gives us a present every year. We have had a long list of useful items, all with an outdoorsy theme: backpacks, thermo-bottles, flashlights, a special bag for maps and a compas - well, you get the drift. Of course, each of these have become the source of jokes among the staff: they want us to get out more, they want us to know what we are doing and where we are going, make the ground fit the map, they want us to be able to shine some light into dark corners... you know, the usual type of jokes.

This year the college is shaken by some extremely controversial decisions. Trust has been betrayed, corners cut, texts twisted - you can say both the staff and the leadership is bleeding. So what did we get? A booklet called "10 years of Volda College" - and a first aid kit with the college logo.

Bless whoever had enough self-irony to make that the official gift this year.

Evil is always the other side

Terra Nova has an interesting discussion on matter of choosing sides: Horde/Alliance in WoW. Castranova asks why do people choose to play evil beings, like undead, prompted by the fact that he discovered that he scares his three-year-old son by it. The post got so many responses I gave up on them, but I did get interested.

I can't answer for Edward Castranova, I can only say what I have learned about conflict in role-play, through playing and through research. And yes, I do know about the issues concerning my own rationalisations, read the parts of my thesis about reflexivity, don't think I haven't faced those questions. But back to the Horde/Alliance conflict.

1) Games need a conflict in order to expand. They need "the other side". Yes, orcs, undead and trolls indicate evil, but if nobody played them, the game would collapse, just like democracy would collapse if nobody dared to represent the opposition.

2) Democracy is based on the right to diversity. OK, so the diversity in WoW is a little extreme and the diet of the undead not exactly compatible with the diet of the taurens, but there are a lot of things I don't eat, too. And I have eaten whale meat, which I guess by some are considered the equivalent of the dead bodies of humanoid enemies. So playing the dark side is, to many of the players, a real moral choice: the choice of representing the alternative, the option to the traditionally accepted "good" side.

3) I have a son too. He is 17 years old and had played WoW for months before I started a character. He sat next to me while I learned how to play my orc, and told me how to deal with the game. His main character is a night-elf priest, and he started to play at the alliance side because he thought they were the heroes. The disappointment when he discovered that he went straight into a long tradition of betrayal, in normal human "God is with us" style, was enough to make him roll a tauren, for some serious tree-hugging.

4) Blizzard is playing with the stereotypes. Yes, the names and imagery of the different races play up to stereotypes. Stereotypes strike both ways, they restrict as well as set free.

5) My personal demons: I can't play humans. My version of hell is a pretty, well-organised human society where the deviant are wiped out. Just logging in as a human character, against that sunny, pretty background, I feel uncomfortable. Give me the graveyeard of the undead any time, chaotic, falling apart and openly rotten/rotting. I might be able to play a gnome if I loaded up enough irony, or a nightelf with a heavy dose of selfrighteousness and detachment, but otherwise the stereotypes just get me: ordinary human organisation is the source of real evil. Sadly and very realistically, people don't see evil in what looks more like themselves.

6) One of the commenters on Terra Nova pointed out that the horde-side players go out of their way to be polite and helpful. While I agree on that on certain servers, I think that is more server-based than side-based. What we get are different cultures on different servers. Moonglade (rp-server) horde-side has a very different dynamic from Argent Dawn (rp-server), more like Alliance side on Runetotem (normal server). The players appear to be younger and used to normal servers or pvp servers, and get rude and unpleasant when they are exposed to role-play. I'd like to say that horde-players are nicer, but after a couple of weeks on a new server, I am really not sure. On the other hand - Moonglade is a young server, it has very few high-level characters (the price on light hide is ridiculously low and it still doesn't sell), and no strong, agenda-setting guilds. Moonglade can still shed the "fuk u" responses to role-play and grow up. Culture can develop and become different.

My conclusion to this is: The reason I like WoW is that Blizzard acknowledges the stereotypes Castranova points out, and then plays with them. The backstory of the game does what the game invites the players to do: play with assumptions.

When Gamers Breed

A story about a family that plays together.

The new battleground

The Women in Games conference in February triggered a frantic comment discussion at joystiq. While there isn't much news ("I get hazzled so I prefer to play with other girls." "You play with only girls! That is so sexist, if I said 'I get hazzled so I only play with guys' you'd flame me for it." "Would not!" "Would so!"), I find it very interesting to see how many of the regular "women should shut up about sexism" crowd hangs out around gaming sites.

link by way of Netwoman.

Researchers' guild

We now have these types of characters:
undead priest
mage
troll rogue
troll warrior
orc warrior
orc warrior
one future warlock
one tauren shaman

So if you want to join the researcher's guild, make a (shaman), druid, (warlock) or hunter - but preferably not another warrior just yet - at Moonglade, European server, horde side, and email me with your information.

Neminism

And if you are a Norwegian reader of comics, you probably already know Nemi, and will be able to relate to Neminism.

For everybody else: Nemi is a goth girl in a wonderful comic series. She is oppositional and make very alternative choices in her life, but is at the same time deeply sensitive and warm. She is not particularly successful at anything but living - but she enjoys life with an enthusiasm which is contagious. In Nemi's world it's OK to enjoy candlelight, poetry, chocolate, rock (metal, preferably), sunsets, politics, beer, dragons and sex. Contradictions are her friend, and style is both surface and lifestyle.

So what is Neminism? It's the power of Nemi. She is becoming a cult figure and role model for girls and teaches that they are allowed to be different. It's OK not to be perfect, formatted like everybody else, or constantly consistent and successful. It's OK to be strong and soft at the same time, to make your own choices about what is important and to neglect others. It's not OK to desert your true friends, hurt those who are too weak to protect themselves, or to kill the dragons.

But Nemi also appeals to much older people, and cross genders. The issue where they discussed the eternity engine was a hit at the Norwegian Council of Research, communications of natural sciences program. My husband the Norwegian language and literature teacher confiscates all issues with Andre Bjerke in them. Bjerke was a Norwegian author and poet, whom Nemi and her writer Lise Myhre greatly admires. There are other sharply critical and funny series in Norway, perhaps more elegantly drawn or with a sharper edge, but while Nemi is always defending the underdog and attacking the establishment, she does it with such a delightful self-irony that even the harshest attack becomes - not weak, but human.

And seeing what I have written, I guess I am a Neminist. I'll even dress in black for Christmas.

Christmas Calendar

A little late, but you can always go back and click the rest of December. The Christmas Calendar at Oslo Central Station is both an online project and a decoration at the station. It's made by Ingrid Toogood Hovland.

I am not entirely certain what the girl with the matches (H. C. Andersen's sad Christmas tale) has to do with flying horses and minarets, but, well, Christmas is not the time to be picky about mixed imagery, and at least it's a politically correct mix. And 2005 is the H. C. Andersen year - in Denmark.

I wish I could have seen this at the station though. It looks like it is much better there than on the website.

By way of Nye Eventyr.

Never playful again

From the Onion, a review of a game designed to not harm, exite or interest anybody.

By way of the ICA game mailing list.




Note: for people who don't know the Onion, put your tongue firmly in cheek and beware of irony, sarcasm and downright silliness.