Media-ludic approaches: Critical reflections on games and research practice

Emma Witkowski at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and I will be editors of an upcoming special issue on "Media-ludic approaches: Critical reflections on games and research practice."

The deadline is September 1st 2017, the journal is the Danish mixed-language (English, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) journal MedieKultur, with Kjetil Sandvik as main editor and Claus Toft-Nielsen as issue editor, and I can't wait to start the labour of love it will be to edit these articles. (and I wrote that with a straight face. I am discovering that I like editing.)

MedieKultur is open access, which in these times of insane pay-walls and publishing fees means you don't pay to publish and you don't pay to read! Media, Culture and Communication studies are also very strong and well developed in Denmark, which means that the articles will find a good audience and be treated by solid editors (beyond me and Emma). So since you are now almost convinced, here are the submission guidelines for authors.

From the CFP (Do go read the whole thing, it's not all that long and there's useful information):

The goals of this volume are in part to:

• Explore questions on games and media studies methods, collaborations and productions, and to ignite critical considerations of existing and imaginable alternative instruments of study.
• Examine the gaps and precarious methods in games research methods, for example covert ethnographic research, big data, socio-phenomenographical research, approaches to mixed methods (qualitative-quantitative) research, and small or single case studies.
• Question how research concepts from the study of games have travelled and how they are exportable to media and communications and other game/play fields.
• Expand on how the study of games raises new practical and ethical questions of established user/audience methods and theories.

By focusing on the question of methods in games research and media studies, this edition of MedieKultur presents a collection of innovative research perspectives, which can reach beyond the growing field of game studies and engage with interrelated subject areas such as audience studies, media sport studies, digital broadcasting, political economy, and leisure cultures research.

Hedonism in August

One of the topics I have been working on for a while concerns hedonism as a moral philosophy of gaming. This is, of course, frightfully ambitious, seeing that I am not philosopher. I am certain my arguments can be ripped apart quite easily by somebody who have actually studied philosophy, and not gaming. If so, feel free to find my article The player as hedonist in the Journal of gaming & virtual worlds. But for those of us who are more concerned with new ways of thinking about games and game research, I am trying to poke some holes in the idea that pleasure can be planned and designed for.

A counter-productive claim, if you are looking for a formula to make winner games, but if you're trying to gain insight into the wider processes of gaming it's very important to keep looking for different viewpoints. And so I have thrown one of mine out there, going out on thin ice for the sake of trying to carry an argument across.

Is there a rythm to gaming?

All who have played games know there is a rythm to them, an ebb and flow of activity and energy, back and forth, sometimes like a tango where the participants are evenly matched and push, give and counter with intense focus, sometimes like the inexorable march of the invading feet as the stronger participants lay waste to all opposition. From the lighthearted singsong of easy togetherness to the complex concert of a well-rehearsed team, yes, there is a rythm to play and to games.

But to gaming, as a phenomenon? Is there a flow and counter, an emerging patterns of back and forth, intensity and slack? I don't know, but Tom Apperley is looking for it. In his quite new and fresh book Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global the topic appears to be an assumption of interconnectedness of gaming practices, globally.

It is an extremely interesting thought, and I am looking forwards to seeing there Tom Apperley takes it.

The real, the unreal and the passing of time

In between semester end, student supervision, guest lecturers, seminars, exam preparation, conference papers (oh no I have more mails I need to send out about that), conference organising, moving to another country and changing jobs, I am a tad busy. However, when given a forced pause (sitting in one place, looking awake), I grabbed the chance to read Playing with one’s self: notions of subjectivity and agency in digital games, by Alec Charles in Eludamos.

I have been using Baudrillard to a certain extent in my own work, and have also read with interest Ragnhild Tronstad's very interesting Doctoral thesis Interpretation, Performance, Play, & Seduction: Textual Adventures in Tubmud.

This prepared me for the sense of going back in time I experienced reading this paper. Fifteen years ago I wrote about the pseudo-interactivity in games (in Norwegian, Charles is exused for not citing that). This was the introduction to meeting Espen Aarseth, and the many, many discussions about the real meaning of interactivity, of agency and power that followed through the years I worked with my doctorate.

And this brings me back to Alec Charles' interesting text, because this is an article which could have benefited quite a bit from going back 10 years in the references. It feels amazing to be able to say this, but the discussions of game texts, literature theory and interactivity were quite heated around the change of the milennium, and a central text is the now old, but not yet, obviously, dated: Cybertext by Aarseth.

Another valuable source is (after the last years of telling people "you don't need to cite that #¤¤%& debate all the time," I never thought I'd say this) the infamous and formative ludology vs narratology debate. Much of the discussion in that debate concerns itself with the question of interactivity.

This little stroll down memory lane made me reconsider some of the things that have annoyed me the last years. Time has actually passed, and there is now enough material that it is possible to have a decent literature list for an article and still miss some of the more relevant material. This is all good, so no, I am not goign to start whining about "these young academics who don't do their homework, and everythign was so much better just 15 years ago..." It does however give a perspective to game studies, and the people who once upon a time said:

2001 can be seen as the Year One of Computer Game Studies as an emerging, viable, international, academic field. This year has seen the first international scholarly conference on computer games, in Copenhagen in March, and several others will follow. 01-02 may also be the academic year when regular graduate programs in computer game studies are offered for the first time in universities. And it might be the first time scholars and academics take computer games seriously, as a cultural field whose value is hard to overestimate.

It feels like 2001 was yesterday.

When I read this and look at the material being produced only 9 years later, it feels like the years must have been very long indeed.

Gaining the upper hand

Another article hits the digital sphere. Training, sharing, cheating is now available to the subscribers of e-learning, the journal. In 18 months it will be free, but until then: Subscribe, or be satisfied with the abstract.

This article gathers a lot of the loose threads of my thoughts through the last years, particularly my experiences from playing in guilds that raid (although casually).

Games and e-learning

Sometimes I just forget that I have done something, and then it pops up and I go "Oh, yeah, right, I did that." It sounds horribly arrogant, as if I don't care, and I don't like this part of myself. You see, I do care about the articles I write and the work I do. It's just that when I have finished something, I put it behind me and move on, and sometimes I put it a bit more behind me than I really planned, you know. And then, more times than not, I go: "Oh, I wrote this as well. Huh, I almost sound smart!"

One such item is the upcoming article in E-learning. Issue 7 is on Game Design Literacy Practices, and my article in it is "Training, Sharing or Cheating? Gamer Strategies to Get a Digital Upper Hand." Heavily inspired by Mia Consalvo, I write about theorycrafting and the use of specialised gamer sites, where gamers go to help each other learn or develop those mad skills they later use to impress each other with ingame.

All you need is to have no life

Jonas Linderoth at the University of Gothenburg published an article in "Digital Læring" or Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy on the value of games for learning. The title "It is not hard, it just requires having no life - Computer games and the illusion of learning" positions the article as a stumbling block right in the middle of the over-enthusiastic rush towards games as a solution for modern education.

I had heard about and disagreed with this article several times before publishing, but reading it I am almost inclined to agree with it. Linderoth points out that there are two ways to gain skills in games. One is by learning to jump better, learning to think more tactically than the opponent or in some other way use the resources at hand better. The other way to gain skills in games is by doing repetitive tasks until you are rewarded with a level, an object or some other affordance that makes your avatar stronger. In short: he makes a clear distinction between what you learn as a player, and what affordances your avatar gains.

So far I am with him, and I think it's a very important consideration. The general belief that games make learning easier is severely flawed. The most important flaw is however in my opinion the belief that games makes it easier to teach what is on some curriculum. I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Norway we have certain things pupils are supposed to learn each year, and their progress as well as the success of the teachers and the educational system is measured by how well they are able to learn these particular things. Outside of those skills, what the pupil or student learns doesn't count. So if you learn how to dance salsa really well, that does nothing for your grades in mathematics.

Games tend to teach you how to salsa, when what you should have learned is to do maths. If you don't want the game to teach salsa, you have to remove all options for dancing, and only leave options for mathematics. Linderoth describes his argument of the relationship between affordances and skills:

What I aim to illustrate is that a game system can be designed in such a way that you can progress in the game to a certain degree without adapting yourself to the system. A system that means that a gamer can succeed without the effort of mastering gaming skills. Phrased in a more theoretical way this is an issue about how new affordances are introduced in the gaming activity (p 10).

So, to sum up the argument - somewhat brutally, I admit: in order to learn something from a game, or develop as a gamer, the game should have static affordances. No new skills with new levels, no new tools, no gold or achievements, only you and your skill. Most common games which are typical agôn games are like this. They take you to the arena, read you the rules and give you your game-piece. Then it's just you, the board and your fellow gamers, and nothing changes within that frame.

Games where you can gain affordances simply by working diligently at simple tasks are, according to Linderoth, not games from which you can learn anything.

In the light of Scott Rettberg's article on "Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft," in Digital Culture, Play and Identity, this is an interesting claim. Rettbergs argument is that exactly the grinding aspect of World of Warcraft is what makes it an ideal training ground for capitalist work ethics (p. 32). So, on the one hand you don't learn anything from grinding, on the other hand it's perfect training for many of the positions you can expect to hold as an employee today.

Now, Rettberg's argument gives strong ideological reasons to adapt Linderoth's position on games with non-static affordances, but I am still not totally convinced. The reason is that both in World of Warcraft (Rettberg) and World of Conflict (Linderoth), personal skill is the most important feature for satisfying gaming.

Most players who play a game with levels more than once, learn how to use levelling as just another fixed affordance, and so learn to become better at it, do it quicker and with better results. You can use levelling processes to learn more about the story of the game, hence use it to gain narrative satisfaction, or you can aim at aquiring particularly useful objects which you will then not have to return for later.

The problem with Linderoth's argument, where increased skill and new tools and resources pull in different directions, is that this conflict is just skin deep. For the players who play through a game that demands leveling more than once, the apparently increasing affordances they gain access to become fixed. There are just that many quests, just that many abilities, just that many levels, and that is what you have to play with. Yes, it takes longer to reach that point, and players who think a game ends just because they have reached a certain level, may feel that it's all about grinding. But players have other experiences from games of progression. The game researcher Kristine Jørgensen at the University of Bergen recently wrote a glowing description of her experiences with the new game Dragon Age: Origins, and all who have followed her descriptions of the play process on Facebook know that she is planning to go back to old saves in order to explore the game much further.

Now, we can argue that exploring old saves does not lead to learning, as it's just about repetition of something already done. But for a game which reveales a story that's even experienced as a moral story, a fable even, replaying old saves is a way to delve deeper into the conflicts, the parables and the lessons of fiction, and hence absolutely a way to learn... even if there are levels and new skills and objects to be gained on the way.

However, Linderoth does actually say something along these lines:

The relationship between the player’s skill and progression in using tools and resources is not something fixed, but rather fluid. In one and the same game there can be moments that require more or less skill. It is not as simple as saying that just because a game introduces new tools and resources the player never has to develop her or his skill (p. 12).

But I find that he loses sight of this in his final words:

Games and education have completely different conditions. While games are designed to make players happy, educational practices are legitimate as long as they offer students the opportunity to learn something. To design educational tasks where you can succeed by just waiting and doing some extremely simple, non-challenging activities is hardly appropriate. That would be like giving someone on a diet a set of scales that showed weight loss without the person actually loosing any weight. Maybe the things that make a player motivated while playing games neither can nor should be brought into schools (p. 17).

First, learning is very much about repetition. You learn how to do a certain task, and then you drill that task until you can repeat it easily and quickly. This is how you learn how to do maths, how to play instruments, how to read and write. Each repetition is simple and non-challenging.

Next, you gain new affordances all the time, as you learn. When you have repeated one piece of music until you know how to play it, you get a new set of notes. Perhaps you get to play together with people with different instruments. You get to play in some new spot. Boring repetition leads to increased skill, new affordances and new achievements. You do actually gain levels, and you are not stuck on the same limited board with the same game-pieces for the rest of your life. Rather, if you keep repeating the same things without gaining new affordances, in real life you're stuck on a corner of the game board, without looking up to see that you're just playing a tiny part of the game.

Still, I think that Linderoth's article is very important for developing pedagogic games. I just agree with him on a different premise. I agree because what educators need isn't a virtual representation of how the world really is, but a way to see how pupils perform at a certain set of tasks given limited affordances. For this the games Linderoth promotes would be just perfect.

Why I really should read CFPs more closely

I just finished an article I am now quite happy with and would love to see published, on player ethics and pleasure in games, and enthusiastically I looked up the CFP of the magazine I was asked to contribute to, in order to see where I should send it.

I have written 7000 words too much.

I can cut 2000, perhaps 3000 if I really go through and remove all redundancy (I probably should do anyway), but reducing the paper by more than half?

BTW: Cutting is going fine. Not even sarcastic about that! I may not make all 7000, but it's really useful to start killing darlings! It's an important part of the process, as well. What comes out at the other end will be the important material. At least I hope so!

Finally here

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


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

It's at Amazon

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

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

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

But I am still pretty proud of it!
---

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

Ja, vi vet alt for lite

At times I feel like giving up on what we in Norway call "forskningsformidling" - popularising and communicating research. All the efforts done, nationally and internationally, to understand what gaming is and how it influences society are made invalid to the Norwegian debate by plain and simple lack of knowledge and critical sense in Norwegian media. Friday's news item on games at nrk.no is another example of amazing lack of a critical approach to certain opinions. Forgive me, English-language readers. The rest of this post will be in Norwegian.

Fredag morgen, 6 februar, hadde Dagsnytt i NRK en nyhetssak om at kulturdepartementet setter av en million til opplysning om og forskning på problemskapende spillbruk. De sa imidlertid ikke "problemskapende spillbruk", de sa spillavhengighet. Mange mener dette er det samme, i alle fall ville en eventuell spillavhengighet være ganske problematisk. Imidlertid finnes det ikke noen diagnose som sier spillavhengighet. At norske media og enkelte grupper i den norske offentligheten, her representert ved NRK, på død og liv vil påprakke en gruppe en diagnose gjør den ikke til noen faktisk sannhet.

Det de gjør er imidlertid å skape en sosial sannhet. Saken slik den ble sendt på radioen var ganske ille. Den inneholdt alle de forventede ingrediensene, en bekymret mor, en interessert forsker som stort sett fikk si noen omtrentligheter og en ikke helt godt forstått melding om forskningsmidler om spillbruk. På Torsdagens Joingame møte ved universitetet i Oslo presenterte seniorrådgiver i Kulturdepartementet, Dag Asbjørnsen, nyheten saken sannsynligvis bygger på. I den sammenhengen presiserte han at Kulturdepartementet snakker om "problemskapende spillbruk". Han sa ingen ting om det NRK påsto i nyhetene:

Kulturdepartementet øker satsingen på dataspill, og jobber nå med en ny handlingsplan for å bekjempe avhengighetsproblemet.

Forsknings- og opplysningsmidlene som Kulturdepartementet satte av var, slik jeg oppfattet Dag Asbjørnsen, midler som skulle brukes til å finne ut hva problemskapende spillbruk er, og til å spre informasjon om dette. Når NRK presenterer dette som om Kulturdepartementet endelig vil utrydde spillavhengighet vil jeg i alle fall se/høre kilden til deres utsagn.

NRK påstår at et fenomen som er svært omstridt, og som spesialister som har arbeidet med feltet lenge avviser, er et faktum.
NRK trekker fram, først og fremst på nettsiden, andre problematiske saker som alle på ett eller annet vis har blitt tillagt spillavhengighet, mens de ikke trekker fram saker som sier noe annet. Dette er en form for ensidig rapportering som er noe helt annet enn god journalistikk.

Kanskje har NRKs reportere misforstått hva det vil si å være kritisk. Dataspillbransjen er i ferd med å bli veldig stor, og det er all grunn til å være kritisk til den. Et norsk eksempel er Dagbladets fokus på arbeidssituasjonen i Funcom. Internasjonalt er det flere ganger rapportert svært dårlige arbeidsforhold for ansatte i ulike spillfirma. Lange dager, lav jobbtrygghet og dårlig arbeidsmiljø er ikke uvanlige forhold for ansatte i bransjen. Med tanke på de svært mange programmererne og designerne som spesialiserer seg mot spill i norske utdanningssinstitusjoner er det grunn til å spørre om ikke nyhetsmedia forsømmer sitt samfunnsansvar når all kritikk av spillbransjen handler om kritikk av spillenes suksesskriterier, og ikke for eksempel ser på de framtidige arbeidsforholdene for alle disse entusiastiske studentene.

Det er all grunn til å spørre hvor pengene for spill går: hvem tjener på spillene? Spillbransjen er adskillig mindre dekket på dette feltet enn for eksempel musikk- og filmbransjen, og det sier ganske mye. Store multinasjonale selskap kjøper opp gode ideer og gjør dem til sine egne. De tar også over ideer gratis, ved at spillernes innsats integreres i spillene uten at de får betaling for det. Svært mange entusiaster arbeider mye med å gjøre spillopplevelsen bedre for seg selv og andre, og dette er gratis arbeidskraft for spilleiere som allerede tjener godt - hvorfor finnes det ikke et lett tilgjengelig system for å belønne denne innsatsen?

Forskerne får ikke tilgang til opplysninger om spillermassen, om sentrale element i utviklingsprosessen og om arbeidsprosessene i produksjonen: Er det akseptabelt at så store organisasjoner er så lite tilgjengelige for innsyn?

Dette er kritikk av spillbransjen som blir helt oversett i journalistenes "kritiske dekning av dataspill." Det er ganske enkelt å forstå hvorfor dette skjer. Det er veldig lett å finne folk som spiller mye, og andre folk som er bekymret for disse. En hvilken som helst journalist kan prate med foreldrene til noen ivrige dataspillere på ungdomsskolen, og vips har de en "kritisk sak" til et stort og kjent fenomen. Det er adskillig vanskeligere å sette seg inn i sosiale, økonomiske og politiske forhold som spillene blir produsert innenfor.

Det vi får er dermed en situasjon hvor journalistikken stempler en stor gruppe svært aktive spillere, påfører dem en ikke-eksisterende diagnose og er med på å rettferdiggjøre noe som kan være overgrep og frihetsberøvelse i godhetens navn. Når barn blir tvangsinnlagt på grunnlag av avvikende adferd blir det vanligvis knapt nok omtalt i pressen. Barn og ungdom har svært få rettigheter når deres foresatte ikke er fornøyd med deres adferd. Det hjelper ikke denne allerede svake gruppen at det blir akseptert i nyhetsmedia at enkelte blir tvunget til å kureres for adferd som vi faktisk ikke vet er det faktiske problemet, eller bare et symptom på helt andre og adskillig større problemer.

Utgangspunktet for den aktuelle nyhetssaken, og dermed denne bloggposten, var en rapport om at det skal komme litt penger til forskning på problemskapende spillbruk. Ja, det er veldig nødvendig med slik forskning. Det er imidlertid svært tungt å initiere forskning og forskningsformidling om hva spill er så lenge journalistikken er så ekstremt vinklet i en bestemt retning at det kan se ut som en systematisk fortiing av all uenighet med det rådende medieparadigmet. Hvor er det mediekritiske perspektivet i denne saken? Må vi som forsker på spill begynne å rapportere alle tilfeller av misrepresentasjon av våre utsagn til PFU? For å sitere fra vær varsom-plakaten:

1.4. Det er pressens rett å informere om det som skjer i samfunnet og avdekke kritikkverdige forhold. Det er pressens plikt å sette et kritisk søkelys på hvordan mediene selv fyller sin samfunnsrolle.

Nei, jeg kritiserer ikke pressen for å stå på sin rett til å skrive om at mange bruker spill på en måte som bidrar til problemer, nå og i framtiden. Jeg kritiserer pressen for å ikke oppfylle sin plikt til å se på hvordan den utøver denne retten.

Mythbusting

In this picture: Torill Mortensen, Faltin Karlsen, Jessica Enevold, Rune Klevjer and Snorre Bryne.


Links for an afternoon of discussions about myths around computer games:

Studies from NOVA on youths and computer culture - in Norwegian mostly.

NRK interview with Ole Jensen, concerned grandfather, Dagfinn Nordbø, childrens ward specialist, Leila Torgersen, researcher and psycholog and Rita Brudalen, from the Norwegian Media Authority: Verdibørsen, 24 januar 2009.
Dagfinn Nordbø argued against the idea that children are so impressionable that they don't see the difference between games and society.

Leila Torgersen presented her study of 12000 children and youngsters, and their use of computer games. She had found that children who are interested in violence in general are also interested in violent computer games, and that children from families that did not interfer with the childrens' media consumption and let them play as much and what ever they liked had a slightly higher preference for violent solutions after a some years. It was however not possible to establish a causal relationship between violent computer games and violence in real life.

She had a few very important points to add: Over the last 10 years youth violence has been decreasing in Norway, it is not increasing. In the same period children report less loneliness. This is the opposite tendency of the myths about the lonely, violent youths produced by the increasing use of computer games.

An interesting curiosity: Action games where the player identifies with a character who needs to solve his problem through violence showed a slightly larger tendency to create positive thoughts about violence than the much more directly violent first-person shooters. The difference was not big, we are talking small margins here, but it does change a few ideas about what kind of violence is really violent.

Her findings are also supported by C. J. Fergusons findings in his study of school shooters, which I wrote about recently.

Active gamers and health: Swedish research, which I wrote about in 2008.

Ragnhild Tronstad's blogpost about "interested or addicted" - "Hekta eller avhengig" at forskning.no. A good discussion about addiction and overwhelming interest, and the importance of making a distinction. Here she refers to the report by Jonas Linderoth and Ulrika Bennersted: "Att leva i World of Warcraft". This is a study of very active World of Warcraft players, where ten young players describe their lives.

Discworld and World of Warcraft

Did you know there was a MUD based on the Discworld, the universe created by Terry Pratchett? I knew, actually, although I had never visited it.

The one who did visit is Faltin Karlsen, a Ph D student, and currently a doctorate candidate, at the University of Oslo. He defends his thesis Emergent perspectives on multiplayer online games: A study of Discworld and World of Warcraft tomorrow. I know, because I am one of the opponents.

As such, I don't really want to say too much about this. I just wanted to say this: The test lecture is at Forskningsparken Friday 16th at 9.15. The defense starts 11.15. I am going to do my best to make it an interesting, worth-while event.

Still not really real

I just downloaded the copyedited files from Peter Lang publishers. I haven't looked at them yet. It's too scary. It's worse than an exam. Perhaps even worse than getting the evaluation of my Ph D. I am hoping people will read this, I mean, real people, not just five peers who are equally geeky and nerdy as me anyway.

Well, now I know what I'll be doing: Reading my manuscript. Just in case anybody worried I'd be bored, now that I am back in Volda. I am not. Instead I am scared.

58977

They wanted 60000 words. I have been in the unusual, for academics, position of having to bulk up my manuscript. "But I write a compact language" I whined to my editors. "I noticed" Colin replied, laconically, and pointed out that I really could use more adjectives and adverbs if I wanted to.

But this will have to do. There are pictures, tables, screenshots and pretty drawings. And I am within the parameters of the book I wanted, without having to make up stuff I hadn't planned should be in it. Feels good. Now off to scan images and put everything together the way I want the world to see it.

Final touches 1

I haven't written much about it, because I feel so apprehensive and actually quite shy about the project. I am currently writing a book, to be published at Peter Lang's publishers, some time this winter I hope. It's the book I have always wanted people to read before they come to me and ask if there is something written about game research. To this end I am packing it full of game research references, but also declare my defeat, immediately. There's no way I can cover it all. All I can do is try to get enough variety that the person who is planning to do "something" about game research goes off and does a few new, more informed, searches.

When I finally dare write about it, it's because it's coming together now. The editors have asked me for what they want changed, the illustration issues are kind of solved, I have found a way to increase bulk while also following some of the advice I have been given (hugs Ragnhild), I have a proofreader waiting impatiently for the text and financing for that, too, and I have received some reassuring noises from the editors about my writing. I am just too efficient for them. Use more words, they say. It hurts my journalist heart, so I am afraid all I'll do about that is to add content.

The most fun part of the recent changes has been on the advice of Ian Bogost. I haven't drawn any illustrations for publishing since 1981. My early dreams of a career as a graphic designer and illustrator died as my love of academia hit hard and suffocated all else. But now I am doing that again. And again, that shyness. This is a part of me that can not be backed up by references or research. When I publish the graphics in this book, I am going somewhere new and scary. My only comfort is that I am really not planning to change careers. So if people laugh themselves silly over the graphics, it's OK. As long as they understand what I am trying to show.

I still have a chunk left to add. I miss about 5000 words. I know what's going into it though, and I am racing through the rewrites earlier in the book, in order to reach that section. I just realised that I am telling the truth: That is why I have been so driven lately. I have something I really want to write. I just need to get there.

So, I guess that tells you all where I am off to. Actually, I am off to fetch the mail at the office, have coffee with at least one group of people-I-should-see-more-often at Umeå University, play some AoC so I can see if my enthusiasm is triggered when I reach level 20 (out of 80), and generally try to be something other than a driven hermit maniac. We'll see how that works out. This morning I hurt myself in an attempt to care for my health. Now I may be crippled and doomed to remain in hiding for days. YAY!

Articles this year, so far so good

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



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

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

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

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

Living in Hyboria

I am playing around with a couple of things now. First, I decided to try twitter, and made a profile there. I have to admit I fail to see the intense popular demand for details about what happens RIGHT NOW in my life. OK, I am occasionally an attention whore, but really - one thing is posting a good recipe and some angsty confessions here and there, but a minute-for-minute update on them is a little too far even for me.

What I do think is fun though, is reading about other people's experiences in different types of projects, such as work at or around conferences, a quest to reach a deadline, experiments with food, more general topics which is about something slightly beyond their immediate self. Subjective, but a subjective I can relate to without feeling we should be in a committed relationship.

Hence, I have for the time being decided to devote my twittering not to what happens here (it's same old same old anyway: I get up in the morning, eat, go to work, work, occasionally remember lunch, shop, make dinner, go for a walk or do some pilates, read, play games, call the family, fiddle with pictures on flickr or just on the computer, go to bed, rinse and repeat) but to what happens in Hyboria. So far I have been treated to a solid dose of genderconscious outrage, only tempered by extreme annoyance with the game performance. I am only at level 5 though - I know from WoW that I didn't really start liking it until around level 30. And I didn't understand anything about what was going on until level 50. Yeah, I am a little slow.

Anyway: I have put in a sidebar here, a little widget, that posts my twittering. I am by the way quite happy with the options of Blogger, now that I have finally gotten around to using them. Once over the hurdle of updating and moving my links from the old template to the new, I have become a fan of the options in the new template. I may get a little over enthusiastic for a while, but bear with me.

Understanding Games

Want to understand games, but can't get to the lecture? Well, go play this educational game about games! I have to admit I haven't gone through the whole thing, after a while they wanted me to actually INTERACT and that got too exhausting. But it's a fun idea, and should be interesting for academic gamers.

The game is a thesis developed in Potsdam, Germany, copyright is 2006-2007, so most likely submitted in 2007.

Understanding Games is a diploma thesis project designed and developed by Andreas Zecher at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany. The project was advised by Prof. Boris Müller, Prof. Klaus Dufke and Mattias Ljungström.

The game has been around for a while, and if you want to read more about the responses to it, Cory Doctorow has a pretty good description in Boing Boing.

Gamers and researchers

For those of you who read Norwegian, forskning.no had an interview with a bunch of game researchers in relation to the book we all wrote in, recently published from MIT Press.