From the Institute of Applied Theatre Studies, Giessen University, a really long list of online resources on everything to do with performance, roleplay and the net or just on the net.

I know, I know, it's bad form, but I still have a few interviews from 1999 which I haven't typed. I had a period when they bored me to death, but now as I am to summarise them, it's actually a lot more interesting to work with them. Today I am listening to one of the women I have been playing RP-games with for years, in the background there's the cultured tinkling of teacups, and we converse over fruit and bagels. It's almost enough to make me miss Portland, Oregon.

And looking for links for that last post, I met a name from way back in the eighties, when I went to an alternative school to practice and study photography and journalism. One of the fellow students that year was Signy Fardal, today the editor of the Norwegian version of Elle. I can't help smiling every time I see her talking about women's rights, trying to defend her change in attitude from the early eighties until today. I still remember her as an angry, loud but amazingly colourful and attractive girl with a wonderful voice and dialect. She stood up for her rights and those of everybody else, wearing her hand-woven Sigrun Berg shawl like a badge of honour. Always fashion-concious, oh yes, and the radical fashion of the time was flat shoes, cotton shirts and dongery jeans.

Now when I hear her on the radio her strong dialect is gone and she is always defensive, trying to explain herself. But she's still a woman who dares to change and be honest about it.

In the interest of getting to the bottom of the women's rooms topic, I called Golden Tulip Rainbow Hotel Arena, which has 24 women's rooms. And if I ever stay there, I am going to ask for a woman's room, because this is what they say is supposed to be in these rooms and not the others:

dressing-gown, a magazine (Henne or Elle or something similar), flowers, an iron and not just a trousers-press (that has annoyed me I don't know how many times), more items in the bathroom and a special mirror so that you can admire your hair from more angles. And it's not supposed to be more expensive than the other rooms. They said nothing about a more feminine colour-scheme, for which I am grateful, I am no fan of pink.

Afterwards I called the hotel Hilde had stayed on and yes, she was right: SAS Radisson Hotels define women's rooms as having more feminine colours, and nailfiles and tampons in the bathroom, none of the rest.

I have carried my load of groceries through life, I don't need to prove anything any more - and I travel often enough on those flights where the only other woman in the cabin is the flight-attendant. I would love not to have to search through the whole building for an iron, after all it gets boring to constantly wear t-shirts.

I was looking for the lyrics of one particular song by Hartvig Kiran; "Aldri Meire". It's about a girl waiting under a bridge for her lover, and she's cold, tired and angry. She tells him exactly how angry she is, and swears this is the last time he'll ever find her waiting for him.

For some reason this song was stuck in my mind this morning, and I discovered that I remembered a lot of it. The words of that song roll off my tongue with such ease, and her mixture of longing and despair expressed as anger and defiance fits so well with the mood of the girls from Ålesund, hometown of Hartvig Kiran as well as me, that the song was through the years of coming to age a very common refrain among us girls.

"Aldri meire skal du sjå meg stå ved nattestid og vente på din veg, aldri meire skal du få å seie på meg, at eg gjeng omkring og vaktar dine steg. Reis i frå meg - den som vil kan gjerne få deg, den som gir seg blanke søtten det er eg...." "Never again will you see me waiting for you at night on your way home, never again can you hold it against me that I am watching your every step. Leave me - who ever wants you can have you, I don't care..."

I didn't find any homepages of Hartvig Kiran though, but I did find an other lyric he has written, about hering - this is one of the things I love about him, he writes about commonplace things, like one of the most important sources of wealth in Ålesund after the war and into the sixties: the hering. In this song he describes the hering logic of migrating towards the coast in large schools for protection - and how that is their undoing. Quite neatly done.

And among the 117 hits google gave me on Hartvig Kiran was a site with norwegian and english traditional music, with translations from norwegian to english. Enjoy: Greensleeves: Tradisjon

I keep being forced to think beyond the thesis. A request from the Norwegian Media Researchers' group to speak at their anniversary conference in Oslo in September made me review again what I am doing. The topic is Text and Audience, and the other speakers will be discussing things like film criticism and the image of audiences in the production of texts. I had to sit down and think for a moment: what should I speak of? They wanted me to discuss games, but while the mechanics and the power-structures are the same with blogs and games, blogs are not as easy to shrug off. A game - no matter how important I think it is, is often received with the comment: "But it's just a game, it doesn't belong in reality." A blog on the other hand, is somewhere ambigously between reality and imagination. One can be shrugged off but not blogs as a phenomenon, because they are channels, not content. And a channel is what you make of it, but it always have potential for change, for allegiances to shift and for authorities to be confirmed - or attacked.

I might go with the blogs. Somehow I'll manage to sneak games and game-theory into it anyway.

I just finished an article for publishing in Game Studies - hopefully I'll be able to link to it soon, as well as talk about the other articles in the upcoming issue. Publishing is always a drag - when I am ready to submit something I am done with it, mentally it's a closed topic, and then I move on. But to the editors, that's when the process starts. This invariably leads to smaller or larger conflicts, and when I am involved in the journal as I am with Game Studies (although my involvement is very low-key at the moment and has nothing to do with editing), these conflicts easily go beyond the comfort sones of all involved.

Not that this became a big issue - I have just had quite a bit of resistance to preparing this paper for publishing, and I have been made to feel guilty for it. Now I only have one very short article, luckily in Norwegian, to prepare for publishing, and I'll be done with other academic writing than the dissertation for quite a while. At least a month. Then I have to look seriously at the science-theory essay.

Second, their site and a subsequent email from Anja made me think about my working title again - which I had almost forgotten while trying to finish all the little bits and pieces.

The digital juggler is an image for how people use the net, particularly players, that it's not an aimless and uncontrolled skipping where ever the net takes you, but that the players and the people who know how to use the internet go with the flow but retain their equilibrium - the way a juggler does, holding all those tasks going, catching and sending them off again, chatting here, playing there, surfing or writing in two more windows. I still like it, even if I am writing more about the game and less about player behaviour than I expected. Returning to think about why I chose that title, I think I have come back to where I started. The process of understanding something I suspected has come a full circle, and the jugger is still back there somewhere behind the notes and chapters and definitions and methodology and references.

First, a correction: Anja Rau works for mediaman, not on them. Even better, given their cool design and business statement!

By way of Lionel Mandrake, a really hilarious (and I agree with him, unsettling) link. Warning, if you feel that animals should be permitted to preserve their dignity: Don't look!

    .    Bird's Mood    .    Out of Nowhere    .    
Very pretty - hard on the Netscape users though, and the writing is nice but personal - almost private.

But still - something about this design touched me.

thinking about poetry

mediaman | Intro
Hey, look at that! Anja Rau is working on Media man, which looks like an interesting new company, but most important for me their logo is a juggler. Why am I exited about that? Because the working title of my PhD thesis is: The Digital Juggler. And there he is - from theoretical concept to business idea in just four years...

Jill, Adrian and particularly RMIT have Mark Amerika as their guest in Melbourne these days. According to Jill Adrian has convinced Mark to make a blog while in Australia, and with some searching the ozblog was revealed. (note 23.04.2002: this has been changed since I wrote this post, there's now a directory at the end of that link.)

Now Mark Amerika is an interesting character. He is an active internet artist who also gives lectures and exhibitions. He travels all over the world, and at one point he was in Bergen during DAC 2000, as one of the keynote speakers. He didn't impress me much at that time, but being a simple girl with barbaric tastes and uneducated parents, I assumed it was just too sophisticated for little me.

His blog on the other hand... I think I a know a thing or two about blogs, and was very interested in seeing what a creative artist could get out of this form which I so much enjoy. But according to Mark Amerika, what I found wasn't a blog - at least not a true one. He has written a de-construction of blogs, rather than constructing one.

A blog should not be defined. Defining a blog would be like defining what a novel is or what a film is or what an experimental art installation is.

Perhaps it would be better to de-define a blog. A blog is not a diary, it is not dated, it is not autobiography, it is not a dreambook.

Or: it can be any or all of those things but probably should not be any or all of them.

Yes, the blog is the medium: just like television isn't each program you can view through it, the blog isn't each style in which you can write. (At this point I felt very friendly towards Mark Amerika, and thought he might have a message for the simple girls of this world after all.)

Blogs could be pseudo-autobiographical works-in-progress, where the artist who creates one surfs the electrosphere for useful data, samples it, manipulates it, and then exhibits it in an online environment that makes it feel like something more than just a diary website.

This will probably have to be done in the translinguistic act of writing itself. The writing I speak of is more than just a diary entry with links to things found on the net and is more than just text. It is designwriting, video ecriture, mixillogical sound art, a color field of graphic disturbance.

Human portals are fine, they are even dandy -- in fact, they may even end up being a kind of virtual dandyism strutting their stuff in net space -- but they are not true blog.

True blog is not true at all. It is pseudo.

huh?
1) true blog. this indicates that Mark Amerika has found out what a true blog is.
2) pseudo: this indicates that a blog isn't really a blog, it just pretends to be a blog - which again assumes that there is a kind of "blog-an-sich" out there.

And then I look at the words being used here - human portals - strutting their stuff - What's wrong with strutting our stuff in virtual space? Isn't that what Mark Amerika makes a living from? Should the bloggers of the world abandon their happy strutting, humbly putting their inner flaneur away and leave the virtual streets to the persons who have found and realised the "true blog"? (At this point the simple girl in me smiled happily - strutting my stuff is no bad thing, particularly when I am confident that I have stuff well worth strutting.)

After having declared blogs pseudo, there's a short interlude where Mark Amerika uses blogs in retrospective: talking about how Anaïs Nin would not be bloggered - or the bloggish nature of Henry Miller. I am always fascinated with this rhetoric twist, how realisations due to new technology tends to be used in retrospective, to describe something belonging to a totally different context. What does that have to do with anything? Both these authors played with the tools of their preference, and from their writing they had some fun and did some strutting of their own. But while some of the styles which blogs might resemble harks back to the journal, the diary, the autobiography, Mark Amerika himself already said that blogs are not these things, blogs can contain them, can resemble them, but go beyond this point.

Finally, the definition of the true blog. Keeping your dictionaries at hand won't help you:

True blog, then, is not blog as we know it, but as we un-know it. It incites creation - more invention - so that you yourself have to get down and dirty into the developmental process activating the network with your own mixillogical discourse. This is blog as inventive remix machine placing value on what it sees, what it links to, how it appropriates the Other and strips it of its isolation.

I think mixillogical means: mix-il-logical - a blend which isn't logical. Then it actually makes a kind of sense. I guess the rambling in order to get to this point is the blog-part. We use blogs as a place to ramble, it's a place to strut our stuff, to juggle with words, to play around with thoughts and to make our own priorities visible - which is what Mark Amerika does as well. So, not de-defined after all, but the same ramble, the same pseudo-blog - which as far as I can see is the real thing. Very postmodern.

by way of Jill: E Y E B E A M | atelier, the social network soiree. I'll be in New York at the time! I love that thought.

A list of links to philosophy glossaries.

Bradley Dilger: The Ideology of Ease, a very interesting piece on why software often seems to be structured so stupidly.

I am going to spend a month away from the family, writing the final two chapters. It's a combination of doctor's orders, an attempt to take some pressure off my extremely patient family, and fleeing any further attempts at involving me in what other people think of as "life", such as teaching, planning, caring for members of the family or worrying about the house, not to mention staying home faced with the fact that I have let my social life fade into nothingness over the last four years.

To prepare I keep ordering books to wait for me in New York, rather than having them delivered here and then schlepping them there and back. Now I only have to worry about the back part of the carrying. Here's a little list:

Diane Ackerman and Peter Sis: Deep Play
Victor Turner: From Ritual to Theatre
Annette Markham: Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space
Sherry Turkle: The Second Self (Yes, I have already read and used that one, but the library insisted I give it back - they got quite strict after a while...)
William Betcher: Intimate Play (I am not sure if this one is appropriate, but Brian Sutton-Smith quotes it)

I'll also drag along The Ambiguity of Play, Man, Play and Games and Homo Ludens.

I had a revelation saturday, while cleaning the house. Some people go for a hike, some people have a cigarette, some people watch movies and eat junk-food: I clean the house, and my mind starts working, as if making those floors gleam and tidy up all the stuff around me is a process if internal cleaning as well. And this particular saturday, I saw the finished thesis for my inner eye. I know what it will look like now. I know the reason for every chapter. I know that there will be twelve chapters, and the two last will be - yes, the conclusion, but before that a chapter discussing games as such. It's the only logic way to lead this work to an ending. I have read, used and qouted game-theory before in the thesis, but at this point I have to sum it all up, show how all threads lead here both from the theoretical discussions, from the results of my interviews and the playing, and even the choice of methodology.

It's such an odd sensation: There will be an end to this, and it is close.

Everything I have seen, heard and experienced has brought me to this point, and I understand nothing but in relationship to me at this point. That sentence is why I keep a journal; it keeps me from walking in circles. Every time I reach some place that appears to be the same, I reach it as a new me and can often then take a new road. This requires a frequent review of the paths chosen and the reasoning behind the choices.

Steve Jones (ed): Doing Internet Research, Critical issues and methods for examining the net., page xxi

Overwhelmed by exhaustion, Friday was pretty bleak. My back hurt, I couldn’t work up the energy to start editing the next 5 chapters (one of which was missing) and life in general was a gloomy contrast to the lovely April sunshine. Worst of all: I felt like there was nothing left that I wanted to do. Since this is a bad sign of depression and burn-out, I took it seriously, and started making a list to see if that was true. Here it is, a list of “stuff to do once life isn’t dominated by the thesis”.

• Learn more about making web-pages, and set up my own.
  
• Badger or bribe somebody into making a Mondrian-inspired skin for my blog. (I have made a sketch and it will look great.).
  
• Write more articles on blogs, preferably cooperating with Jill. We should be located in Athens, Melbourne, New York or – well, why not – Bali.
  
• Take riding lessons, perhaps in Melbourne or Bali.
  
• Work on the asthma information project the department is undertaking, the game-part of it.
  
• Make an easy system for PR and information about Game Studies, and write a suggested structure for a discussion-group adjunct to the journal.
  
• Buy a big, popular, silly computer-game and play it for hours and hours.
  
• Write an iconology of said game: using Panofsky. The title should be: Games, Cathedrals of the Third Millennium.
  
• Start painting again.
  
• Search old floppy-disks and see if I can find the file with the children’s book the kids and I almost finished writing 7 years ago.
  
• Edit my poems.
  
• Get back to cooking, not just reading recipes.
  
• Start reading up on subcultures. Remember to discuss methodology with Jan Fredrik.
  
• Plan a Lom-School Seminar: User-oriented online research, expressions of gender, power, pleasure and the dark side. This would go well with my plans for more adventurous cooking.
  
• Paint the kitchen.

Looks like I’ll be busy. At least this indicates that there can be life on the other side of the dissertation.

The reality is elsewhere
Mark Bernstein sits with a feeling that "the real meeting was elsewhere" after the Oslo conference which Jill, Anders, Hilde and I blogged.

This is an interesting statement, as it echoes the comments of Ragnhild Trondstad, who's an other of the Ph. D. Students on our program, also studying games, and a wonderful person to know. Ragnhild doesn't have and doesn't want a blog, but she misses an online voice in order to be able to take part in the discourse.

Somehow, our blogs make exhibitionists like Jill and me seem more important than we consider ourselves. Not that I don't have respect for Jill and loads of self-respect, but we and all of the bloggers we refer to are just people who happen to like writing and sharing. There's no secret agenda of exclusion, and from my side, hardly even an attempt to promote myself online. Jill, Hilde, Lisbeth, Gonzalo, Mark are all better at that than I am; Jill, Mark and Gonzalo in particular, with their links to their writings and works, their finished articles, Jill's reference list and the links all maintain to other similar sites, making their sites good portals and excellent resources.

On the other hand... Perhaps the real conference WAS in Oslo - Norwegians are pretty advanced when it comes to researching ICT!

Milkbar.com.au
An interesting concept for a Ph.D., although it seems to have a very wide scope, lack some conceptual rigor and originality when discussing "new media" and "multi media", and a very challenging empiric base for discussing globalisation. But then again, perhaps Australia is diverse enough that all you need to talk of globalisation is to take a walk to the closest milkbar and observe...

And I found it through Craig Bellamy's comment on blogonblog.

Places to Go, People to Be
This might have been blogged before, but it's a cute little magazine, and it deserves to be blogged again.

If you are looking for a present which will really make a statement for a writing-freak like me, buy me one of these pens.

I just got back from Oslo, where I have seen Jill, Hilde, Janne, Ragnhild, Anita, Anders, Espen and a lot of other people I have never mentioned to you out there, like Ingunn Hagen and Per Hetland, two of my favourite people in Academia.

I am exhausted, but happy. The presentation went much better than expected. Jill and I met Sunday evening, around 10 pm, sketching a plan. In the morning, over breakfast, I typed it into my lap-top and copied it to a floppy, gleefully reminding Jill that there are things her imac can’t do. At the Research Park we strained the skills and (amazing) patience of Andrew Morrison and his competent staff, but they delivered. Ten minutes before the presentations started up again, we were pasting the morning’s comments into blogonblog and linking them. As the next session started, Jill discovered that her lipstick and jacket were still on the table up front, and I had to hold her to her chair by force, promising her I’d distract the audience while she applied lipstick.

Hilde and Helen were on before us, they were great: serious, competent and organised in the way female researchers often are, upholding the tradition of having to be twice as good as men to be heard by half the number of people. (note on the organisation: after lunch there were no male presenters but those who were in groups: Andrew and Anders. The audience was halved, and the “power-attendants” were gone. It was embarrassingly familiar.)

Finally we were on. By now we had worked each other into a giggling, adrenaline-fuelled frenzy. We still had no idea what to say. While the group before us were speaking of dance, I wrote the introduction paragraph: how to start the entire presentation. Jill nodded. We were on.

The next 15 minutes were kind of blurry. Reading Anders’ comments afterwards was very interesting. Yes, we had coordinated our outfits, in this manner: Torill: “My clothes don’t fit me anymore, and I went shopping for something to wear for the conference… but I am freezing to death!” Jill: “you look great! Do we have time for me to run and change? I want to match you. After all, I am lugging my entire wardrobe around!” Torill: “sure, I’ll be finishing this list of keywords anyway.” Looking at Anders’ interpretation of this spontaneous act of coordination, I realise that the next time we do something together we have to go for a serious shopping-trip as well as get a choreographer if we are planning to top this.

My duties were not done with the presentation though. I had, not entirely certain that it was a clever move, agreed to give a speech at the dinner. I hate doing that, but I agreed out of principle – I prefer people to say yes when I ask for favours, so I acted accordingly. How that went? Well – I think it went OK.

So that’s it. After floating on a cloud of nervous energy fed in a loop between Jill and me since Sunday night, I landed with a crash this morning. Now I am at home, in front of the wonderful view from the living-room, waiting for the connection to the internet to kick back in. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so critical of the EU vision of the future European net: mainly more bandwidth and a more reliable internet, where I was hoping for user-research to see how people actually use the fairly functional network already existing.

Looks like I am between a rock and a hard place when it comes to blogger and blogger pro. I want to update to blogger pro - it has all those neat features - but I can't run Internet Explorer on my lap-top, which is the machine I use when it's important for me to leave notes about things I want to remember, when I want to communicate with colleagues or family while travelling - when I generally want to be able to use the blog for stuff which might be a bit more urgent than the usual more-or-less adademic musings. So until Blogger comes up with a pro-version which is compatible with Opera (which I am in love with, by the way - of course, it being Norwegian has nothing to do with it....), I am doomed to be prioritised below the Microsofties.

Ugh.

(As for the lap-top and IE: despite having windows reinstalled on the lap-top, it still turns off the entire computer when I access certain sites. It baffles our IT department, and after all the problems I have managed to cook up on my computers over the 11 years I have worked at this college it takes a bit for those guys to be baffled.)

Children's games and sex
Mark points out two flaws in my discussion of Henry Jenkin's article on games and learning.

1) nothing can be colonized by commercial interests: economy permeats everything already.
2) children's games are sexual.

I'll address those two topics particularly, although they were not the main themes of my original post, because I have opinions on both.

1) When I say that the area of play is being colonized by commercial interests, I mean that our understanding of what is playing, what is fun, is increasingly defined by marketing. With the danger of propagating nostalgia; the targeting of toys as a product to be bought for children, as well as the idolizing of childhood as a lost realm, a protected golden dream of safe happiness where the dangers and the harsh colours of adult reality does not intrude work along with the legislation defining children, defining adult's duties in respect to children and protecting children from abuse, exploitation and neglect, to define "childhood" as seperate from "adulthood" in a manner which we do not even question. We tend to forget that childhood is a social construction. Where the legal definitions of childhood were constructed in order to protect children against working in the mines until their bones grew soft from lack of sunlight or weaving rugs until their legs were crippled from sitting and they were going blind, these same definitions have been used to create target groups for "otherness" - and ugly otherness at that.

We do not permit children individuality, we stare in awe and fear at the prodigies, think it's odd and alien when the eager, flexible minds of children grasp what adults do not. It breaks with the definition and the image of children as lesser beings from a world apart - from the realm of childhood (signified through lack of experience, lack of reasoning power, naivity and helplessness). And then when the children punish those of their own who do not conform to this otherness which we have let advertising, toys, clothes, schools and organisations shape the group of humans from 0-12 into, we are shocked and try to cure this lack of tolerance through theraphy - often through treating the victim - by helping him or her to conform and thus become invisible to their persecutors.

2) Children's games are sexual. Sexuality is shaped and often expressed at an early age, the explorations of bodies, of sexual roles and of power and submission is a strong human drive, and children have not yet developed the layers of religion, shame, fear and other hang-ups which will come later and make them supress their sexual expressions in everyday lives. However: I was speaking of games adults play which they should invite the children to participate in. Even in enlightened Scandinavia, the thought of adults playing sexual games with children is sickening. The power-exchange is too absolute, the barriers of protection for the child are too weak: while children should not be raised to think sexual games among adults don't exist, that is NOT the arena of playing where children should be involved.

Scandinavians don't abhor public nudity. We can let our children run naked in the sun without worrying that the neighbours will think we are displaying them for our sexual pleasure. We don't assume that 10-year-olds are dating and should be watched in case they might display sexual behaviour, such sexual paranoia is not a Scandinavian thing. But we do draw a line somewhere, and one of them goes there - children are not supposed to be a part of the sexual games adults play. And, dear Mark, I think you agree with me there, even if it might burst your fantasy of us sexually totally liberated Norwegians.

Spring is overwhelming me. I guess this will be one of the most beautiful springs ever, since I will be working harder than I have done for any exam in my life. No, it's not like being back in school and reading physics under the lilacs. This is more like trying to do a long-distance run in the full glare of a merciless sun, reminding me of how time slips away towards summer, revealing all the flaws I am trying to ignore, beating against my unprotected skin to penetrate and cast light inside of my most-cherished denials.

And the crocuses are violet - violently violet, shouting their promise of summer at me as I hurry by, yearning for the cool light of the monitor.

Bli blogger du også!
A Norwegian article about blogs from December 2000! There's a journalist who was ahead of her time!

It speaks of the "relatively new norwegian jill/weblogg". Ohhh, the old days, when that was the name of Jill/txt....

Conference program with papers.
The SKIKT conference for which Jill and I have written a paper, described at blogonblog.

Technology Review - Game Theory
Henry Jenkins tells us that computer games can be useful in order to make children learn easier. I'd like to mention that games have always been used to help children learn. It's why we played games of maths at school, it's why there are competitions in spelling and calculus, it's why we would go on little excusions in spring to find frogs eggs and keep them in a tank in the classroom - the value of learning through play is obvious.

The modern problem is that children's play has been colonised by commercial interests, and split from the adult tasks. The sphere of childhood and the sphere of adulthood has the wide border of ever-expanding, idolised and desirable teen-age in between them. This makes it that much harder to see the value of the skills already existing games are teaching, because we view them from our own little bubble of generationism.

We are reducing the playfullness and the pleasure of being adults, limiting our playing to the spheres where children should not be involved: competitions or sexual games prominent among those. Where's our own playful approach to nuclear physics? When we find that, I am sure the kids will be delighted to play with us!

Did you ever play this game with words as kids? You fold a sheet of paper in four columns. Everybody in the room says a name or a noun, which you write in the first column. Then the process is repeated with a verb for the second column, an adjective in the third and a location in the fourth. When the page is unfolded to read the lines which have been created in this random manner of generating text, some of the sentences are unbelievably funny, some are stupid or nonsensical and some are beautiful. And you have just created a text in an ergodic manner.

The Danger of Chatting
Tommy from Mosjøen (this is in the northern part of Norway) came home and found that the woman he had been chatting with had moved into his house. She had broken the door open, moved all her belongings in and was waiting for him in the living-room with her two children.

It's interesting that Nettavisen, a Norwegian net-paper, makes this a story at all. It is a classic case of bad communication and false expectations. They had agreed that she should move in, and then the guy had changed his mind. She had however gone on with the plans, left her job and everything. A classic story of a relationships with two parties who misunderstood each other. What makes it a story is that they met on a chat. They had been chatting through text-tv, and decided to go through with this after three sessions. The story confirms all the horror stories about what kind of lunatics you can meet out there through chats, it fits well into the image of the desperate people who look for partners online, and it ridicules a woman who's not afraid of trusting strangers.

Her not wanting to have her name in the paper or speak to the journalist is the soundest decision she has made in this case - if only Tommy had been equally sensible. The story says nothing about what promises he made her before they decided that she should move in, only that "she's very determined."

Dissertation update: Done editing the first five chapters. The introductionary chapter might need at least one more reworking, but I'll save that until I am writing the conclusion. Those two chapters ought to match. I am 40% done with the second to last editing (hopefully), and I start to see a defense somewhere in the future. I am still scared, so I'll find something else to do for a month or so, while I adjust to the thought. Expanding the blog-paper to the science-theory paper sounds like a good plan, as does editing the paper to be published in Gamestudies. Yep, should keep me busy until I can supress the thought of having to tell people what I have done - and why.

Jill mentiones that she has her terminology in shape (march 29th, currently writing), and she chooses to use text and reader. That triggered a realisation in me: I am not using text and reader, I am using game and player. And the reason I do that is that no matter how close the online texts Jill is studying and the online games I am studying are, we are not looking at the same thing! So this shouldn’t be such a revelation, but there’s so much else which overlaps in our work: the choice of theory, the approach to power and agency, the focus on creativity and player/reader activity. The difference is that while cybertexts and non-linear texts can be approached playfully, they are not consistently built to support and encourage competition or closed arenas of achievement unless they have been limited by rules and other signifiers of a game. Intent and comparisons differ, while the performance might be seductively similar to the viewer.

Thanks, Jill

Playing around with Opera: I really like it, for everything but blogging. The blog-editing window becomes tiny.

By way of Gonzalo: Technology Review - Cyberspace and Race by Henry Jenkins.
Jenkins argues that we are carrying our prejudices into CyberSpace, the colour of your skin matters no matter how your avatar is. I would like to point out that you carry your entire culture into CyberSpace. To be Norwegian in all-American chat-rooms can be a very alienating experience, and I am certain being american in a all-Norwegian chat-room would feel like having landed on the moon...

Race and class are, as is gender, a naturalised distinction, but still one trained into us since childhood, and Jenkins is right, we don't drop it as we log on.

There are however online games where exactly race and class are part of what they play with: particularly race. Aarinfel and Azhad both have restrictions on what characters it's advisable to create. On Aarinfel having blue eyes and pale skin meant that you were cursed by the deity of death, and people with this combination were shunned. Blue-skinned orcs were no problem though.

On Azhad, the connection race and class has been turned upside down. The aristocratic pure-bloods are all black; dark hair, skin and eyes. Paler skin or eyes is a sign of "pollution", and the whites are outsiders, scum and often slaves.

The regulars hardly think about this, but for newbies it's always a surprise. The skim the race-descriptions, and pick a race close to something they are used to thinking of as high status in Western Europe and North America, and end up being treated like lepers. Always a hard way to start a game where you had planned to become a high-status aristocrat...

OW. this isn't too good. I just changed browsers - netscape is not any good, internet explorer keeps closing down this computer - but Opera is not good with blogger. I have a TINY editing window. There has to be a way to change this.

I am looking at my wish-list at amazon.co.uk. I use it to remember books I want, but can't afford at the moment, and it's loooong. Jill wonders if she would have presents sent to her from her wish-list if she showed her tits on her blog. There have been times when I have been considering prostitution for books, but at those times I have been lacking most other things in life as well, so the books would still have come after food and clothes for the kids. Not that I think anybody would send me books if I exposed any more than what I have already shown. I might have heaps of cultural capital, but physical capital is a little inflated at the moment.

And more things you really neded to know, in the middle of these serious academic topics: How to swear in norwegian

This is a list of other essential Norwegian lines and words. But no, the pick-up lines don't sound any better in Norwegian

I never knew this existed, but it will make my life easier: The Norwegian Council for Technical Terminology - Abbreviations

While searching for something not at all to do with what I found: The meaning of birds in Landscape Painting

Hmmm. I am supposed to be editing the chapters, not adding to them. The file has grown 8 pages by now. Alarming.

The Naked Novel, the online writing project initiated by Peter at Naked Blog has started. Reading it makes my fingers itch, and I would still have loved to participate, but that's yet an other thing for life after I am done with the dissertation.

By way of Lisbeth, Research Management Summary

How not to get a PhD
There are 7 common ways of not getting a PhD:

not wanting one;
overestimating what is required;
underestimating what is required;
having a supervisor who does not know what is required;
losing contact with your supervisor;
not having a 'thesis' (ie. position, argument) to maintain; and
taking a new job before completing.

Make sure that the implications of these traps are fully understood.
Re-establish your determination regularly when blandishments to stray from your programme of work occur.

Why does this sound so frighteningly familiar?

So what's for lunch? Since it's Easter, it has to be egg, right? I never realised how important eggs were to bloggers until I started writing this post. And there are inedible meanings of the word as well, although that might not diminish the sustaining value. Can you tell my brain is scrambled? Time for food.

A Vannevar moment
Drifting in that space between awake and asleep, I had a vision this morning. I saw the tool I needed to be able to keep track of the chapters I am editing. I saw exactly how each fragment I am moving should be linked to the different positions in the text: where it should go, where it was originally, where it might fit. This way I could easily, from the same document, produce a wide variety of versions of my thesis, and I could pick the one I liked the best. Or the assessors could pick the ones they liked.

As I woke up, I realised I was not the first scholar to think of something like this. I had had a Vannevar moment.

In one of the chat-rooms I habitually roam through, there are several different boards. On one of them, which has been blessedly free of trolls and flames, there was a likely troll-post today. It was kind of lame, posted by an unregistered chatter, and it didn't stir the people regularly posting to the board into much action.

But I am a little fascinated with posts like that. I think trolls are interesting. I find myself spending more time trying to understand the game of trolling than considering the actual post. There are some boards I read only for the flaming and the trolls - because of the way troll-posts are playing with the conventions of the boards, searching for the weak point of the chatters.

The conclusion I have come to on troll-posts, is that they rely on people getting upset, shocked or very exited about a topic: preferably the post should be designed to split the audience in two camps: those who are angry and those who are happy. If you take a troll-post seriously, adressing the topic rather than the emotion, they can lead to good discussion. Now a good troll would make certain the topic is controversial. But on boards with a fixed topic and a moderator, that's complicated, because either it's a good question which deserves debate - or it's far out and will be deleted.

So at which point does a post become a troll? When it's posted, when it's discussed, when the people discussing start flaming each others?

Done editing one more chapter. Tomorrow I fear there will be blood seeping from the computer, as I hack my way through the next (and so far my favourite) chapter.

I am trying to decide what to do about a little quote-error from Baudrillard. No, not my error - his. He quotes Philip K. Dick, a book he calls The Schizo's Ball, and the quote is so beautiful and fits so well into his argument, it just flows along. However, Dick never wrote a book with that name, it's the direct translation from the French title of the book We Can Build You, and the quote is a translation back to English from the french translation, distorting the quote until it's hardly to be recognised.

So far I have used the quote from the English translation of Seduction, and added a footnote where I say which book this is and what the original text of the quote is. I might have to just delete it all, but I love the lines too much: "Take me to my room and fuck me. There's something indefinable in your language, something left to be desired."

Unfortunately Dick's characters said: "'Take me into your motel room,' Pris said, 'and screw me.'
'There is, somehow, in your language, something, which I can't put my finger on, that somehow leaves something to be desired.'"

Simulation: Introduction
While this simulation of an Islam Shariat divorce did not impress me by its advanced simulation of society, the discussion on Computer-based Simulation Modelling for Anthropologists is rather interesting.

Department of Anthropology
A definition of anthropology. It's lovely, and open enough to embrace everything which has to do with us - human beings. Doesn't that make it a little less useful than a definition should be?

Jills is discussing Costranova's paper on economy on EverQuest, touching on scarcity and games.

Our culture is rife with stories of the futility of unlimited wealth, the main theme being how everything becomes boring, how the diversity created by lack, restrictions and the need for an effort makes life more enjoyable. Modern myths center on the unhappiness of the rich and beautiful, and are full of tragic deaths caused by having too much.

To match this myth, poverty is supposed to lead to a more profound happiness than wealth. At the moment the Norwegian aid organisation Kirkens Nødhjelp is showing a series of little advertisements on television, asking people to contribute to building wells in Africa. The films are doing its best to promote the myth of the happy pauper, the pictures showing pretty, smiling, water-drinking children and their mothers, slender and elegant as they balance 20 liters of water easily on their heads, and as much swaddled like a baby on their backs.



It's interesting to see that this isn't just a myth, but has been adopted as a rule of the games simulating life. Scarcity, struggle and reward is what gives a sense of progress and of self-fulfilment. All the MUDs I have played have tried to balance this: find the balance between the challenge and the reward, and when simulating some type of society controlling currency is the most recognizable way to do just that. Wealth is a measure of success, and as such, it's desirable. Just having it given to you might be comfortable, but no fun.

I am trying to trace a comment from DAC 2000, in a presentation where I just got the tail-end of it - about katarsis and games, and how games did not have the structure of buildup and release of a traditional narrative curve like for instance a film. Who was talking about this? Susana? Lisbeth, Jill, Elin?

We are a sorry lot. Jill, Hilde, Lisbeth and me are all struggling to finish our Ph. Ds. A recent soul-sister in the struggle is Tinka, so eloquently expressing the angst we all feel.

I think Hilde is holding up the best. She's the sensible, healthy kind of girl, works steadily and well, exercises and has her notes in a good system. We all love her for her quiet humour and her self-discipline. Hilde is reliable and sane compared to the mess the rest are making of this final phase of writing.

Jill is talented. Brilliant ideas leap from her keyboard out into the academic community. A center of energy for us to tap into, throw ideas against, test theses on. And Lisbeth is just plain good - a thorough, classic danish humanist, well-read, imaginative and with a quick analytic mind. But they both have their bodies warning them, telling them that the strain is taking more out of them that it should: the pressure of writing is not just a mental barrier, but also a physical one.

As for me - I struggle. I am old and slow compared to the brilliant spark of the others, and my body is screaming for attention. But I am stubborn. The doctor gave me medicines to help me relax the muscles of my back, in the hope of stopping and perhaps turning the escalating spiral of pain, ease the inflammation and help me to breath easier, sleep better, walk stairs without pain and stand up without crying out because it hurts. But he had the common sense to believe me when he threatened to force a sick-leave on me. I told him that not working would not make me relax right now. He agreed, wrote out medicines and treatment, and gave me a lecture on exercising - once I have finished.

He claims my body reacts the opposite way of how it should because of the stress. If I try to work out while I am this stressed, I'll just end up worse off than I was at the beginning. I have noticed that before, but it's the first time a doctor has actually said it. Trying to release the mental tension through physical exhaustion won't always work. It's not really such a great revelation, but in a way it's liberating. I have been struggling to stay in shape in order to carry on. Seems like I can laze around with a clear conscience when I am not working. And that's an other thing - he told me to drop all the work which is not related to finishing. That means drop feeling responsible for the family, the house, my mother, all the other stuff. Preferably I should go away.

I already feel better. Not least because he freed my conscience. I can be ruthless - as a matter of fact I need to be ruthless and care about nobody but myself, and I don't need to feel that guilt, the eternal guilt of the bad mother, the bad daughter, the bad spouse... Just writing those words makes my muscles relax and the back feel better. I think I am not alone to carry this guilt with me - after all, we are girls, taught to care for others, accomodate others and be open and vulnerable to them. But right now, struggling to finish, it's good to stop being nice.

Painkillers that work. Heaven.

Just one thing, Mark: Your writer's Ph.D. student might obsess over the serial killer because she doesn't want to think about finishing. That happens. One woman I know drove all her friends crazy looking for the right kind of support for her breasts to wear with the dress she had planned to wear for the party after the defense. She had people scouring every lingerie shop in Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim, as well as a few "adult" stores. When it was all over she didn't need it, and she would have learned that if she had tried her dress a few months back. Minds do odd things to us, and we can create silly obsessions in order to avoid thinking about the magnitude of the real problem.

Lisbeth writes about the life of a Danish Ph. D. student. I don't have much to add - her situation is pretty much what we are all in, only that I am priviledged: I have a job and even one with 50% research as part of my job requirements. But I'd like to add that in the Norwegian system, a marriage which survives a Doctorate is rare. The pressure is simply too large on the relationship: the demands of children and spouses too much for everybody included. As Mark writes:

She's also worried about a serial killer working in the region. I find this unrealistic: graduate students I've known, facing this kind of research pressure, would dismiss rumors of wandering murderers out of hand, just as they dismiss sleep, friends, family, toxins, illness. If she doesn't find those rocks, it's over anyway.

And this is what kills the relationships: "You're annoyed that I don't notice you? But if I don't fix that referance, it won't matter what you feel anyway." Even the request that you pause a moment to let your loved one spoil you is a demand to turn the attention away from your work, and when you're pushing to finish that is more than it's possible to tolerate. It's not nice, but you can't be nice in order to finish any large creative work. And that is what a Ph. D. is. It's academic art, and it's a race for aknowledgement.

Back to basic questions. What is a text?
OK, chapter one rewritten - this is the version I'll submit to proof-reading. Scary, hmm?

Dambàgin, the fantasy world of one of my colleagues, Torbjørn Lien.

It's snowing.
Two people were killed this week-end in an accident involving a bus, a road along a fjord, a mountainside and an avalance of snow in Hardanger, closer to Bergen. Did I mention that we have been isolated from the rest of the world once this winter, due to avalances and snow? This climate is why I feel that humanity should never have climbed out of the trees and migrated north. And we wouldn't have had to worry about our Ph.D.'s either.

Intelligent games and simulation, a conference and call for paper for the third international conference at the University of Westminster, London. They have also opened a new academic journal on Intelligent Games and Simulation.

Michael Jansen has some computer generated pictures I really like. This is for instance the background on my computer at the moment.

But his pictures are not the kind of pictures I'd want to print out and have on the wall. I like them on the computer, not on paper- and I think the reason for that is games. His topics and his styles are very game-inspired, the realism that's more than realism: all details in place but not smooth and fluid, rounded as in a drawing. They are obviously built trough squares and with pixels, kind of like the statues in Legoland, Denmark. This is also, I assume, why his pictures of objects floating in water or flying seem to work better than of objects and particularly people standing. The effects of gravity is subtle, expressed in the way bodies distribute weight: complicated to achieve while drawing free hand, even worse when the image is built or contructed rather than drawn. When floating or flying gravity is already defied, and the slightly unreal weightlessness of the figure enhances that sensation and brings the images over to the fantastic.

I think this is also a reason why the games I have seen with really good animation are not of humans or even the earth. There was one really gorgeously animated game which never became a great hit - with clay figures... When I come home, I'll check the name, unless it suddenly pops up in my mind. The game was a bit too much of an enigmatic world of riddles, which tended to rely on association rather than connotations for clues - but it was absolutely geougeously animated, and I loved the music. Anyway - the figures have weight, which is a goal for the serious animator - weight and mass - and it's a lot easier to give non-familiar objects that illusion, than familiar ones. We know what gravity and speed do to humans, but not to Erochnaqs from Eritrpathyx.

The Interactive Fiction Archive for interactive fictionphiles

GameSpot Presents: The History of Video Games

How They Got Game Proposal Portal

ComputerGameHome

The Dot Eaters - Player1 Stage1 - Classic Video Game History

Lisbeth and Elin both object to my sense of humour about procrastinating, both feeling that I carelessly disregard the feelings of those who are losing loved ones. I am sorry that this hurts you both. I am not laughing at your pain, but at my own. For me, laughter works.
[update: Lisbeth has removed the post I refer to.]

No, I didn't find this link while procrastinating. Honest. Actually, it was my NYC connection who knew I needed a distraction. And YES it worked. Check out the gallery!

Anders at Surftrail delivers a thorough description of where he has erred when introducing us to Espen Aarseth and Mark Bernstein's views on hypertext. That was a very interesting post, Anders, err again, will you please?

As for scientists who write about hypertext in hypertext, I am very curious about my colleague Anne Mangen's work in and with Xerox Park's hypertext - or is that elastic text - FluidReader. This fall she expressed a desire to write her thesis in Fluid.

I think Fluid is quite a bit better suited to this than the MUDs I fantasised about using for my writing, some time back in 1998... Writing a Ph.D. as a game would have been fun though!

Procrastination, advanced level
So you have cleaned the house floor to ceiling, you have rebuilt the garage and you have had all the diseases you can imagine and your doctor is sick of telling you that "no, there's nothing wrong with those tests and I am not taking new ones." The deadline is coming closer, and you are actually almost finished. All you need to do is that final editing. This is the moment when a true procrastinator has to become wily.

The computer is one wonderful tool. I am not talking about amateur procrastination, like surfing, blogging or playing games rather than writing. You know you are wasting your time, and you know you can't do that and you are able to stop (because, to be honest, it gets old). No, this is the time when you have to procrastinate without knowing about it. This is when you decide that your computer is too slow, and you need a) to have the current one de-bugged and set up with a new operating system, b) a new computer.

Both solutions have the advantage that you need the assistance of somebody else. IT-departments are experts in this. They are a blessing for the busy and stressed procrastinator. The moment they get their hands on a computer, it's gone for days and days: days when you can read a little in between whining about how you can't write, because the IT-department aren't done with your computer. And if the reading gets too efficient, you can bug them to make them work faster. Keep checking on them. Keep calling them every time they might have had a chance to actually get some work done. As long as you keep nagging, nobody can blame you for procrastinating, because you are TRYING to get your computer back.

As for the new-computer-ploy, that's even better. First, you have to research the possibilities for a new computer, which means hours of effective work you really have to do. Then you have to start the paperwork in the shape of getting money. This will let you have endless meetings with your superiors or much moaning while looking at your bank-account. Once this is done, there's the ordering-process. And again: IT-departments or stores come to your aid. They don't stock the advanced, specialised and very particular equipment you want, so they have to order it, set it up and then finally remember to tell you. You are safe for weeks. No work needs to be done and your conscience is clear.

And I haven't even touched on the potential of leaving your notes in a public place where an expensive-looking bag will be nicked, going away to write somewhere where you will get stuck with the car in the snow and have to survive for a week on the (luckily generous) supplies you brought, but without a net-connection and the vital books you need - or the really long-term advanced stuff, like falling in love or having babies, or having close relatives die and leave you traumatised.

As for me - I have tried them all. I have no other option but work..... yeah right....

Dunk, dunk, dunk
Og det er lyden av en ambisiøs og dyktig kvinne som stanger hodet i glasstaket.

Chop, chop, chop
do you hear that sound? That's the first chapter I wrote being chopped up and spread all over...

I am in bed, my back killing me, but not with the same urgency as in the beginning of the week. We have a wireless system in the house now, and I am carefully negotiating the effects of the chimney, to be able to half lie in bed and still be online - through my son's lap-top. My own is too old for easy installment of the wireless link - and I have started talking to the department about a new one - lap-top that is. I am drooling over the Pentium IVs, suggesting both a Dell and a Toshiba to the department. I need something buff enough to play games and movies and to support the increasing graphic work I know I'll have to take on, since the department is less than subtly reminding me that my other main subject is art history, and I should be well suited to teaching visual communication. I already have a Dell which has followed me faithfully and with remarkably few problems all over for three years. It's a robust, serviceable computer, and I like the no-nonsense design. But it's also WAY more expensive than other, comarable computers. I haven't tried Toshiba, but this machine is highly recommended in the computer magasines, and they are good at making light-weight, smooth computers. Weight is important for me, the way my back is these days.

I know, I know, there's a whole lot of people out there shouting "If you are to spend that much money: GET A MAC". And I would, if there was an apple distributor within 40 miles from the College. No such thing, I am afraid, and I am not adventourous enough to want to learn how to use a new system right now. In 2-3 years, when I start thinking of updating this lap-top, we'll talk!

But in between having these sticky fantasies over technological items, I have re-structured the first five chapters completely. Chapter 2 has been butchered brutally, and put into the other chapters, and chapter 5 has been split into two chapters. I might do the same to chapter 3. So by now chapter 3 is chapter 2, chapter 4 is chapter 3 (a and b) and chapter 5 is chapter 4 & 5. Confused yet? Just wait until I mix chapters 6 - 12 into this.

"I don't think your 'the Prince will be here any minute'-tactics is the answer to all your problems."

Tinka has started a new blog

Ides of March
By the end of March I am supposed to have edited the chapters and a paper for Gamestudies. I need to be made aware that we are now at the ides of March. And yes, there is definitely a gloomy sound to it in my ears.

A reply to Tinka, who discusses language in the humanities. A rather well-known sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu looked at this 30 something years ago. I quote from Academic Discourse:

But the teachers' self-assured use of professorial language is no more fortuitous than the student's tolerance of semantic fog. Quite apart from the fact that individual words, little known or unknown, always appear in a context which imparts a sense of familiarity to them or at least the feeling that they have already been heard fefore, the whole corpus of professorial language is employed in an environment dominated by the teaching situation with its distinctive space, its ritual and its temporal field.

While I won't go so far as to say it's all a conspiracy to keep those less socialised than us out, the language of academia is part of a system which Bourdieu describes as ritualistic as religion. "As one student put it, 'Lecturers have a way of asking, 'is that clear?', which actually rules out any question that it might not be clear.' Destined above all to play the part of the faithful at a church service, students must answer with ritual responses." It depends on understanding as a sign of being worthy: "By definition, the professor teaches as he ought to teach, and the meagre results with which he is rewarded can only reinforce his certainty that the great majority of his students are unworthy of the efforts he bestows upon them."

Yes, I agree with Tinka, as I pointed out in an earlier comment to her earlier post, we need precise language to speak of our research and to be able to communicate with others in the same field efficiently and easily. At the same time we tend to use those terms for a lot more than just efficient communication. We signal our arcane knowledge, our exclusive membership of a small, priviledged group, in short: we flash our cultural capital.

Do I think it's tacky when I get on the plane with businessmen all signaling their success aggressively through clothes, equipment and expensive habits? Yes. Why should I be annoyed that others think it's tacky when I signal my success through language?

Min kollega Erling Sivertsen er ansvarlig for å holde nettsidene til Avdeling for Mediefag oppdaterte. Han har utviklet dem til å bli klare, tydlige, informasjonsrike og en god presentasjon av hva som foregår på avdelingen både av faglig debatt og studentarbeider.

different models for structuring the thesis - first 5 chapters (of 12)

1: introduction
2: positioning in the field of research
3: methodology
4: theories, relevant, writing, reading etc
5: describing the object
----------
1: introduction
2: methodology
3: positioning in the field
4 - 5 as over
-----
1: introduction
2: positioning in the field
3: theories, relevant - writing, reading etc
4: Methodology
5: describing the object
-------
(6: the interview as method)(7: Online worlds and online places: discussion) (8: games, game-theory and roleplaying) (9: Good games, built on the interviews) (10: Online role-playing and the aesthetics in action) (11: A possible aesthetics of games) (12: conclusion)

I am trying to bring all of this to some kind of order. At the moment I am playing around with colours. The first five chapters are gold, pink, green, blue and silver. Drafted on black paper. When I am not drawing I am walking.

Weblog Entry - 02/19/2002: "interest-group despotism"
By way of Jill at our blogonblog

At one point communication philosophers were all sharing Marshall McLuhan's vision of the Global Village, and thought the net would be the answer to that.

A village is distinguished by the fact that everybody know everybody, you are included in the community, and you're important to the function and dynamics of the community. This was the vision of how modern media would change the way we all thought about the world: It would bring us all closer, make us feel more related to and therefor care more about our distant neighbours. The planet would become a village.

There is not much village-like on the net - if there is, the village is Jante: highly exclusive, ruthless aginst those who think differently, ready to criticise and quick to reject. But a more realistic and positive image of the net is perhaps The Global City. I know I have seen this mentioned before, but I can't pin down who said it first.

If we think of the WWW like a city and not a village, the groupings and the special interest communities are not only understandable, but to be expected. In a city, there are different cultures and different attitudes, different social strata and even different nationalities clashing. We worry about ghettoes, but they are still unavoidable: people like to live among who they see as their peers. Some might be striving to become somebody elses' peers in a better neighbourhood: we call that ambition. Some might not care, and just drift around until they settle out of need or because they somehow feel comfortable there: we call that dropping out.

Online, you can find your comfort-zone, your neighbourhood. Sometimes this is the source of anger and hatred, just as in a real city. Sometimes this is a place to become comfortable, feel secure, feel that you are "home", and give you a place to start when you want to explore - just as with all those yong rebels streaming out of the too-safe suburbs looking for adventure.

I think that's just human - and I am grateful of it. If we didn't have this need for mingling with our peers as well as the will to explore, we'd still be disorganised individuals killing each others off with clubs.

Some might think that would be a good idea. Me, I like being a 21st century human being.

OK, I thought this would pass, and you, all the people out there, would think I was just a little lazy. But already Monday Jill asked me: "Torill, is anything wrong? You haven't blogged lately." I made an effort yesterday, but today I just have to give up.

My back is hurting. It's not the "oh it's so good to rest" kind of pain. It's the type of pain that drives me crazy, has me moving all the time searching for a position which hurts less, has me waking up at the middle of the night in order to turn around carefully, has me yelling at the kids for putting down the tea-cup just out of my reach forcing me slightly out of balance while I stretch, has me startling students with outbursts of pain when I stand up, has my colleagues jumping to attention moving chairs and tables when I sit down/get up - the kind of pain that would have made the doctor give me some of those really strong painkillers if I went to see him. But I don't. I am a stubborn idiot, and painkillers make me throw up - I am a little allergic to most sedatives, and get a buzz from the slightest touch of morphin. I could stay home, but I would work anyway, at least at work I have good chairs, good computers and corridors to roam when I can't sit still.

But it makes me angry, bitter and prone to whine, and it also breaks my concentration, so I don't even whine with style and a sense of humour. Therefore - I may blog - or I may not. If you don't hear from me, don't worry, I have not been abducted by aliens (I'd actually prefer that right now) or taken away by the men in white coats while wearing a straightjacket. I am just walking through a darkened corridor, muttering mild curses, scaring students with guilty consciences.

Just had an interesting discussion with a student who's writing a paper on the Norwegian documentary Alias Slayer, about a Norwegian buy who won a world tournament in - I think it was Half-life...

Anyway, her theory was that the boy was like a game-character, because game-characters don't express emotions when they win, and neither did he.

I told her that I have seen too many victory dances among game characters to think that her assumption about games was correct. Now I am in doubt though, because I can't remember any. Anybody else remember an example?

And I'll do something I am not too happy about for this - unlike tinka, who checks the number of readers for her site and gets spooked, I just assume that everybody reading this already have my email address, which limits the number to a manageable size. But in case you don't, and you want to tell me about a game and what kind of message/response you get at the victory in that game, write to tm at hivolda dot no

the art of serving chocolate

Among the books from my father-in-law's place, I keep finding treasures. The latest I gave to him myself, for Christmas 2000. I ordered it from amazon while I was still in NYC, and never saw the book until I found it while we were opening crates. There it was, black, cheap, and well-read. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem is a very different detective story. The hero has Tourette's Syndrome, and soon everything of importance in the book is related to this syndrome. The investigation he performs, to learn about his dead friend and crooked boss, becomes a labyrinth of compulsive actions and repated as well as developing tics. I finished the book this week-end, and because my back hurts and I can't do much, I finished to more books this week-end - but Motherless Brooklyn is the one I remember.

At least this bean-bag is produced by Ekornes, one of the most successful factories in this area.

There's a lot of jokes about people from Southern Møre - Sunnmøre - where I live, and 99% of them are about furniture factories and gaining wealth where nobody else would think it was possible to survive.

The last 1% is about swimming.

Ugly, noisy and something the kids will argue over, but if my back doesn't get better, I am getting a bean-bag.

Mileage Giveaway
Remember the mileage giveaway with Justin Hall? I submitted my dream of where I want to go, but I totally understand that I was way down on a list which was topped by the European Capital Sewer Tour!

I have decided not to charge the battery on the lap-top until it's completely empty. So here I am, hungry for lunch, but wanting to keep the computer active until the last % of power run out. Isn't it amazing how long a battery can last when you want it to be empty?

Eliminating the dangers of playing in the street, children use videogames in isolation.

City Play looks like a very interesting book on other types of games than videogames, still relevant to digital game studies through the influence society, centralised living patterns, traffic and crime influence play-patterns and pave the way for the indoor, solitary game, ultimately the video- or computer game.

This webcam from Volda - apart from being fuzzy - has an other flaw. It doesn't show you the sleet-mixed rain pounding against the windows, the slushy mixture of snow, ice and water in the road, or the wind that helps that freezing rain find its way down beyond your collar.

Some really odd things are happening here. I hope it's due to the changes in blogger, and that it will return to normal soon.

By way of Jill, my real life Ad&D stats

Thursday, March 07, 2002

The norwegian Princess, Märtha, isn't really royal any more. She has given up the right to be titulated "Her Royal Highness", she has resigned from her duties as a member of the royal family, and she has given up the payments due to royalty. She has her own firm, and her future husband will never be prince Ari Behn. But they'll get married, and have chosen a design for the wedding (which will be a large one) to stun anyone with the slightest touch of taste left...

The Darker side of games, is mentioned in Brian Sutton-Smith's Ambiguity of play:

"I think women's tennis is a ballet type of game. It's got beautiful movements and I think there is nothing else that combines that beauty of momvement with the tremendously graceful pirit. But in reality it's also an assassin's game: if one person has won, the other one is dead. There is no compromise. I become quite aggressive on court. I get a thrill out of hitting a winner." In the same vein, an American football professional says, "Football is not fun and games. It's an expression of the darker side of the individual. It's not 'let's go out and have a good time.' It's, 'let's go out and beat the other team, let's pound them into submission, let's intimidate them and show them that we are better than they are.'... As it get down to game time, the personality changes, the darker side, this different person, comes out." (page 88)

Research ethics
Triggered by a question of Svein Brurås to all his colleagues today, I started thinking about the ethics of my work. My initial response to his crass challenge, where he claimed that journalists are constantly involved in an open discussion of their ethics, while media scholars never discuss this, was to refer to my chapter on reflexivity in research. This chapter is mainly concerned with what results does the different theories and methods I use give, how does it skew the results, how do I influence the objects of my study and what does this imply as to the level of precision and openess of my study. Do I manipulate the results? Do I manipulate the people I use as sources? Am I too critical or too accepting of certain topics or questions?

As far as I am concerned, these questions are central to the ethics of a media scholar in the humanistic sciences. If I was a sociologist basing my work on statistics, I'd have to consider what parts of the material I made available to the public, what kind of information should or should not be possible to cross-check. If I was a clinical psychologist searching for the reactions of the body to certain stimuli, I'd have to consider what stimuli are acceptable and whether I really need electrodes connected to the eyeballs of my subjects... In all cases, protecting the source is weighed against learning as much as possible, and the political implications of the research.

This is however such an ingrained part of methodology, that it has become invisible. Perhaps what we need is, like the journalists, to make our questions more publicly visible? Some of the methodology debates at the Department of Media Science in Bergen in the late eighties early nineties were certainly heated enough for good entertainment value.

A shroud of dust.
The bookshelves were utilitarian - simple but sturdy. They had been moved quite a few times, but this last move was the longest and perhaps their last. Soon the wall in the downstairs hallway was lined with them. Then came the crates of books, closed little treasure-boxes for avid readers like me and my husband. We opened the first impatiently, ignoring the hunger after an afternoon of putting up shelves.

The first books were put in place with delight, a feeling of adventure: "look, this boks contains the complete history by Grimberg, look here, I had forgotten about this book, I read it when I was in junior high, that's something we should recommend for the kids!" Then slowly we touched on different kinds of books. A crate of travel guides to places he had never been able to go. Books connected to research he had planned to indulge in after he retired from administrating his department and became an emeritus. Books we had as well, that we remembered buying for him, or having as presents from him, sharing the pleasure of reading.

Soon we were putting the books in place in silence. To me, the dust of the books was a shroud containing the loss of the only father-figure who had understood what I was doing. For my husband, this was more intense. He became lost in the process of putting up the books. His elegant hands caressed each book before he put it in place. Some of them he paused to read, murmuring about when and why this book was bought and kept. When I wanted to put in a couple of crates of comics we needed to store somewhere available, he had to turn his back, the desecration of those shelves more than he could watch. As hunger finally drove us away from the books he was quiet. The next morning he had to go back and continue as soon as he could.

This almost became an obsession with my gentle, easygoing husband. After we had cleared enough room in the basement that we could get on with the work we had planned doing, he was still carrying crates and sorting through the books. The shelves are full now. They are stuffed with prayer-books from 1798, outdated and heavily slanted nationalistic historic works from 1920, instructions in the use of punchcards in quantitative research from 1960, cook-books from 1940, and novels from all genres and periods from around 1915, when his grandfather had built the house his father had been born in, and up until today.

The books smell of dust, and the hallway is narrow and dark where they loom well above our heads, but to my husband they are his past, containing all the best memories of a man who's lost to us. Sooner or later we will have to move some of the books, split them up and mix them with our own, not just with the glaringly misplaced comics. I suspect it will be later. Perhaps I'll put in a reading lamp in the hallway, and a chair. There are a lot of memories never written down, but still stored with the dust between those pages.

jill/txt
Hmm, Jill, what exactly did your friend claim that Sigurd Allern, Sigurd Høst and the institute of journalism say about journalists and citing sources? I'd very much like to hear that, because citing sources (particularly when cutting from other newspapers or using press-releases from information centers or PR-offices) is one of the things our students find that journalists are chronically bad at. If Sigurd and Sigurd have made any reports contradicting this I would very much like to know.

As for the research of Sigurd Allern, he's mostly concerned with the manipulative powers of the sources, not the lack of precision in journalism, Nils Øy is concerned with the publicity principle in Norwegian legislation and how it's influencing the working conditions of journalists, while Sigurd Høst, the one who might have worked at a level of detail required to be able to check something like this, is more concerned with how people use the media, and statistics of the development of norwegian newspapers.

The one woman who keeps appearing on the list of publications from the Institute of Journalism, Henny Wale, I don't know. Now that's something to consider. The three men are the ones who get invited to lecture in Volda, where only men teach journalism (I teach Media Theory and Public Relations). But that's a topic for Hilde, I think.

The researcher who might do work on this is Svein Brurås, who's working on a Ph.D. on journalism and ethics, a colleague of mine. But he hasn't, as far as I know, published anything showing whether journalists are notoriusly bad at citing sources or not. His work is more normative, discussing what ethical journalism should be.

Ultra short stories for the WAP and Web
the phone book has existed for one year. I like it, and I use it when I am lecturing in narratology - this is story telling as an extreme sport (couldn't keep clear of Jenkins-references today either...), story telling under very rough conditions, and people still manage to do it!