Friends and contacts.
Tinka at distantsun looked in on her blog to tell us that no, she's not feeling good, but she has people who looks after her. That is reassuring - but somehow it made me wonder what I really need to know. Distantsun has been one of my favourite blogs since I discovered it, but before she went on a hiatus I was wondering if I checked the blog controlled by the same mechanism that makes people stop and look at accidents.

I was never one of those who stop to stare, I was always more of the "let's get out of the way and let the ambulances and fire-engines have space" kind of a person. But the net invites this kind of voyeristic gloating over an other person's pain. As the original energy and intellectual analytical pleasure drained while Tinka poured it all into finishing her thesis, it was as if I stood by and watched her burn out.

In such occasions I wonder: is it possible to act in any really supportive manner? Tinka got a lot of very nice messages and well-wishes, and I was one of those who wished her all the best, but who knows - was that right of me? The illusion of broad and busy social contact which computer-mediated communication can give seduces those who are inclined to depressions and isolation into thinking that they actually have this many friends. One of the people I interviewed emphasised this: it's an illusion of human closeness, because you have such a wide net of contacts, you think you have a lot of friends.

It's hard to be a friend online. It's hard to find a friend online. I hope Tinka found some, it's good to know that she has more offline who look after her. And I don't think I'll look in on her site for a while. I still wish her all the best, but I don't want to be that person who stands and stares. If I can't be useful or supportive, I had better move on.

Revisions, sex, porn and public information
In August I start teaching at a very changed study. We have expanded to a three year study, but since at least one of those years is to be open for the free choice of the student, we don't have to deliver more than two years of teaching. There will however be quite a bit more administration, since we have to administrate three classes rather than two, and all students within these three classes theoretically can have different choices and specially designed tracks of study.

I find myself thinking about this as a linked text rather than a linear text. I understand how to organise the semesters with all the different options as if they were a labyrinth and not a road - or perhaps a house where the doors stand open. When I worked with computer games and sexual information, I found Bianca's smut shack at bianca.com.

No, I don't link to Bianca's any more. When I found it way back when, it was a series of chats and message boards where the metaphor was a building, each chat-room a room in this building - in the cafe there were tables of course. This was expressed graphically like a map, in a time when the convention was that all links were displayed as a list in the margin, normally to the left. To the right, or perhaps even on top, was daring design....

Today Bianca's has changed into a place where you're not just encouraged to pay for a handle and some benefits, but the code has been set up to demand that you join. They sell the emails of their members, and support robots that track ip's in order to collect email addresses. The structure of Bianca: the design and the way to navigate, as well as the chat-system hasn't changed for 8 years, perhaps more. Or if it has changed it has become less interesting: the map of the house no longer is the most efficient way to navigate the site, it demands more clicks and in that way creates longer corridors between each room. It's no longer a shack, it's an appartment building where the stairways, lifts and corridors are not particularly well designed.

The days when the porn-and-sex-sites were the best designed pages on the web is past. There is too much which has to be displayed - rather than being tempting and nice little budoirs, they are huge unwieldly monsters where the browser is used ruthlessly to trap you and hold you in with all the insistance of a desperate prostitute. Today the most interesting and manouverable sites tend to belong to academic organisations and research organisations, with non-commercial gamers sites and public information pages as a close second. These places offer information rather than push it, and as such rely on being open and easy to use rather than on forcing the user in one particular direction.

This is how I have to think about organising the study as well. Of course, there are things the students have to study. There's a minimum of topics which we have to control, in order to give them a bachelor's degree. But when in the next three years they study certain topics can only be controlled through what we make available, not through what we insist on. The design has to be logical and open, and the links between the different topics have to be easily and clearly visible. OK, so I don't want to build a smut-shack, but I do want to build a house where entrances and exits are clearly marked, where it's easy to understand why certain rooms are on the same floor, and where the stairwells and elevators don't get clogged by students who insist that they need to be somewhere else.

And no, I am not planning on selling their email-addresses. At least not to commercial interests...

The Real Topic
My thesis is about a lot of different things. Today I am trying to find a title. I have three suggestions so far:

Pleasures of the Player: Online Games and Offline Actions
The Digital Juggler: Flow and Control in Online Games
The Player's Game: Imagination, Control and Participation in MUDs

I think I prefer the two last ones. I am not really writing about offline actions. I like the image of the Digital Juggler, and it's been at the back of my mind ever since I started writing. But I am afraid that it's nostalgia which makes me keep it: that or inertia - that I can't see the changes in my own work. Still, the Digital Juggler is a fertile image, an image which for me points to flow and control.

The Player's Game is a nice image too: the Player as subject, active and controlling. But I have already published one fairly large report in Norwegian: Spillets leser, leserens spill - The Reader of the Game, the Game of the Reader - and this refers to and playes with pretty much the same image, and might lead to confusion, particularly when you add the report I wrote with my sister on offline role-playing games and computer games: "One of those reports on playing and reading from Mortensen something - don't remember which..."

Perhaps a mixture of two and three? The Digital Juggler: Imagination, Control and Participation in MUDs? No, I am not sure yet. And the main reason is because I need to write the conclusion. I have attempted conclusions several times. Some of them are:

Games are not stories, but can be narrative environments.
Players are not writers, readers, actors or performers. They are players - even if they commit several of the same acts.
Computer Games are not open texts, but not closed texts either. They are ergodic texts (yes, I know Espen Aarseth has already concluded this), but they don't stop at being ergodic texts. Games contain ergodic texts, just as they can contain or communicate little stories, videos or pictures.
The gaming experience can not be studied without immersion and reflexivity.
Game culture is fragile and change-oriented.
Players are smart and problem-solving oriented.
The computer is a perfect arena, and all aspects of it invites play.

I still don't really know what is the most important conclusion. I don't know which conclusions I have omitted here. I don't really know how these things connect and what they mean. I have these 250 pages, and I look at them and I ask myself: So what?

That's one of the major questions when I criticise research: so what? I had better find an answer to my own question - and write it down in somewhat accessible language. BBL.

Media and Games online network
Discussion boards for Computer Games.

UFD - The Competence Reform in Norway
They call it "Competence Reform" in Norwegian. I wonder whose competence is to be reformed.

Raftevolds Hotel
The department has been away, staying Tuesday to Wednesday at this hotel, to discuss the "quality reform" of Norwegian higher education. The reform has been nicknamed "the quantity reform" - it's still an open question where the quality will enter into it, but we will have to deliver more teaching to more students, preferably cheaper. Isn't that what all reforms are about?

Neil Gaiman's Journal for you, Lisbeth.

Thesis update
Chapters 1-5 proofread.
Chapters 6-10 sent off to proofreading and for a look-over by Espen, my supervisor.
literature list corrected and updated

to go:
editing chapter 5 after proofreading
writing chapter 11 (and the whole discussing with Espen, proofreading it and editing it ceremony)
writing the science-theory essay
presenting same essay
convincing our graphic designer that I need a cool design for the front page
submitting the whole sorry mess.

yes, I am starting to get fed up with this.

a meme just because
Francis quotes jillmatrix, because he loves Nancy - I couldn't resist, mainly because of my soft spot for Francis:

"Five things that pick me up when I'm feeling blue. Now, how 'bout you?"

• A new fantasy or science fiction novel.
  
• One of the teen-agers in a cuddly mood.
  
• Tea carried by some considerate family member all the way downstairs where I have hidden in the music/TV room in order not to bother anybody else with me being blue.
  
• Long online chats or games with some favourite friends, like my NYC-connection.
  
• Trying on old clothes. I haven't blogged this before, but I am losing weight this spring - surprising amounts of weight! I am down 11 kilos, and I have only a few kilos to go until I can get into the trousers I wore in 1985 - before both pregnancies, a thyroid malfunction and years spent before the computer screen. It started out as an online duel, but now the other woman is so far behind that I have stopped posting pictures of the new me and updates on how I shrink. But I get quite a kick out of reading my journal documenting all of this - a kick I'd normally get from chocolate. (This diet permits chocolate! I guess that's the only reason I can stick to it.)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players

Shakespeare gives the answer to why games are so popular!

Baldur's gate and The Sims are two very different types of games. But they seem to have several aspects in common, most important perhaps the attempt at convincing the players that the avatars are "real people" or characters, that they are ruled by certain laws, and that the player needs to relate to them not as agents of random acts, but as personalities, with a logic which can be explained from the physical and social reality they live in.

MMmmHmmm, can you tell I want to go home and try the game?

Yesterday, I bought a copy of The Sim's, with the Livin' Large expansion (Livin' it Up in Europe). What I think about it? That my kids seem to be pretty involved! They are both in front of the computer, discussing in quiet harmony, and I don't expect to have time/opportunity to test it out before their characters are quite established.

For myself, I am looking for Baldur's Gate II, which is not easy to find for PCs. But I'll keep looking. And it has to be the "Shadows of Amn" version, not the "Throne of Baal" expansion.

In order to be able to write - even to read - I need to be in this very special state of mind. Other people go to beautiful, quiet, clean and peaceful places like Volda to achieve this peace of mind, to be isolated from the bustle and aggression of their every day lives. I can write just about anywhere - in an uncomfortable chair, in a computer-lab with chatting students all about me, in a tent while it's raining... The one thing I can't handle is guilt. And the last two days my guilt of being a bad colleague, a bad mother, a bad daughter, in short, a very, very bad woman guilty of the sin of putting my work before the needs of everybody else, has caught up with me with a vengeance.

I don't know how to deal with it. I am going to bed. I am so sorry. Tomorrow I'll try to be good.

I never used to being good at accumulating lists of references and citations. Even now, after four years of information gathering, it's not really such an impressive list. But still... it keeps accumulating. A little quote here, a little clearification there - and slowly the list grows, like some fungus appended to my chapters... And despite the fungus-metaphor - I enjoy watching it grow. It somehow makes me feel adult and oh-so-serious.

Sometimes I hit the "recently updated" links on www.blogger.com just to see what is out there. Most of the time I find something which looks nice enough, but I am just not the target group for it. Sometimes I find little treasures of interesting writing and irony... and sometimes I find something really bad and with absolutely no sense of humour.

Today I found Kirc's very desperate expression of love to or dependency of his wife, and through his blog a link to Melissa's weblog. According to their logs, he cheated on her in 1993, moved out, then he moved back in. Now she's sick and tired of him and he's trying to save the marriage. He's been lying, working and drinking with his friends, but not at bars, because according to Melissa he doesn't go to bars. Melissa has also been slamming his mother in her weblog, and now she's deleting all of those posts because she has discovered that Kirc was a spoiled brat before Alec got leukemia.

Still not confused? Get a glimpse of real life soap through blogging. It's out there.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Simple password holds the key
Sometimes, not-so-inventive security is a good thing. This was at the Aasen Center - which is just next to that cute little airport so often mentioned here.

Netacademy on JMM Journal Homepage
The International Journal of Media Management. Yes, I do other stuff too, like teaching public information and communication planning - and this journal looks relevant to that part of my life.

Reality TV
An article by Marie-Laure Ryan - just to remind myself that I want to read it.

No wonder I was confused about ethnology/anthropology. This is what Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia has to say about the topic - courtesy of my colleague Eivind Rønnestad:

Different terms are used to describe the fields of anthropology in the United States and Europe. While in the United States the term anthropology is used to name the whole subject, in Europe the name ethnology is applied. (Ethnology is defined as the science that studies the many races of mankind their beginnings, characteristics, differences, and distribution.) What is called "cultural anthropology" in the United States is also termed "ethnology" in European countries. The term physical anthropology is used in both parts of the world.

Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia. Copyright © 1993, 1994 Compton's NewMedia, Inc.

After I shared my confusion with the department where I work, Øystein Sande was quick to reply with his understanding of the terms, giving me the correct answer based on the etymology of the words.

But Erling Sivertsen put me on the track of a book by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. And Jill, Hylland Eriksen is an exellent example of a researcher who used the net to communicate his opinions as well as write journal-like entries long before blogging became a fashion, He should be on your list, I think. At least he's an example to remember when we talk about this in Norway.

Back to anthropology versus ethnology:
According to Hylland Eriksen, ethnology comes from the french ethnologie, and the distinction is between ethnographie: a description of society and culture, ethnologie: regional comparisons and anthropologie: The general comparative science of mankind, society and culture.

Hylland Eriksen however focuses on social anthropology, and he would of course use a definition of the topic which positions the anthropology as the main or dominant category, which the other categories are subordinate to. My confusion has been caused by the American/European use of the words described in the quote from Compton's, as the texts I keep referring to position themselves randomly (appearantly) within the one or the other paradigm. The texts themselves however refer to the same kind of theory, problems, questions and methods. And that's no wonder, since it's the same thing, just different terms.

Now I can go back to the thesis and change a headline. That's a relief!

The difference that makes a difference... So what is the difference between Ethnography and Anthropology? I don't know, I can't find the answer online and I don't know where to start reading.

From Book Crossing, a testimony:

Take BookCrossing.com. On the face of it, it presents no profound challenge to established publishing practices and to the modern concept of intellectual property. Members register their books, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around for a total stranger to find. Henceforth, fate determines the chain of events. Eventual successive owners of the volume are supposed to report to BookCrossing (by e-mail) about the books and their whereabouts, thereby generating moving plots and mapping the territory of literacy and bibliomania. This innocuous model subversively undermines the concept - legal and moral - of ownership. It also expropriates the book from the realm of passive, inert objects and transforms it into a catalyst of human interactions across time and space. In other words, it returns the book to its origins: a time capsule, a time machine and the embodiment of a historical narrative.

by Sam Vaknin - who's working in a surprising, but interesting field - that of narcissism.

From the NYC blogger-page: CHF's Life and Times on media and digital communication. I particularly appreciated the post from May 24th on Book Crossing. That's something I might want to do. I have left enough books in random airports and buss-seats - this way it would feel like the act has a purpose.

It’s 10.30 pm, and the sun is setting on the veranda where I sit, computer in my lap. The light reflected off the fjord is golden and pink with sunset, the ferries cut shimmering lines through the water. Kept apart by the deep, lush green of the mountainsides, sky and water are light and reflection. From the gardens along the quiet streets there are careful voices or happy laughter. It’s too late in the evening for barbeques, but there is the occasional tinkle of glasses meeting for a toast. It’s summer, filled with a rare and unexpected heat which makes the days a burden but the light, warm nights a luxury such as children will remember when they grow old. The fragrance of the flowers, hurried into frantic bloom, the warm asphalt slowly cooling, the salt of the fjord and the delight of that feverish chill as sunburned skin meets the light breeze off the water; it will all make for those nostalgic attacks of longing for childhood, for early puberty or for that year you fell in love, that year which was all different from every other year… And through the silence of the evening the sound of a boat-engine pours its exuberant vibrations into the perfumed, purple evening of future nostalgia.

It's hot here. I am learning new tricks:
Iced Vanilla Coffee
Creamy Ice Coffee
40 coffee recipes
Cold Coffee recipe index

I have been smuggling for years, I just didn't know about it. According to Norwegian Customs, I am only allowed to take one kilo of chocolate into the country, without paying for importing it. That was scary, next time I have been to Economy Candy in NYC before getting on the plane home, I'll have that guilty look and they will take me aside and go through the entire luggage looking for the illegal substances that make me look like that. And then they'll grab my stash of chocolate, optimistically hidden underneath the books, and fine me severely for years and years of pushing sweets.

Anyway - talking of luggage: One more piece arrived today - it was the backpack with some clothes, books and back-up CDs. It was soaked. Not good - damage-report already registered, one bag missing still. The last bag has been sighted though, and should arrive this afternoon.

Weblogs at the UC Berkeley: a course in journalism.

I will pass this link around to my colleagues, as I think both the concept and the technology is something journalists and editors have to discuss seriously in the next few years.

link by way of leuschke.

Normative Studies
I am writing a little paragraph about Normative Studies, using Provenzo Video Kids as an example. To me that book is the video-game version of the media panics sweaping over the western continent all through last century. But where is the limit for normative? At which point does the expectations and political or religious conviction of the writer start dictating the reporting/research and turn information and enlightenment into preaching?

I hope I find out before I have to defend my definition of that line.

The Placebo Effect
I checked again, even if I by now have absolute proof that at least 1/3 of the information on the site is wrong. It has a soothing effect, but it doesn't bring my luggage back, and it doesn't tell me where the two missing bags might be. But my mind is preoccupied with them, I keep memorising what is in them. The new dress and jacket. Two pairs of shoes. Medicines and cosmetics. Underwear - and clean too. Not to mention the books. All of the books I have been working with lately. I am trying to remember what I slipped into the top pocket. That was something I had almost forgotten, then remembered in the last minute.

My mind obsesses over these possessions, and I seek solace by giving myself this substitute for information. One of the players I interviewed said that levelling in games is something people do not because it's so much fun - not even because it lets them kick the other player characters' behinds - but because they can do it. We are often powerless, adrift, victims to circumstances beyond our control. In the game, the one thing the players can do is level: gain experience points and check out equipment. And so that's what they do. It's not a cure, but it feels like a cure, it's at least something. There's a place where I can log in and see that they have all the information I gave them. I can see that they have the right address. I can see the numbers of the luggagge tags and I know that when somebody finds the bags they can search by way of the tags and find out where they belong. And it doesn't really change anything, it just offers the illusion of control.

The pretty earrings. I was complimentet for those at the Eyebeam Soiree. Now I wish I had forgotten to pack them. They would have been safer in NYC.

I keep getting emails in duplicate - one from the college, and then immediately afterwards one from verizon.net, both from the same sender. The one from Verizon.net has infallibly been cleaned of this worm: WORM_KLEZ.H

The ones from the college have not been exorcized... The worm is apparently already within the walls of the college security, creating addresses from our server to spread the infection. If you get any mail from verizon.net or hivolda.no, from a sender you don't recognize, beware. I hope the fact that I am not in a habit of opening spam or attachment I am not familiar with should keep me safe, but I can't guarantee the pristinity of my mailbox if the college server has been comprimised.

More about this worm here.

The journalists are on strike in Norway, and today the local paper of this district joined. I wonder who will be left to cover the fact that the journalists are on strike? Because it's not like they will get any attention if all of them refuse to produce news!

It doesn't look that hot, but I am almost fried here in my office, with no air-conditioning or shades, and sunlight in the window. I normally never whine about being warm, I like heat, but this is draining me.

Forskerbasen
Utnytt databasene og søkemotorene!

Free Surfer, the ultimate popup stopper by EMS-Project
Finally a good idea.

Without any help from the internet tracer services, one of the lost pieces of luggage found its way to the house, carried to the door by one of my favourite airport employees, one of those guys who knows every passenger by name and books journeys to any place I want in the world, cheaply, easily and with an uniquely personal service (remember, when you come home, you will need ID. We can always find a way to convince the people at Oslo Airport that we know you, but it's a little harder if you try to get home from Copenhagen without something to prove who you are...).

From the kids' point of view, that was the most important piece of luggage, my daughter's new case for her saxophone; the case stuffed with presents and sweets. I am however still waiting for the books, and my new shoes. The books, or course, are the most important...

Bag 1 Status: PENDING. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER
Bag 2 Status: PENDING. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER
Bag 3 Status: PENDING. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER

If you're going by plane by way of Amsterdam: take only handluggage! (At least keep your medicines, most valued possessions and clean underwear for a week with you.) They are changing the luggage-handling system, and it needs a wee bit of tweaking. As of this morning, more than 300 pieces of luggage had not arrived to Oslo from Amsterdam - at one handling company alone.

Yes I am an addict... but I try to stay addicted to the good stuff.

I escaped to the end of the R-Line, Brooklyn, for the same reason why this girl wants to leave. So I am twice her age - it just means I have had all that more practice at dreading phone-calls when I try to focus on something else.

Henry Jenkins: Game Design
Continued

Last Tuesday I read quickly through this article and promised I'd come back to it. Today I have been going through it more carefully in order to figure out what it is about this article that disturbs me. I agree with a lot of Jenkins' statements. His view of games is very close to my own opinion on this topic: they are not narratives but environments which can accomodate or support narratives and can have narrative elements. The argument on spatiality is to the point and captures one of the main differences between games and narratives, and his argument as to why games basically focus on science fiction and fantasy put something in its proper place for me:

Often, such works exist on the outer borders of literature. They are much loved by readers, to be sure, and passed down from one generation to another, but they rarely figure in the canon of great literary works. How often, for example, has science fiction been criticized for being preoccupied with world-making at the expense of character psychology or plot development? These writers seem constantly to be pushing against the limits of what can be accomplished in a printed text and thus their works fare badly against aesthetic standards defined around classically-constructed novels. In many cases, the characters - our guides through these richly-developed worlds - are stripped down to the bare bones, description displaces exposition, and plots fragment into a series of episodes and encounters. When game designers draw story elements from existing film or literary genres, they are most apt to tap those genres - fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war - which are most invested in world-making and spatial storytelling. Games, in turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds.

However; much as I agree with such keen observations, I can't reconcile myself with the article. I think that is because I find that it has conflicting agendas, or perhaps goals which cannot be achieved with the information Jenkins bases his writing on. The goals as I understand them:

1) To end the feud between ludologists and narratologists
2) To tell the ludologists how important narrative still is for understanding games
3) To argue for why game-designers should learn about film theory

1) Ludologists and narratologists
Who are these mysterious ludologists who just can't understand that narrative is important to games? According to Jenkins, it's Markku Eskelinen and Jesper Juul. It's a testimony to the fragility of narratology in popular culture that two voices are taken to represent an opposing community. Jenkins devotes an otherwise exellent article on narrative elements in games to the "ludologists'" lack of submission to a certain theoretical approach, in order to educate, convince and might one perhaps even thing silence them? Among scholars who devote as much time and energy to the study of games as Jesper and Markku and have the same claim on being "ludologists", there are other voices. These are however mostly ignored because they pose no threat to the hegemony of narratology. The strategy of positioning in a field is a well-known and effective rhetoric technique; pick one or two enemies, create the largest gap possible between yourself and them and then argue against the extreme expressions of the oposing paradigm. That is where the perceived bloodfeud between "ludologists" (whoever they are) and "narratologists" is at right now, and where it will remain as long as the criteria of news value rules academic attention.

2) Tell ludologists about narrativity
Jenkins argues as if he thinks "the ludologists" don't know narrative theory, and are incapable of doing independent analysis of the narrativity of games. I find that Jesper Juul's thesis contains among other things quite nice discussions of the narrative elements of some of the games he studies. The assumption that enough knowledge of narrative theory will bring enlightenment to the strayed sheep is a political or perhaps religious conviction rather than a valid academic argument. At the end of Jenkins' article someone who studies games rather than stories can only nod and say: "yes, all of this is correct, but games are still different from stories, and we need to take those differences seriously, rather than try to incorporate the games in a too narrow field." This conviction of the faith of ludology is also based on study and research, and is as entitled to respect as is any other fairly well researched belief in Academia.

3) Teach narratology to Game Designers
Where did this come from? Or perhaps I am wrong about who the ludologists are? Are they the game designers? In that case I agree, just as I agree that my journalist students need to learn about advertising, propaganda and fiction writing: Because game designers need to be able to communicate with their audience, and they should use as many tools as possible in order to do that. Along the same vein I think that fasion designers can benefit from taking classes in art history, and architects should study comparative politics. The one thing isn't the other, but it's possible to benefit from knowing about it. Just don't confuse Game Designers with the initial "ludologists" and this should be uncontroversial.

....
To answer Gonzalo's question from last week: I agree with a lot of what Henry Jenkins writes, and I know there are several dissertations about to be finished on the topic which will give more space to this topic than he can do in this short article. I don't agree with the rhetoric goal of the article, as I find that it is based more on sensationalism than on actual knowledge. Still, it's the best piece I have read on the topic games/narrativity in quite a while, and as mentioned, there are one or two passages in that article for which I am quite grateful to Jenkins.

I am trying to decide what style to use on my references. Yes, I know that's a tad bit late, but I have been fairly good, I just don't know if what I have been doing has a name; and now I have to find and pick one style in order to be able to agree with my proof-reader.

So here are some samples.
My proof-reader claims I am using the MLA-style.
I have been trying to use the style used in Norsk Medietidsskrift, but I don't know what it's called in English, and the journal doesn't tell.

Lost Luggage
It makes me feel like I haven't really arrived yet. Or like I was never away. There are no backpacks filled with dirty laundry just inside the door, no heaps of books waiting to be sorted out and taken to the office, no bags in different states of unpacking surrounded by chocolate paper and bubble plastic from gifts and souvenirs. Perhaps I was never gone - the only thing I have to indicate my month of absense is a bottle of tax-free booze and a box of chocolates - and the chocolates are almost gone already. But I keep checking, hoping to hear that my bags are on their way to Volda. Without them, I feel like I have just lost a month.

Some people want to take home puppies - I want this cute little computer cart. Make sure to watch the HD-series in motion!

Defecation rule
With this in mind, I hereby establish the defecation rule: A defecator is at liberty to commit the act, but he may not commit it on his neigbor's doorstep or in the quiet street in front of his neighbor's house, or in his neighbor's alley, or in his neighbor's customary place of work, or any place where the neighbor or any other passerby may step in it by accident in his own zone of privacy and tranquility.

From Sheri S. Tepper: Six Moon Dance, page 32.

Once upon a time - Oh, might that even have been in an article - I seem to remember saying something about there not being much flaming in blogs. Looks like Des is doing his best to prove me wrong:

I do have my own site, obviously, and one of the rights I exercise here is the right to decide that some things are better said elsewhere, or not at all. (The idea of being told how I should use this space by someone who patrols her own borders so fiercely has He Who Yearns To Use The Word Phallogocentric In Anger straining at the leash, but I have him yet, I have him.)

And I acknowledge that same right in others; yea even unto the gate-keepers of the Sacred Groves of Academe. My concern, like Foucault's, is with the exclusion of certain kinds of voices, rather than their "owners". Being told that I can have a say (if I scrub behind my ears and eat up all my greens, and write where and how I'm told) but that He Who Ululates Elsewhere With My Throat cannot isn't a solution. It's the definition of the problem.

I still don't see what Des' problem is, unless it's that he really wants to be able to write in certain blogs, but the owners won't let him, because - surprise surprise - they don't like to be told what to do in their blogs either. Gets him lots of attention though, and that should keep boys-who-don't-like-to-eat-their-greens happy.

Reading
I have not just been writing this month. Now that it's time to pack up and go home, I find that I have been reading as well. I carried with me Huizinga, Caillois, Sutton-Smith and Jones (ed.), while Turner, Turkle and Life Online by Anette Markham was waiting for me here.

Most of this was familiar stuff, so I just used it to flesh out the five chapters I edited and wrote here, but the Markham book was special. It's a little old, we have seen several of these books by now, describing an academic's (in this case an ethnographer's) experiences as a new user online. In many ways it's naive and unsophisticated, almost clumsy, particularly in the way it switches between account modes: From observations and reporting to comments through switching back and forth with italics. But when I had accepted the quasi-academic format and the naivistic form of her questions and approach, it was a very revealing, honest and even familiar exploration of a first encounter between the online subject and the not-so-connected researcher. From page 71:

Online, you can't see their faces
Online, I can't see the other person's face, hear their tone of voice, or get any sense of who they are beyond the words I see scrolling up my own screen. This does not mean the interview is less interesting. Through their words and through my interaction with them, I could sense joy, anger, passion, bitterness, happiness. In fact, I was surprised and impressed by the intensit of the conversations.

However, I found it difficult to manage the basic elements of conversation, such as taking turns at the appropriate time, nodding, or mm-hmm-ing to imply, "Go on, I'm listening." I couldn't give a questioning glance or wrinkle my forehead or frown slightly to let the other person know I didn't understand what they were getting at.

This rather simple observation is something I have neglected to describe, but it is the reason why I travelled across the North-Atlantic as well as the American Continent in order to interview my players. Every response has to be verbal, and not just that - it has to be written. Still, my fascination with Markham's book was with the leaps she made from such essential, but basic observations, and to sophisticated conclusions to her interviews:

At some point Sheol uses real as a convenient term that demarcates those experiences that occur offline. Meanwhile, Sheol describes real as a matter of degree directly related to a level of information/knowledge, particularly when speaking of other things or people exclusively in online contexts. In other words, the more he knows about something or someone, the more real it or they become. Sheol seems to distinguish his online experience along a continuum from less real to more real. Stated differently, the reality of others - and more specifically, their subjectivity - is not a static condition as much as a matter of degree. (page 184)

This expresses one of my main objections against the vitual/real discussion. I cannot see reality as either/or. reality is relative, a continuum, where the subject deceides on the degree of reality. Anette Markham and her interviewees reminded me of this, and I devoured the book. It will be useful - I have to go back to the methods-chapter and put her into my discussion on reflexivity - but most of all it was a delightfully honest, personal and open scholarly work on internet research.

by the way: Emily is the blogger closest to where I am at the moment...

Geography and places of the heart
I find myself wishing I could register here, that I could be a NYC blogger. I would be at the very end of the R-line, the south end of the yellow line, where only shuttles run in the week-ends, five minutes walking away from a breath of salt air, where it's still possible to buy Norwegian meat-balls with brown sauce or warm fish-cakes in the regular delis. Not to talk of real danish bread.

But I hesitate, because even in a non-geographic community, the geographc identity is powerful. Language is obvious, but I notice other differences as well. The priorities, the problems, the questions and the answers: I cannot even begine to pretend that mine are those of a New Yorker. I'll just add that page to my favourites, and be a digital tourist, lurking around thedescriptions of life in a part of the world I have grown to enjoy the way the familiar is still enjoyable before it grows tiresome.

I read the same comment from Des as Jill reacted to, but I saw it first on Tinka's page. My reaction to his criticism of the lack of comments was identical to Jill's, possibly because comments or no comments is something Jill, Hilde and I discussed pretty extensively when we created blogonblog (We initially tried to involve Hilde in that).

Blogonblog has comments, and they were put there in order to give us a tool through which we could quickly and easily comment on each other's posts, as well as give other bloggers/readers/non-bloggers who might be interested in contributing to a meta-blogging discussion a way to give feed-back. The comment function is still there, and both Jill and I check on that blog regularly to see if there are any changes (and we have agents doing the checking for us, in case we should grow lax), but they didn't really work well. We had some very nice comments and some not so useful, but email and checking links from other blogs was a much better way to get feed-back on what we were discussing.

During that initial discussion both Jill and I opted for no comments on our "personal" blogs. Jill/txt and thinking with my fingers are our gardens, they are not public parks - exactly because they are not strictly academic, even if leusche claims that jill/txt is the most rigorously academic blog around.

This blog of mine is a way to communicate opinions and experiences which I'd like to share with others, and although I most of the time try to make those experiences interesting for others who like MUDs and media theory, there's more to me than being academic. Over the last month I have found that the intense writing which I do offline makes me less phrone to write academic posts here - the blog has become the place where I go to breathe, relax... and if Jill, Lisbeth or Hilde are around I'll bring a pot of tea as well and just chat or listen to what they have to say.

I want to feel free to do that, without needing to maintain an ongoing discussion with just anyone who might be passing by. Perhaps it's the introvert Norwegian in me who thinks like this; the one who maintains the personal space in all public places, doesn't meet the eyes of strangers on the street and looks offended if spoken to in a personal manner by shop-keepers. I know it's not the academic - when I think like an academic I want comments, I want attention, I want to control the discussion and keep it on my turf. I want to be the one to design the frame-work and define the limits. And that is what a comment system does: It keeps the discussion within the predefined limits of the blog in question. The moment you take my words to your turf and quote or link, it's out of my control. You might even "burn" me, if that is your pleasure.

At the speed my brain is working today, the Dull Men's Club seems hilarious. Just see what fun I have missed when walking in Central Park:

Even when I’m in Central Park, I can easily find out where I am by reading the lampposts. There are numbers on every post. The first two numbers tell me which cross street I am near; for example, lamppost numbered 7304 is located between 73rd and 74th streets. The “4” designates that the post is the fourth post in from Fifth Avenue. In the upper reaches of the park, where street numbers are 100 and higher, the “1” is omitted; for example, a post numbered 0500 is between 105th and 106th street.

Jill generously passed on a discount at Amazon.com to me, on Marie-Laure Ryan's book Narrative as Virtual Reality. Since I have wanted that book for some time I grabbed the opportunity. However, the next 5 emails in my mailbox, after the amazon.com notification, were junk emails. Coincidence? The very good system for sorting out spam at the college normally protects me from junk like that. I have however noticed that shopping at Amazon tends to coincide with new bursts. I don't know if it's just amazon.com or if the same happens with their .co.uk site, but I will be keeping an eye open, and see if this is a pattern.

Dull Men's Club, for those who are, or like, men with simple pleasures. A sample from their activities page:

Safe Sex at the Laundromat

I take my girlfriend to the Laundromat. I bring my bag of dirty clothes. She brings her bag of dirty clothes. When we get there, we walk up to a laundry machine. We look around to make sure no one is watching us, then we put her clothes and my clothes into the same machine. We start the machine. We pull two chairs up in front of the machine. We sit down and watch our laundry. We watch her clothes swishing around together with my clothes. Her little lacy things getting right up next to my boxer shorts. Sometimes her panties are on top of my boxer shorts, sometimes my boxer shorts are on top of her panties. The way I look it, that’s safe sex.

By way of Gonzalo, a link to Henry Jenkins' article Game design as Narrative Architecture. I have only had time to glance at the first paragraphs, but I know I will be back to this one. He is dangerously close to finding the missing link between games and narratives, but at a first quick skimming, his "narrative architecture" it is still flawed as he claims the "ludologists" are, with undue polemics.

Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.

With this statement, Jenkins is still involved in a defense of narrativity in games, and still arguing with the ludologists, of which I am not certain if I am or am not one. I will find this article again, before I conclude my dissertation, and see how it relates to the work I have been doing, but so far the interviews with the players does not emphasis the story (surprising me, at the time), but the many other aspects specific to games. Three years ago, when I conducted those interviews, I'd have agreed with every word Henry Jenkins writes in this article. Today, I am no longer that certain. At least he has made me see some of my own intellectual development.

To be continued....

It's been a rough week-end. I seem to have a much livelier social life in NYC than in Volda. Friday night I celebrated being done with all but the conclusion - modestly though, by seeing the sun set by the water under the Verrazano Bridge, having a philadelphia cheese steak sandwich and a diet coke. That was the last vestige of restraint for the next three days. But I have found at least one new nice restaurant: Sushi Samba at 7th Avenue - just a little north of Bleeker Street. I was not too optimistic at first, it looked like it would be outrageously expensive and I would get pretty, but tasteless food and a drink with more colour than taste, as funky and annoying as their Website. We sat down because they offered nice outdoor seating on one of the loveliest days in New York for the whole time I have been here. I have never been less disappointed. I have no idea now what they called the course I ordered, and it wasn't on the (not too informative) website menu, but it was a fish pot which was served in a sizzling hot bowl. The sauce was made from among other things tomatoes, cream, saffron and generous amounts of fresh coriander. In this incredibly delicious sauce cubes of sweet potato had been cooked with shrimp, octopus, crayfish, different types of shellfish and bacalao. I had a coctail with it (an odd american habit of mixed drinks with the food I am not all comfortable with), and the creamy coconot tasting thing was perfect to cool my mouth when I got too impatient. I didn't manage to finish the meal, even if matthew heroically took it upon himself to rid me of all the mussels. And even as I write, a late and slow Tuesday morning, I remember the taste - almost crave it, if I hadn't been exhausted and a little sick from the rest of what was supposed to be a slow week-end of rest and a little light typing. Oh well - my hands, back and shoulders feel better than in a long time. It's probably all the seafood...

(Oops. That would leave me without a career. And blogging ain't paying that well yet. I'm starting to understand why young rebels support the status quo once they get a mortgage.)

What's with the gloom Jill? Read Bordieu's Reproduction and never worry about not having a place in Academia if you rebel. It's the rebels that justify the authorithy of The Establishment, you know. And while you're at it, that book should help you not to worry too much about hiveminds either. You're already trapped in a much bigger web...

Thesis update
Written and edited chapters 1-10 (out of 11)
Chapters 1-4 returned from proofreading.

still to do:
Cleaning up notes, styles and references
Chapter 11 - conclusion
Espen's reading of the whole thing
Proofreading of chapters 5-11
Editing after proofing

Science theory essay, writing and presenting
submisson

and more doubtful...
trial lecture
defense

and perhaps even
defense dinner.

Some time in December, I might dare to breathe again.

One of the things I am almost spared for: Martha and Ari's wedding. and I want to mention: it's not a royal wedding - Princess Martha is not Her Royal Highness any more, she gave that up months ago. Now she's just an other celebrity, with exellent training in shaking hands, reading speaches, addressing large crowds and foreign dignitaries, and waving. She's good at that.

Tinka has read Jill's and mine paper Blogging Thoughts, regretting that she didn't use her blog, 6th edition, as a tool while writing. If it's any kind of consolation, dust from a distant sun has been one of the blogs both Jill and I have followed, learning about the different ways to use and explore online journals. Thanks, Tinka.

It's memorial day week-end soon, but also Fleet Week. I missed the parade of ships under the Verrazano Bridge yesterday though, I was too busy being a good girl.

I have been a good girl today too - done editing chapter 9, one more chapter to edit (I have already loaded it into the large file that contains the next 45%) and I can attack chapter 1 again... before starting to put all of this tentatively together and conclude.

But now I hear that it's warm and sunny out. I'll go track down a chinese lunch and take it down under the bridge, to the spot where I should have been yesterday. I'll bring The Fifth Elephant with me, and enjoy the day, the food, and having done what I came here for - almost.

Just finished chapter 8. I think I deserve a little break. *patting own shoulder* good girl.

The only problem with being isolated here in Brooklyn is that nobody admires me when I do stuff like this - like finishing something almost within my own deadlines. Thursday and Friday I'll edit the nex two chapters, then I'll take the week-end off exept for editing chapter 1, which returned from the proofreader before I left for USA, before I start to write the conclusion. Only I understand and appreciate how good I really am. Oh, well, I'll spoil myself. *pats the other shoulder as well*.

A few links for the more suspicious among us:
hoaxbusters
Symantec hoax-page
Vmyths
Urban legends and folklore, the page where I finally found the "oogling breasts make men live longer" legend.

Tits, breasts, boobs
While the news Hilde refers to about the health-promoting effects of watching breasts are tittilating, I am sad that I have to tell you all the harsh truth: It's a hoax. I learned that from an intense email-exchange within the Department, where all the hopes of my (mostly male) colleagues were crushed as at least one of them did what journalists and scholars are supposed to do: research.

terror-warning
It's like tornado-spotting... but according to FBI there might be an other attack, this time on the statue of Liberty or on the Brooklyn Bridge, on memorial day, which is monday. I'll make sure to go shopping before the week-end, and not be in a sub-way tunnel that day - as for the rest: yes, it's kind of like expecting a bad storm, all you can do is be prepared, stay safe and wait it out.

Thesis update
I am terrified. I have edited two chapters and am writing chapter 8 rather than chapter 11 - something else will be chapter 11. It goes well, quickly and easily, even if there are a few references I have to put in when I get home. I might almost finish while I am here. I have two chapters left to edit, and one left to write. I feel sick already. After this comes proofreading and then - submission. And that's just not my style.

Thank you Lisbeth, just what I need... an interesting and versatile toy so I can relive that horrible scene in Moria over and over again...

Now when the Riders of Rohan come as Lego, we'll talk business! (I want Eowyn!)

My host laughed at me when I told him that it's sick to have the May 17th parade on the 19th - but he was nice enough to come with me to see it. It started right by the subway-stop where we get off, and we hurried one stop north in order to get to the front of the parade. It was an odd experience. Viking-ships and american marching bands, scotttish bagpipers and boyscouts of colours which would only be seen in the Oslo parade, mixed in between banner upon banner fom the "Sons of Norway" groups (their ranks mainly filled with women) from around New York State, and further out. Red, white and blue are familiar colours to Americans, but really... playing "Ja vi elsker" as a march? I appreciate that the band had practiced it though, and played it, even if such things as crescendos and de-crescendoes was beyond them.

There were some odd groups, like dock-workers of Brooklyn... until it dawned on me that THAT particular connection is pretty obvious. This is Bay Ridge, which used to be one of the largest Norwegians settlements outside of Norway - with more Norwegians here than in most Norwegian cities. Their main occupation was in connection to the boat/traffic, both trade and passenger ships. So of course, there would be Norwegians working on the maintainance of the boats - and docks - as well as on the boats themselves. All in all it was a very interesting experience. And there were lots of Norwegian voices, and more blondes than I have ever seen in one place in NYC. There were some fake national costumes, and some really old ones, as well as some splendidly kept and donned ones, silver tinkling and flickering in the May sunlight.

The crowd was different though, silent, serious, hardly waving a flag. And I became the same. I missed the yells of "Hurra for 17 mai!" or the incessant waving in order to catch the attention of somebody in the crowd. The parade ended in Leif Erikson Park, with games and entertainment in the Owlshead Park. I didn't go there... I was done with the 17th, it's not normally a celebration that lingers.

Lunchtime again. This is becoming a refrain. Today I have to eat out, because the water has been shut off in the entire building. They are tearing up the sidewalk outside the house, so it was impossible to deliver fuel for the heating yesterday. This lead to only cold water last night and this morning, and then from about 9 am no water at all, until 5 pm. I have an emergency bucket of water just in case... but I think I prefer going out. I think I'll go see the nice ladies at Tiffany Diner. They have warm, nice bathrooms there. And they'll go: "What can A get'cha sweetie?"

Representation
Jill quotes Alex Golub on editing your representation. Golub's post is eminent and I recognize the signs, both in myself and my friends - although I didn't think of googling myself until I had been blogging for half a year. What I want to point out is that this is why newspapers have editors - to protect the paper, the writer and the subject of the article from "getting burned". It's a skill to present yourself in such a fashion that you can live with what people learn about yourself - as well as living with how you represent others. This training is perhaps the most important difference between a skilled journalist and the amateur writer of a journal. "Burning" their subjects is the most frequent complaint against journalists and news organisations. Normally this burning happens not through presenting untruths, but by neglecting one of the rules hanging in all news-rooms: protect your sources from themselves. Your source might be willing to talk to you and even be filmed by you, perhaps even eager to be shown with milk coming out their nose... but they don't know anything about how this will affect them later on. This is what journalists are supposed to be protecting them from. And yes, they do so more frequently than the public know.

Lunchtime. Got to go shopping. This is the only time in Brooklyn when I wish I had a car, or at least a bike I wasn't afraid would be stolen if I left it outside a store. Or perhaps I just wish I was home and could raid the freezer if the fridge was empty.

Ritual, Theatre and Play - random hits of the day
Metamorphic Ritual Theatre: between performance, role-playing game and ritual
Our Troth: Aasatru on the internet, a compilation of online and offline resources on the modern version of the ancient Norse religion. Chapter 36 is concerned with ritual and Theatre
A Booklist on improv theatre. Role-playing is often compared with improvisation. While it does have a lot of the aspects of improv, it's not the same thing.
An other bibliography on theatre and playing, Augosto Boal featured here.
An argument in favour of games being theatre and the other way around. Interesting little piece.

Work and Play
When I am not eating and drinking or hunting for esoteric places to do it, I do try to work. I have been reading Victor Turner's essays in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. He writes of the relationship between work and play in tribal agrarian myth and the Calvinian inspired cultures (such as the Norwegian protestants and the European descendant Americans):

The point is though, that these play or ludic aspects of tribal agrarian ritual myth are, as Durkheim says, "de la vie serieuse," i.e., they are intrinsically connected with the "work" of collectivity in performing symbolic actions and manipulating symbolic objects so as to increase and promote fertility of men, crops and animals, domestic and wild, to cure illness, to avert plague, to obtain success in raiding, to turn boys into men and girls into women, to make chiefs out of commoners, to transform ordinary people to shamans and shamanins, to "cool" those "hot" from the warpath, to ensure proper succession of seasons and the hunting and agricultural responses of human beings to them, and so forth. Thus, the play is in earnest, and has to be within bounds. (page 32)

When we read about stress and tension in the work-place and what this does to humans, the idea of play as productive becomes obvious. Tension is the cause of everything from infertility to heart-failure and depressions. Physical and mental illnesses come from not relaxing, not cooling down when hot or not having the right rites for relieving tension. According to Turner, this is our Calvinistic past shining through. We have turned from play as a way to approach what is sacred, and replaced it with work:

Work and leisure were made seperate spheres, and "work" became sacred, de facto, as the arena in which one's salvation might be objectively demonstrated. [...] The Calvinists wanted "no more cake and ale" - or other festival foods that belonged to the work and play of the gods. What they wanted was ascetic dedication to te mainline economic enterprise, the sacralization of what was formerly most profane, or, at least, subordinated to, ancillary to the sacred cosmological paradigms. (page 38-39)

And now, on that note, I'll leave the reading of serious-looking essays and the writing of serious-sounding posts for a while, and go play Baldur's Gate II, the Shadows of Amn.

The Essentials: Eating and drinking in NYC.
It's been a busy week-end, and both my back and hands have had a chance to recover. Most of the time has been spent trekking about on Manhattan. I went shopping for things I packed and sent home Friday - celebrating May 17th being nostalgic about my kids rather than doing anything particularly Norwegian. We did have a great meal at the OliveTree - that place is fun AND cheap, get a pitcher of Sangria after a long day of warm and exhaustive shopping - and then cakes at the local diner in Bay Ridge; Tiffany Diner, a piece of fake-tiffany-lamp infested Americana, with charming ladies of the type that makes you believe they really want to know when they say "how're you doin', sweetie?". They also have this wide, conspiratorial grin when they bring me a Long Island Ice Tea. Trust them when they recommend a cake, they have tested them!

Saturday was tattoo-shopping day. My broker matthew (who patiently endures my visits and lengthy stays in NYC) wants one, but as it should be, he's worried about quality and hygiene - so he's taking his time, looking for the best artist. And what better place to look than at a tattoo convention? After a couple hours spent there we saw Lord of the Rings again, and I have to admit, I hate the scenes in Moria as much now as I did the first time around. I ache with Pippin when he looses the skull in the well, I feel the terror as the drums start sounding, and I just HATE it when Aragorn and Frodo are trapped at the wrong side of the crumbling bridge. But the saddest part is still Boromir's death, in the film as in the book. Afterwards I tried to meet up with an online friend from California, who would come into NYC yesterday.

We didn't find her, but visited The Beauty Bar, a funny little place which used to be a beauty parlour. It was mentioned on one of the first blogs I happened to visit, that of a girl from Brooklyn. I am not certain if it was Brooklyngirl, but it might have been. Tracking it down became a kind of quest. When I was here after September 11th it was closed, but yesterday it was open in all its glittering splendour. Sadly, they don't give pedicures with the cocktails, even if they have kept the hairdriers. And to keep the style of this blogpost: yes, we did eat as well as drink. The little Asian Bistro called Friend House caught my eye on the way back to the subway. Don't go there. I want that place to myself, not share such a pretty place with such tasty food at a very friendly price with anybody but those I bring there personally.

Oh, perhaps you'd like to know what the technology did? Everybody got some really interestingly techno-primitive looking meme tags to hang around our necks (Which means they were put together simply and cheaply and had no covers so all the stuff inside was showing). You had to type in your name. When that was done, you'd find that a little yellow light would light up. We were all supposed to wear this around our necks, because the messages displayed were not for the one wearing the sender/receiver, but for the conversation partner. It would say things like: "Hi Mark, I am Torill. You have more contacts than me. I am a relative introvert (which I stayed all night, despite my efforts). We have 14 contacts in common. The most frequently dropped name is V. (I still wonder who V was.)" If you checked, the meme tags would give you a list of people you had met, let you know how many they were, and display the most frequently dropped names, which meant the names which most of the other tags you were in contact with had also on their lists. The tags were in almost constant communication with each other, and you would be deep in conversation with one person, while the tag captured the names/signals of others passing. by the time I left I had more than 140 contacts on my tag, and I was still a relative introvert.

People developed different strategies. There was even a version of the sneaky ass-pinching, when somebody would sidle up to an unsuspecting victim with the tag in hand, slip it between a couple in deep conversation, and grab - not a feel, but a contact. The most common was to just walk around. Spending some time in line for the food or the drinks worked pretty well too, since that got you into close contact with an ever-changing stream of people.

And no Jill, I didn't get to take the meme tags home with me. They had this BIG black bouncer to make sure nobody would try to make off with the tags. I got his card though, you can have that, and perhaps take him home instead...

Social Network Experiment, with technology and champagne
I have seen the light. I have seen the technology which will save the shy introverts of Norway from themselves. Have you ever been to a party where you're supposed to "mingle" in Norway? If it's a really big party, you'll have a hundred people politely clinging to their drinks, glancing at the others and speaking in low, careful voices to the one or two people they know. This can become a scene of the past.

Eyebeam presented the social network technology that gets you past that embarassing first moment and carries you on to chat as if you have known the other person for ever! which in Norwegian means that you know their name. Getting past the introductions includes having attented the same school for a couple of years back in between the mountains where I grew up...

The lectures were kind of self-evident. Nothing new on what networks are or why they are important. Some funny charts, like the graphic display of the fortune 100 company boards and their interlinking board-members. It also made me think about my social spheres. While I think I belong to more than the standard three: home, work, school I am a far cry from the 35 different social spheres of the really social people. I mean, the REALLY social, those obnoxious people who remember all the names, who always knows someody, and who will remember your birthday and send you cards long after you have lost their address.

The technical thingies were fun though. Typing in the name and getting started was a social event on its own: "now if I do this and push this and try this - will you and I be able to meet? Who's Judy? Did anybody see a Judy? Hmmm, it says I met her, but I have never heard of you. How odd. Is this thing functioning?" At the third attempt I got one that worked. By then the panel was done, Yoko, my japanese nerd friend had arrived, and so had even matthew the broker, who dropped a company excursion to a strip club in order to try his luck on the academic chicks gathering in Chelsea. It was time to mingle.

Now I won't claim that I was uninfluenced by the champagne. But it was an extremely fun evening. The "thingies" would "meet" the signals of the passing persons, and if you saw somebody good looking, it was perfectly legitimate to run after them and check things like "was that your name I just got on this thing here? Did you and I just meet?" After I had been chasing down young handsome men for an hour or so, Yoko found that it was time to reel me in - which made the young handsome men chase us, fantasies of a beautiful delicate-looking Japanese and a butch-looking aggressive Scandinavian making the technology superfluous. But sometime after most other people had left the place Yoko and I found matthew in a group of three admiring intellectual women from different important sounding universities, we grabbed him before he had a chance to give out more cards, and hit the pavement. Around midnight we had untangled ourselves from each other's embraces and found the way home.

Yes, that was excellent social technology, and I am all for more such experiments in the name of science.

Here I am, on a brand new iMac - not quite as fancy as matthew wanted, but really a niiiice toy - with cable connection and all the fun. And it's the 17th of May! Sadly, the parade in Brooklyn isn't until the 19th, so I'll have to find something else to do today. But I am definitely taking a day off, my hands, shoulders and back is screaming for that.

Today the owner of the parrots arrives. That means no more wings fluttering around my ears and feathers landing on my pillow to make my allergies play up - but also no more internet connection for a while. So don't worry - I am doing very well, actually, the weather is agreeing with me, my back and shoulders approve of the weather and me walking around in Brooklyn in between the long bouts of writing, and my host, friend and general make-me-feel-good guy matthew is just busy enough that I feel totally free of social obligations, and I am not nasty to anybody or feeling guilty as I write, write, write.

If everything goes well though, the next time I post I'll do so from a high speed connection and a fancy new iMac at his appartment. We're picking up the computer Wednesday, and the connection will be put in Thursday. Pray to the gods of installations for me, will you?

Sweet praise
Spending most of my time these days doubting every second word I write, reading praise of what I have written is sweet indeed. David Weinberger has read Blogging Thoughts, and he likes it a lot. Writing that article was such fun, such an orgy of academic delight of the rarest kind, coupled with the pleasure of having Jill visiting. And then the double exhibitionism of presenting it as well as performing it with her, our abilities on display, our common pleasures naked before the audience in a swiftly prepared jam-session of our minds. What has happened to me, that my hedonistic self has turned towards the desires of my intellect, my delights as ascetic and my intentions as pure as theory? Perhaps because my pain is intellectual, my needs and my doubts are those of a spirit striving to create, not of a body trying to pro-create…

Not that I would despise more carnal lusts. I’ll just finish these chapters, hmm?

Living in Brooklyn is a strange mixture of small-town America and New York City. If I walk up the wrong avenue - as I did yesterday - it's all well-kept houses with elegant little gardens in front, elderly ladies walking their dogs and kids playing in back-yards and on pavements. The next street is suddenly all businesses - lawyers, doctors, designers in rows of adapted houses turned office buildings. The wide sidewalks are lined with expensive cars, and men with cellphones pace impatiently before the doors. This street carries me into 5th Avenue, and I pass turkish restaurants, greek vegetable-markets, korean fish-markets (finally, that was my goal. It's next to a sushi restaurant - that should be a good sign, right?) and danish bakeries. I have passed the Norge Travel and the Kon-Tiki Travels on my way. Italian restaurants flood the sidewalks with the scent of garlic and freshly baked bread, and elegant french cafe's are trying to distinguish themselves from Dunkin' Doughnuts.

Despite the variety, the pace is slower here than on Manhattan. People have time to say hello, shop-keepers can smile and flirt with their regular customers - and you can become a regular. I am being recognized now - there's the guy who repared my sandal strap while I waited, and the two little korean women who did my nails, they wave when ever I pass the window. And over all of it, there's that aggressive Brooklyn love. Swear-words shooting loudly through the air, like kisses, and being returned in kind.

There's also a definite relationship between how much any species play and the sophistication of its brain. Dinosaurs, for instance, played less than primates. Although no one has as yet advanced a theory that dinosaurs became extinct because they had a terrible sense of humour or a seven-day work-week, the implication is that play may be exceedingly adaptive.

From: Intimate play, page 15

Inspired by Lisbeth, I set out to see who I would be. After all, I'd love to be the queen too... But what do you know? I wasn't even royal:




Which Royalty Are You? Find out! By Nishi.

Watching Parrots
The mornings start with a few deep warbles. I toss and turn in bed, as the sounds and scents of unfamiliarity reach me through my sleep. Soon the warbles change pitch and become eager, insistent squawks. The morning choir of the jungle brings me out of dreams of hunting lionesses oddly reminiscent of my cat, and consciousness hits me a moment after I have put the glasses on and stared about me wildly, trying to figure out where that sound of wings originates. As I see the fine down flutter to the ground, dancing in the aftermath of the storm of wings that just blew by, I remember where I am, just a moment too late as an other low flyby graces my head.

This week I am visiting with two parrots. Don't ask me what kind of parrots, but they are not big, they are green with blue heads, red foreheads and yellow beaks. It's a male and a female, and they are named Merlin and Magic. Merlin is the "good" one. I suspect she's just the more clever one. She watches me with her dark beads of eyes, turning to my voice and going silent in warning when I make some odd noise she hasn't hear before. This happens when I talk to her in Norwegian for instance. She strongly resents being called Pip-Pip, recognizing it for the baby-language it is, and when I tell her how much I care about her opinion on that, she stares at me intently as if she's memorising the sounds in order to look them up in the dictionary the moment I forget to log off the computer and leave her with an internet connection for a few minutes...

Magic is Merlin's mate. He's younger, and according to the owner, a very bad boy. I can understand why she feels so, because he flew up to her and bit her in the face. Now he's punished, and while Merlin flutters by on her green wings, he comes walking along behind, his claws clicking against the floors. Pathetic little bird, used to the freedom of the air, now he walks with his wings clipped. Gracefully he accepts a lift, a human hand rather than a twig, and he rides it to the destination, a cage in the bedroom - or the living-room - depending on where he tries to follow Merlin.

Right now they are both watching me. They are totally silent, staring at the screen. Vain - or suspicious? I guess I should not look up fowl recipes as they are in the room. Perhaps later...

These comic strips are removed regularly, so I have stopped posting them mostly - but this one was just too suitable:

The text is: Just because I have my diary online it doesn't mean I want you to read it! I'll tell on you to Mother!

I am leaving for NYC tomorrow. My belly is all aflutter, I am desperately trying to decide what to bring with me, I am trying to remember whether I asked for paper-tickets or not for the trip Volda-Oslo, I have 15 minutes of afro-american accented compact stream-of-consciousness interview to type before I can copy all the interviews to a CD and pack them, there's this loop churning in the back of my head with which files and book I just can't live without, the lap-top is starting to go to rest at odd intervals, weak with old age and I worry it won't handle the journey, and yes, I have to give up trying to fit it all into the backpack. I can always go shopping in New York, right? Yeah, thought so... I have never been able to buy clothes there! I'll just grab one more piece of luggage,

The worst fear is that when I am there I have no more excuses. I am there to finish. I'll have to do it. And that's the one thing I am really afraid of.

Anyway... if you don't hear from me for a few days, I might be just about anywhere!

Hey, Hilde, I thought you would like to know that our chimney-sweep is a very nice, young blonde. Yes, a she. But I don't have the phone-number for her bath.

That interview started things running about in my head - and the image of the game as narrative environment unfolded before my eyes. The characters would dropped into an environment imagined as a rhizome rather than in the hierarcic structure of plot and underplot, and the tension or exitment of the game is created more through potential than through dramatic structure. "What if" is the important strategy of holding the gamers, playing with curiosity rather than logic or causality.

By way of Lisbeth, the very interesting Small World Project: Smallworld Front Page.

Just typed out a little pearl in one of the interviews:

RM: yes, that's the other way I think you'd do it; where you'd have initial conditions and then drop the characters in there, and if you created the characters well then the characters would have natural tendencies to do certain things or in a certain manner. So in that process the plot would be almost self-creating, or created through the various discourses.

Why am I so happy about this? Because this is the link between writing for games and writing for books: the plot becomes secondary and there's no longer one discourse, but several discourses as the game evolves.

First: some bad news: Norway's the worst country in Scandiavia when it comes to producing doctors (As in Ph. D.s), and there are less women finishing now than three years ago.

Then the good news from the same article: The Norwegian doctorates have a high quality compared with the rest of Scandinavia and also on a wider international scale. Also: I am still below the average age of a finished Ph.D. in Humaniora in Norway.

Ponto media - weblog
According to google, this blog links to mine. Wish I understood a little bit more, and not just tantalising fragments!

warning: Rant
The last two days my mother and her sister have been busy calling me in order to get me to fix my mother's phone. As if I have a magic hotline to the phone-company, or extra-sensory technology repair-powers! (If I did, you bet I wouldn't be an underpaid scholar.)

This is why I am going as far away as possible now that I am starting to really feel the pressure of writing. There's always some similar emergency which I should fix.

Going Postal
Do you remember the Post office killings? Going Postal has become a word for violently expressing frustration. This resulted in among other things, computer games such as Postal and Postal 2. (Voodoo Extreme on Postal 2.)

They call it Spree killings, and it wasn't invented with computer games, although computer games use them. Perhaps these horrors are so frustrating, so alien, so taboo, that we can't discuss and process them in any medium but that of games? They let us handle the blood and gore once removed through labeling it make-belief, and so we can play with it, work through it in a repeated release - almost cathartic in nature? Banning games won't make war, murder and irresponsible car-driving go away. I wish it was that easy.

Damaged game-scholars dinner
Anja; did I mention that I for years lived imaginary lives as first an assassin with poisons as a speciality, and then a courtier whose adversaries tended to go queasy and avoid eating just knowing he might be annoyed with them? And nope, it wasn't caused by his perfume (which was also quite dizzying).

How about dinner sometime?

Anja writes of the other version of death by computer game: when the games make people kill others, not themselves.

The problem is that games more often mimic life, than life mimic games. Shootings in schools is not new - it's not even exclusively an American phenomenon, something we Europeans can feel superior about and claim has to do with the deterioration of European culture by dirty US influence.

We have made schools extremely important institutions in the socialisation of children and youths, and they take over more and more of the responsibilities of families. When we know that statistically most violent crimes are kept in the family, we should not be surprised that the agression also turns against the extended family: the school.

Just spent an hour and a half with a nice journalist from forskning.no. She was nice and very interested, but slightly pessimistic about how much space she might be permitted to use. After all I have no conclusions along the lines of: Games lead to overdeveloped thumbs. That would have been a nice headline. What can I say? "It might lead to a different way of reading." "Perhaps these media can change the way we understand causality." "No, I haven't looked at whether it's dangerous - it's fun and can be good for you." Not exactly fancy headlines.

I think that's why I am here, and not in some newspaper, chasing stories and headlines. I tend to ask: So what - and then try to find out.

I never remembered to ask Jill if the method to avoid jet-lag worked...

Yesterday we bought a saxophone for Erla. It's not new - it's used, a Selmer from 1977, with a rich, full tone, a tall, elegant neck and slender bell - it's lovely. But it needs to be adjusted a little - the A and G don't close properly. For things like this I love living in a small town. Erla's a good musician, and very versatile, playing the clarinet, bass clarinet and tenor saxophone, and so the people who want to maintain bands and ensembles in the area are doing everything to help her develop. The man we asked about the sax not only checked it for us, he also promised to bring it to the best man for adjusting it in Norway, who happens to live in Hamar, six hours driving away - if the weather is good. It's a pretty elaborate set-up in order to get it there and back, and his entire family will be involved - but that's no problem if he can get one more decent musician for his band.

Defining Ludology… Gonzalo asks for definitions, and Jill ponders the term. As I see it (and this is not an authorized definition), ludology has become a label convenient to use when

* There’s a need to point out that games are not narratives/stock-trading/performances
* Somebody needs to distinguish the study of computer games from other computer media
* Apply for money/reject applications for money

Espen is great on claiming that concepts have been take over by other meaning (ex: interaction), but in the case of ludology I don’t think it ever had any specific meaning other than a way to establish “otherness” within certain related disciplines. I think this has to do with the rigidity of for instance literature theory. Media studies have long been picking up the renegades from literature studies, and now ludology is the new refuge for those who find that {add theoretical approach of your choice} doesn’t cover all aspects of written cultural expressions.

Personally I study games, but I am not a ludologist. I am a media scholar, and computer games are yet another medium for me to study. So games and the knowledge of gametheory is important in order to understand this medium, but media science is a hybrid science, a street-mix of the most barbarian kind, which is why I love it. And when I am done with this dissertation I can spend a couple of months reading newspapers and comics, watching television, listen to the radio and going through trashy romances – not to speak of indulging in leafing through advertisements in one glossy magazine after the other – and it’s work. I need to update myself. All that and games too. Yes!

Do you understand Norwegian and care about media ownership? Read this interview Dagbladet has with a colleague and friend of mine, Johann Roppen.

Scott Adams: Storytelling in Computer Games -- Past, Present, and Future
Videogames in Education - neat-looking site!

found here - an interesting list of links apparently collected by a group of people in order to share among themselves.

An other case of game causes death, in this case it's EverQuest which is blamed for the suicide of a young man.

On Thanksgiving morning last year, Shawn Woolley shot himself to death at his apartment in Hudson. His mother blames the game for her son's suicide. She is angry that Sony Online Entertainment, which owns EverQuest, won't give her the answers she desires. She has hired an attorney who plans to sue the company in an effort to get warning labels put on the games.

Shawn Woolley obviously had more problems than those he might have encountered in the game:

Woolley knows her son had problems beyond EverQuest, and she tried to get him help by contacting a mental health program and trying to get him to live in a group home. A psychologist diagnosed him with depression and schizoid personality disorder, symptoms of which include a lack of desire for social relationships, little or no sex drive and a limited range of emotions in social settings.

This is a case of mistaking the cause and the effect. Yes, games are very attractive to people with these kinds of disorders:

Jay Parker, a chemical dependency counselor and co-founder of Internet/Computer Addiction Services in Redmond, Wash., said Woolley's mental health problems put him in a category of people more likely to be at risk of getting addicted to online games.

Parker said people who are isolated, prone to boredom, lonely or sexually anorexic are much more susceptible to becoming addicted to online games. Having low self-esteem or poor body image are also important factors, he said.

I would like to point out that computer games might be viewed in a very different light. While games can become a substitute for a flesh world social life, for people who play obsessively it's normally not a matter of substituting a functioning social life with a game social life. It's more a matter of finding an arena where it's possible to interact with other human beings. I agree that it would have been better for Shawn Woolley to go out and meet people. But his mental disorder killed him. He happened to play a game when it happened.

His mother though... she should have been protected against herself when facing the papers. Her reaction is classic: Psychotic with grief she has to blame somebody, and she chooses to blame Sony Online. I am very pleased with their reaction to her attempt at trying to learn the identity of the people he played with online:

Woolley has tried tracing her son's EverQuest identity to discover what might have pushed him over the edge. Sony Online cites its privacy policy in refusing to unlock the secrets held in her son's account.

She has a list of names her son scrawled while playing the game: "Phargun." "Occuler." "Cybernine." But Woolley is not sure if they are names of online friends, places he explored in the game or treasures his character may have captured in quests.

Knowing the patterns of grief, if she found his fellow players she would most likely take her pain out on them, placing the blame of her son's death everywhere but at his combination of epiletics, depression and schizophrenia... since these problems implie that she might have done more, made sure he got help, made sure he got treatment. But the article doesn't tell us anything about other factors that could have put Shawn on the spot which made him kill himself.

by way of Warwolf.com

Other links concerning this:
www.wired.com
Ms Wooley keeps telephoning his internet friends, who hang up on her
Suicide Mom Sue Sony

I went back to the ocean today - a post at a blog perhaps named OnePotMeal. It was such a lovely post - and then I discovered that it was about Long Island! In just little more than a week I can start bothering my NYC-connection to take me to see his home ground. It's May, I am staying for a full month... no excuses this time, matthew!