Tagged! - 5 things

I am not such a great fan of these chain-mail-type games (unless they involve sword and sorcery), but I am a great fan of Luca Rossi, so when he tagged me, I will play along.

Five things you didn't know about me
1) I used to be great at maths, physics, chemistry and biology. All straight A's, and I planned to become a veterinarian. At High school I picked the science classes, full load of all the hard sciences - and then I got a maths teacher who really didn't make things easier for the class. I managed to keep a fair grade in chemistry and biology, passed physics, but maths went really wrong. I went from A to fail in three years of intense struggle to understand what was going on up at that blackboard. I managed to pass a few months late after tuition from a great person I met at the next school. Petter Stigar, THANKS!

2) When I daydream, I am a dancer, or an acrobat. I can make my body leap and fly in my head.

3) I have a set of handpainted china plates that I painted myself.

4) I made a comic strip with a penguin who wanted to fly when I was 19. It was published in a school paper. (25 years later one of the students at our college made an animated movie over the same topic. Same topic, same kind of bird, very different way of getting there.)

5) I have written two books which I have never, and probably never will, publish. One it's pretty sure is gone for ever, because it was stolen with my laptop in 2005. The other is a joint project with my kids, and perhaps I'll revise it when the grandkids are the right age. I don't think it's a great loss to the world if I never become a literary author, though.

.........

OK, that was five things about me that nobody knows. Who to challenge next?

I think I go for Hilde, Jill and thomas

Go go go!

And yes, you all know I am evil enough to tag you, which is why I didn't count that into the five things you never knew...

German game studies?

I have this impression that German game studies is mainly hard-data sociology. This may be an error of mine, from a traumatic experience at a conference in New York a couple of years ago, but when I look for computer game studies in Germany I don't find it. This is probably due to my bad German skills, it's hard to find the right keyword in a language I write badly. So please, dear knowledgeable and skilled readers: what do you know about German game studies? Can you please tell me?

Game Studies for Christmas!

Just in time for your holiday reading: Game Studies 2006 is out! Rejoice, hark, the angels sing etc - we of the editors team are delighted, you have no idea how much. Now, enjoy!

"We were wrong"

That's not really what they said, the Norwegian television company TV2, but I just saw something I rarely see: a news provider spending valuable space on admitting to unethical behaviour.

PFU is the Norwegian press (which means all news media) board for ethics and professional integrity in journalism. They have no real power, but their power is in the threat about what can happen if the Norwegian press stops listening to them. There is not a lot of legislation in Norway really regulating the content of the media, except what counts for everybody about slander. In order to keep this kind of legislation unnecessary, the press censors themselves, through such boards as PFU.

Recently TV2 and Nettavisen lost against a complaint to PFU. Perhaps not the kind of case I really worry about, producers of diet pills are not my idea of a sympathetic victim, but still... they deserve fair and honest coverage in the media as much as anybody else.

Putting in a news item in a net paper doesn't cost much, but TV2 had a poster (EXTREMELY dull looking) with the text stating that PFU is of the opinion that TV2 and the net paper did not follow good news procedures when they indicated that the death of the mother of an anonymous source was caused by the diet pill in question in best commercial time. That one must have cost them, even if the voice reading the statement from PFU and the poster was about as dull as it gets.

Things to count

Bjarte Arneson counts the men he has met since his birth. At the moment there are 1350 persons on his list.

Ginger Cookies

On request, my ginger cookie batter. Note: This is not a low-glycemic cookie, quite the contrary, and I don’t eat these any more. The family members who don’t have messed up metabolisms are happily chewing away, although we normally reduce this amount by at least 50%. This makes a LOT of cookies.

Christmas ginger cookies
About 250 cookies

300g butter
5 deciliters (400grams) sugar
1 dl syrup or molasses
2 tablespoons ginger
2 tablespoons cinnamon
2 tablespoons cloves
1 tablespoon cardamom
2 deciliters water
1 tablespoon “natron” (NaHCO3 ) also known as baking soda
1,6 liters (ca 800 grams) fine wheat flour

Stove temperature: 200 degrees Celcius
Baking time: 5 minutes

Mix butter, sugar and syrup intil it’s soft. Add water, spices and baking soda and work the flour in well. Let the batter rest somewhere cool at least 12 hours or 1-2 days under some kind of wrapping. Use a rolling pin and make the dough into thin sheets, use flour to keep it from sticking. With cookie cutters, make cookies of different sizes and shapes and transfer them carefully to baking sheets.

Bake the cookies for 5 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius, and cool them on the sheet. Decorate with icing.

Icing
2 deciliters powder sugar
½ eggwhite
Some drops of vinegar

Mix all ingredients until smooth and shiny. Make a cone out of paper and fill with icing, use this to decorate the cooled cookies. Have fun!

Touching the past

I started working at Volda College 15 years ago, when the study of public information and public relations was newly formed as a two-year study. To the green new employee was given the task of kicking it off - basically I was given the keys to my office, a room and a bunch of students. Nobody bothered to give me the carefully developed curriculum and reading list until I had been asking for it for three months... By then I had done all the work for the first semester from scratch, too inexperienced to realise that I should not have had to work like that, and that I should have asked more often, louder, and from more people for the information which was lacking.

Today I have been revisiting the one, great thing about those first years in Volda. I love all my students, but can there ever be another group like the first? A handbook with pictures and names, and google, and I have spent the afternoon tracking them slowly through publications and jobs, to send them emails with greetings in the hope that yes, that's the right person.

I am doing this for two reasons: I am generally curious about where they all are now, what do they do, how did they use the knowledge we tried to share with them? But I would also like to use their knowledge about the information profession and the education in order to create a better, stronger and more updated education. And a third reason, which is the one the PR department at the college loves - I want to show them off to new students: "Look, these were my students once! Now they are there - and there - and there."

An afternoon with Google shows me I can do this, safely. I am feeling all warm and fuzzy with pride. And I have only gotten through the first two years. I am going to enjoy this!

Henry Jenkins and the bloggers

He has gotten himself an official blog, so he doesn't need to ask Elin for help to talk to bloggers any more. But Henry Jenkins today uses the authorial power of an established and well-respected scholar to frame history correctly.

The article is no longer at the end of the link, but if you want to read it - well, you got to buy the book: Fans, Bloggers and Gamers. Here Jenkins repeats the story about the editor making an unfortunate analogy calling the bloggers "cockroaches", and how he had the editor do something to his article which has since been dubbed "Doing a Dave" - changing the content after it has been blogged, hence making a lot of very angry and outspoken bloggers look stupid.

In the introduction Henry Jenkins claims that the bloggers never got past the "cockroach" phrase to understand what he was saying. However, this is from his article: "Once this column appears, my authorial control ends and theirs begin." First - if it really was the editor who wrote that unfortunate intro (and editors can be blamed for any number of things , several which are true), Jenkins' control ended long before the column was online. Second - the bloggers understood that perfectly. No need to tell them - it's why they reacted. Third - by changing the column it was clear that Jenkins' authorial control DID NOT end once the article was online. "Doing a Dave" took authorial control away from the bloggers and placed it firmly in the hands of the man with the advantage.

And while we're talking about framing... Henry Jenkins may have asked the blogging community to "blog this", but that's not why they responded. The "pretentious ass" he claims he may be called by bloggers is not deserved for his more well-considered scholarly writing, but for sentences like this: '"Blog this" I said, and not unexpectedly, the blogging community followed the instructions.' What redeems his framing of the incident is the next sentence: 'I simply wasn't prepared for the consequences.'

Water under the bridge 5 years ago, old stuff, yada yada, but I am still happy there is a reprint of Jenkins' "Blog this" article now that the links are no longer correct. Sadly Jill and I can't change the reference in our article, as it's in print and not online, but it should be Jenkins, Henry (2006): "Blog This!", in Fans, Bloggers and gamers, Ecploring Participatory Culture, New York University Press, New York, p. 178-181.

Christmas?

I haven't even thought about it. But today I realised that I have gotten the plans for next semester off earlier than at any other time, I have a small stack only of papers to read still, and I have my daughter home to help with baking and cleaning. I can go home and make plans and expect to be able to follow them up!

Oh joy!

I may get into that Christmas thing for real this year!

Yahrrrrr!

I am one-eyed for three days, due to an upcoming eye check. A stylish white band-aid covers the left eye, and I am muddling through with one ye.

I had no idea how much I relied on that left eye. I also didn't know my right eye had become this nearsighted, as the left has compensated. After an hour I have a headache, and the right eye is tearing from the strain. 10 minutes online is more than enough already. I guess reading, writing, surfing and gaming is pretty much out of the question until Tuesday. See you all then!

Update: For those who were worried - eyes are fine, really, it was just an test in order to see how much they need to adjust my eyesight in order to make the eyes cooperate without prisms in the glasses. I am going to have an operation to adjust the muscles around the eye some time in March -07. After that I might be able to wear lenses! I am trying to imagine my face without glasses, and it's scary. But until then life goes on as usual, which is pretty good, although I found it was easier to read books and papers with only one eye! Everything else was pretty frustrating though. Suddenly getting a blind side was quite stressful.

Theory? Huh?

I am currently reading student papers, preparing for oral assessments tomorrow and Friday. Before I meet my students, I want to give them (and not just the ones who are to face me, but all students writing papers all over the world) a free tip which may make paper writing in academia easier.

Figure out what "Theory" means.

Here are some free definitions:
Worldreference.com
wordnet.princeton.edu

A bit more challenging:
Jonathan Culler, What is Theory, chapter one in his book Literary Theory, a very short introduction.

The Wikipedias don't entirely agree:
Wikipedia has a long and quite informative article about it, discussing the meaning of "theory" in different contexts.

This is opposed to the Norwegian Wikipedia article, where theory is presented as applicable to the natural sciences only.

Nick Yee on Addiction

Thank you Nick Yee, for this very thoughtful article on gaming addiction! There is still a lot more to the discussion and why it exists at all, but this is one of the most consistent treatments of this topic I have seen so far.

And thank you Jill, for emailing the link while I am up to my ears in reading student papers, unable to look out in the wide world without help!

Norwegian media statistics

Another couple of useful links, this mostly for Norwegian language users. The media use reports by the Norwegian statistical office, and a long list of European sites with an emphasis on Scandinavian by Nordicom/Norway.

And while we're at it: The Eurobarometer, a test which keeps being repeated - the quality of the questions has been discussed, but they are the same in all ov europe, and have been repeated at intervals for 20 years.

Machinima

Machinima is movie making through games, and if you want to see what that can look like, have a look at machinima.com, where you can pick your favourite game for a scene for all kinds of adventures.

Another day in Utopia

A nourishing meal in a clean bowl, eaten comfortably in the safety of a warm and even gracious room. Tea served steaming hot, fragrant with rare spices from a distant country. Can there be a better way to start the day? Add to this luxury the chance to wash in clean water, warm, clean clothes and comfortable shoes, which I, like all other inhabitants in this wondrous land, don before I settle into a vehicle which can easily be steered through the rain and uphill - no effort needed at all.

Then hours are spent in another warm and comfortable location, one with ample lighting and walls covered with books. A magical machine lets me read, write, pass messages and images to others, and receive the same. Delicately I touch the keys and a world of events come to me. Work - the hours I need to engage in it, to give back something to this rich society in which I live - is an intricate sorting of information and passing on my ideas about it to others, a complex process, but painless and performed at the tap of my fingertips.

When the light beyond the large pane of glass changes, it's time to return to the domicile - but first we gather reseources for another meal: fish, meat, eggs, cheese, vegetables, fruit - anything I can imagine and more is spread out before me in one spot. And all they ask as I leave with my catch is that I swipe a plastic card. There is some connection between the resources I have access to here and the tapping of my fingers through the day, but much work or little, it is a long time since I worried about what to eat, when, where.

Safe in the comfort of the place where I store the far too many objects I possess, I can eat, rest and entertain myself alone or with family or friends. I can do this until I am exhausted from the delights of the day, and I fall asleep, warm, safe, well-fed and comfortable.

Truly, Utopia must finally be here.

Norwegian academic publishing

This article, in Norwegian and by Professor Anders Johansen at the University of Bergen, discusses the reforms in academic publishing in Norway. It's deeply problematic as the ranking of publishers in the form about to be implemented will kill any research connected to local issues with a strictly national interest. This reform means publishing on Norwegian language, history, society, culture - everything specific for Norway which would be of interest in order to develop an intellectual Norwegian debate - becomes irrelevant to academia.

I am going to stop there, and not translate more of the points in the article. This is a battle Norwegian Scholars need to fight in Norwegian, in Norway. Hvis du leser norsk og er akademiker eller ønsker å lese norsk forskning også i framtiden, les hva Anders Johansen sier!

Congratulations, Anne Mangen

Once time colleague and still working in similar fields, Anne Mangen recently defended her Dr. art. on "New narrative pleasures? A cognitive-phenomenological study of the experience of reading digital narrative fictions".

Anne defended her thesis at NTNU, the Norwegian Technological University in Trondheim, but she has spent much of her research period in California, since about 2000.

Blizzard and the gold-sellers

Not long ago I wrote about the connection between gold, time and twinking, and how some gold seller sites claimed they cooperate with Blizzard. At the time I didn't consider it, but a certain attunement needed if I want to join future raids have made me pause.

In order to enter some areas in the game, special effort is needed, or attunements. To enter Molten Core (MC) you have to get through Black Rock Depths (BRD) in order to get a fragment of the core, carry it back to an elf just outside the entranc and voila, you're attuned. Takes a bit of effort, but fairly easy, really. You just have to be a good enough player to get through a lev 54+ instance.

To get attuned to Blackwing Lair the stakes are a bit higher, you have to look for the letter that starts the quest - means killing some high level elite orcs. Then you need to go with a ten person raid through Upper Black Rock Spire (UBRS), kill the final boss and touch the orb behind him. No longer easy-peasy, but again, what it takes is skill and time.

Now, for the Onyxia attunment, you will be working for some time. You have to kill certain bosses in Lower Black Rock Spire (LBRS), then run around and deliver quests, collect items in UBRS, run a bit more, disguise as a dragonkin, talk to a dragon, kill a bunch of dragons, well, you get it, this is a loooong quest chain of things you have to do, and then you can enter Onyxia's Lair.

For the Ahn'Qiraj instances in Silithus, the entire server joined in for the attunement. Everybody have to work towards opening the gates, and once they are open, everybody can enter. This is both for the 20 and the 40 man instance: AQ20 and AQ40.

Now, up comes the newest, latest instance: Naxxramas in the eastern Plaguelands. For all the other instances, what you need to get attuned is friends, groups, gaming skills: the same kind of skills you need inside the instance. To get attuned to Naxxramas (Naxx), you need soloing skills and gold.

To enter Naxxramas, you must become attuned (which you do through the Argent Dawn) and then enter a Teleporting Spire in the Eastern Plaguelands. Although there is a green raid entrance deep inside Stratholme, it is blocked off by a gate.

The requirements for attuning to Naxxramas will depend on your reputation with the Argent Dawn:

Honored
5x [Arcane Crystal]
2x [Nexus Crystal]

1x [Righteous Orb]

60 gold

Revered
2x [Arcane Crystal]
1x [Nexus Crystal]

30 gold

Exalted
Free

The fastest way to get into Naxxramas is to run Scholomance or Stratholme until you are Honored and then simply buy the required materials. Prices obviously vary, but to give you a rough idea, the materials costs are approximately 250 at Honored (and about half that at Revered).

So: what you need for this attunement is either to give up all hope of entering for weeks of grinding, or to buy gold. Add to the equation that in order to get the equipment you need for Naxx, you need to run the other raid instances regularly to get new gear, because the only gear you can re-use is the nature resistance (NR) gear from AQ - and for some bosses some of the fire resistance (FR) gear from the dragon and fire related instances, but you can't even reach the FR bosses without the NR from AQ and most important in Naxx: frost resistance and shadow resistance. When you do heavy grinding of gear in raids, you spend a lot of the cash you make there on resources to maintain your presence: Potions, buffs, enchants, repairs. Raiding needs to be supported through grinding.

What does this mean? Naxxramas is a goldsellers' goldmine. Blizzard has built into the game an instance which ensures that nobody but the most devoted players can enter without either a very strong and generous guild supporting them, or through buying gold.

I am trying to understand what Blizzard gains from this. One thing is of course that goldsellers are players, too, and they have to buy the game and pay the fees. And they have to pay more than other players, as they have their accounts revoked each time they are discovered, and so they buy a new game to make a new account to get back into business. I would love to see an estimate of how large a percentage of the player population are gold sellers. It has to be a bunch, I normally get 4-5 whispers every gaming session from different gold seller sites, I report as many as I can, but they pop right back up.

An other issue is: Is Blizzard planning to make players buy their way into better positions in the game? The changes with The Burning Crusade (TBC), where mounts and gear is more advanced than ever, and where movement will be more restricted if you don't have the right gear, hints towards that kind of development. Today an epic mount riding skill costs almost 1000 gold. Before you could get one character to a certain status and buy cheaper mounts for your other characters and your friends. The recent changes makes this practice impossible. I can only guess that it means transportation will be more expensive in TBC. At the speed which I can grind - and mind you, I am a pretty dedicated player, I have to, in order to maintain a presence both with the raiding/role-playing guild and the researcher's guild - 1000 gold takes a month. 10 000 gold, which is the logical sum for a flying mount? Sounds like a year. A year of dedicated grinding, hours and hours of farming. I will never do that. What will Blizzard do to "help"?

Commodification is already an obvious part of TBC. Special "packs" offer goodies for players who buy them, like flashy funny mounts. Are Blizzard planning to beat the gold sellers by joining them?

I was looking forwards to The Burning Crusade. I would love a flying mount, a blood elf paladin and new areas to explore. Now I really don't know.

Selfcontained blogs

Recently I have discovered a few blogs which are actually pretty good, but which are, oddly for a long time blogger, extremely self contained. Some of them have no links in the text, some of them link to themselves.

When news media moved into the net, they tried to avoid links in order to hold the reader in one spot. It didn't work, people got bored and used search engines. So the news media, not being totally stupid, started working with the power of the links and made several different types, both to their own archives and to other sources.

But these new bloggers, who do serious and nice work, so they are no spammers of marketing blogs or anything like that, they link to themselves, don't share the link love, and when they write comments on other peoples' blogs they put in links to themselves. This is a way to use the gift economy of links which I find is ungenerous and selfish: use other peoples' sites to link themselves, but not link back.

I don't know what I'll do yet. So far I am reading the comments, checking each blog carefully, and if it's unique and interesting I let the comments pass. But I am a little surprised at this isolation, this way to use a weblog as a place for display, not for connections and sharing.

Television and feminism

I am leafing through Joshua Meyrowitz' No Sense of Place, a great work on how electronic media in the body of television changed out society. It does point to some of the same issues as the extremely popular Amusing ourselves to death, but it holds so much more. It is a rich and interesting read, and since it's such a long time since I read it parts appear to me like recognitions of my own thoughts. A little sad too, as I realise it was Meyrowitz who wrote it, and not my original thought. Alas.

Anyway, here goes:

Before, isolated from men and from each other, women had "no outside standards to reckon by." "For women at home... the loss of a direct tie to the outer world means a loss of cognitive knowledge of how things work and real standards to test oneself against." As an arena of news and entertainment shared by both sexes, television alters women's perspective. Television gives women access to "outside standards" and it provides knowledge of "how things work." The shared arena of television also invites public comparison of the males and females portrayed in it. And by the male standards offered by television, women are weak, isolated, and relatively useless. If a man were in the position of most female television characters, he would probably be considered a "failure." (1987:211)

This rings with the same kind of truth as does Loving with a Vengeance by Tanya Modleski and Reading the Romance by Janice Radway. Both these works on women and popular culture show how a communication technology apparently worthless and fully commercialised was used in ways that empowered the users rather than numb their brains. Or, in the words of Adorno and Horkheimer:

The stunting of the mass media consumer's power of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film.

Studying, playing and and generally hanging out with consumers of computer games does not leave me with a feeling of interacting with stunted, unintellectual people with no imagination. Quite to the contrary, they are imaginative, hard working and spontaneous - within the gaming context, at least. What I really would like to know is how the women think about it. PerhapsI should try to find one of the women's guilds or a group of women's gamers and do a Radwayian study? OK, one more point on the to-do list...

So there we go - opening one old book made me drag out two more, and one ancient article. Returning to the classics today, I guess.