Virtual Walking

The title is flashy: Paralysed man walks in Second Life, but the reality is much better: they have found an interface from the brain to computers, which lets the paralysed person control computer programs. In this case it's let the person control the motion of an avatar in SL.

This is a wonderful story, and looks much more uplifting than Monkey brain controls robot arm, which is, pretty much, the same story only with slightly different technology. Also the monkeys are a bit more sophisticated, while it's cool to be able to control an SL avatar, tre dimentional movement which can result in being able to feed yourself and not dependendt on being fed is pretty impressive.

It all reminds me of the email I got, almost two years ago, from a woman who had spent the last 12 years of her life in a wheelchair. She had forgotten, even in her dreams, what it was like to move around. World of Warcraft had her jumping and dancing in her dreams again.

Computers can give us back the feeling of freedom and control which circumstances makes us lose - not just because we think we are free and in control, but because we are. The woman who wrote me could, through WoW, play games, crack jokes and have fun with her children, who were hundreds of kilometers away. For her to go and actually do that in the physical world would have been a huge effort.

Computers, even computer games and virtual worlds, do real things, because they are real communication devices. So, some of the communication is a bit more elaborate than other modes, but hey, it's shared experiences!

Final touches 1

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

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

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

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

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

Articles this year, so far so good

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



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

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

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

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

Living in Hyboria

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

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

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

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

Understanding Games

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

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

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

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

Gamers and researchers

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

Investigaming

A nice resource for games and gender has been put together at "Investigaming".

Carrie Heeter Project Leader and Editor in Chief
Brian Winn co-PI
Serious Games Initiative
Games, Entertainment and Learning (GEL) Lab
Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Michigan State University

It holds links and references to a lot of articles on games and gender, and is an invaluable resource to help old, failing game scholars such as myself. If you're one too, there's help to be had!

Some numbers - any good?

At random intervals I sit down and look around for good sources of numbers of players for digital games. They are hard to find, but ESA have some numbers which give a hint at a direction as long as we remember that their main interest is to promote the video game business.

Some interesting statements from their 2007 research:

Heads of Households – Sixty-seven percent of heads of households play computer and video games.

Women – Forty percent of all players are women and women over 18 years of age are one of the industry's fastest growing demographics. Today, adult women represent a greater portion of the game-playing population (33 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent).

Seniors – Twenty-six percent of game players are over the age of 50, an increase from nine percent in 1999. This figure is sure to rise in coming years with nursing homes and senior centers across the nation now incorporating video games into their activities.

Parents – More than a third (35 percent) of parents play computer and video games and 93 percent of these parents have children who also play them. Sixty-three percent of parents with children under the age of 18 consider computer and video games a positive addition to their children's lives.

Of course, as Luca points out, women 18 and up is a much larger group in general than boys 4-17. This means it should be no surprise that there are more adult women playing video games than there are young boys. It still marks a change though, as the market was, only a few years ago, dominated by young males.

Researching Age of Conan

Are you a researcher and planning to play Age of Conan? There are a few of us who are planning to look in on that game over the summer. For Norwegians it's almost obligatory, after all. Nobody have made any decisions yet about server, method of organisation or anything else, but it can be a good idea to know some other n00bs when we start playing. Friends are the best buff, after all.

So, if you do game research and plan to play AoC on a European server, feel free to get in touch and I'll see about spreading the word once we have our games.

Outside?

A new MMORPG reported. Careful though, it's expensive and very addicting, and has the potential of seriously disrupting your relationships and upsetting your entire friends list.

Too cool for my shopping bags!

After a lecture in Copenhagen, a long and exhausting trip to NY, an online conference in the US WoW, several slightly delayed reviews which are now done only a little late and a long student paper by a luckily very thorough student (luckily because thorough means lots of reading, but it is worth it) I came to a grinding halt yesterday. So time to go do something wonderfully decadent, and I did it in one of my favourite places for decadence, a tex-mex restaurant right at the Hudson River.

It's a unique location for a New York restaurant, it has large and comfortable outdoor seating, very little traffic noise, a view of the water and a large part of the outdoor tables set under a little grove of trees, offering shade in the summer, the water supplying a cooling breeze. Right in front is the Hudson River Sailing School harbour, so sitting there, nursing your tequila of choice, you get to watch the boats and oogle the beautiful people walking, running and scating by on their way down Battery Park - one of the prettiest and best maintained parks in New York.

So, that's me up there, enjoying all these things and a drink, too. Life can be pretty good!

Oh yeah, the shopping bags! Well, new shower curtains and a cheap coup at J&R don't go with all the über coolness, so they had to be hidden well away for the picture!

Invisibility

Sometimes I have to go take a look in the mirror to see if I am still there. Then I have to go to the bookshelf to see if the books of my friends and wonderful co-game researchers are there too. Check if the Ph D's people were working on are finished. See if the conferences are still being organised. Just generally have a look around and check if my reality is still there.

Today was such a moment. According to Roger Travis a huge and important chunk of game studies does not exist. Or worse - we are some struggling souls fighting under the tyrrany of such evil gamer-hating monsters as Aarseth, Juul and Murray.

On my way around, checking, I am reassured of a few facts. I have studied gamers and gamers culture since the last milennium, long before gamestudies.org was established, before Espen published Cybertext, sufficiently early that finding Hamlet on the Holodeck was a relief, although I didn't agree with all in it. Two of the gamers I interviewed and was in contact with in that first major interview round have since had a chance to take their own Ph D's on games, one working as a researcher with a major game design company, the other as a designer and researcher on educational games. I have since argued for the gamers, against the formation of an exclusive discipline and in general for an increased respect for the intelligence of the users constantly for years. Not that I think my voice is that important, but, you know, I have not been doing it alone. I have had company in this argument since day one.

But I guess that's not good enough - you see, the people I am referring too publish in journals, talk in conferences and write books, and are very rarely to be seen in American news media. And that is, obviously, where a game scholar should be represented for somebody studying games to read their work.

Oh well. To be honest, I am in this not for the fame, but for the pleasure of pursuing good questions and sharing what I learn. Which I have been doing for a while now, with the generous and continous assistance of the gamers I study among.

Oh, and look, Travis has been blogging about games since April 2008. How sweet :)

Text based FPS

And, on the topic of geekiness: Text based first person shooter!

White people like to publish

I guess it was inevitable. "Stuff White People Like" was a great and extremely funny blog when I found it the first time. Since then it's become selfabsorbed and self-promotory - typical white blog reactions to success I guess. And now it turns into a book.

The blog and the author was interviewed on Racialicious, and he appears very likeable, and yes, he agrees, the blog pokes fun of himself more than of anybody else.

But the whitest thing of all is to laugh at yourself and your friends, relatives and neighbours in public and get paid handsomely for it - or at least get published.

Sorry, crystal ball is DCed

Today's session in the virtual-and-real conference was specifically not moderated, and all the questions were geared towards predictions. I repeat them here for illustration purposes:

1. Given that computer technology and Internet have stabilized, are current virtual worlds a technological dead end?

2. Other than WoW's are there really any long-term viable business models for virtual worlds?

3. Would standardization of software-data platforms be revolutionary, permitting migration across many worlds?

4. Could virtual worlds become living memorials for deceased persons, housing AI avatars of them?

5. Will virtual worlds create social and cultural alternatives that then thrive in the "real world?"

6. Which online games will become permanent features of human culture, like chess and Monopoly?

7. Will some virtual worlds declare political independence, like geographically based nations?

8. What as-yet unrecognized social functions could virtual worlds serve?

9. Could augmented reality (e.g. pervasive LARPs) be the next revolution, virtual and real world combined?

10. What will persist into the future from today's virtual worlds? Will they have a history?

The responses were, as I could have predicted without a crystal ball, all over the place. If not at least 20 guesses were right, I'll be very disappointed. But that's how a decent sooth-sayer works - make so many guesses there has to be a hit, then say: "That's exactly what I said!"

Personally, I just kept quiet, so all I can say in 10-15 years is: "Didn't I hear about this before?"

As a team building experience, this conference was interesting, it brought together a lot of people from all over the US, and some from beyond. As scholarship? Well, let's say: I know in which context I can use this experience :)

WoW! Researchers meeting there?

Who'd have thought...

Well, I have to admit, The Truants never had 100 people online for a guild meeting, but Science has it, for the Convergence of the Virtual and the Real conference. I am struggling to stay unlagged from the jet lag, reading a hyperspammed guild chat, and keeping myself from getting too sarcastic about cliche questions. The panelists are struggling heroically to deliver good and thoughtful responses though, and the audience is incredibly well-behaved.

So, is it a good forum for a conference? Not really, typing is too slow and topics are zooming past like arrows from a well-geared hunter. Is it a fun event that people will notice, remember, refer to and talk about? Absolutely. In a few years it's going to be one of those "remember when we tried that..." things, as we giggle and ease ourselves into the professionally developed seemless virtual conference software.

The King's City

For four hundred years "The King's City" for Norwegians wasn't Oslo, but Copenhagen. This is where Norwegians went for education, for a chance to gain a public service position, to practice the arts and develop as craftsmen and artists, this is where licences were written out - for Norwegian newspapers and just about everything else. This is also where the decision was made to sell off significant pieces of Norwegian land, to persecute Norwegian witches (the last one was burned in 1695, and most of the Norwegian witches were among the sami - here a lot of men were burned as witches as well), and to drag Norway into the war that got us handed over to the Swedes.

Still, with all it's conflicting history in the interwoven past of the Scandinavian countries, Copenhagen is my favourite Scandinavian city. I love the busy streets, a mixture of new, old and in-between, the bicycle lanes with their little special lights for bicyclists and the many, many different bikes. The Copenhagen idea of a family car seems to be a transport bike - a bike with a solid load space in front, frequently loaded with a woman and/or a kid, propelled by a grinning man taking his family to scool and work and getting a good workout too. I love the stores, as big and fancy as in much larger cities, and stuffed with Danish designer goodies: Clothing made for Scandinavian sized women and northern climate and northern tastes.

And now I am stuck in the hotel room, telling myself I have to finish preparing for tomorrow, when what I want to do is to go out into the warm sunny day, find a cool soda and a spot in a park and watch Copenhagen bike past me. This had better get good!

Time, space and value

Some years ago I read an article discussing the real values in modern society. Property and objects were losing their meaning, security, time and space were becoming the only real values.

This was such an interesting thought that I have been thinking about it ever since, when faced with displays of status-carrying objects, as it indicates that the concept of value is shifting. For a researcher playing around with non-physical objects and digital spaces, this idea of shifting values is interesting and captivating.

So now I am looking around, searching the net, searching books, trying to understand...

"Let's fix this"

Going to Sweden for a year, I expected cultural differences, subtle, but I was certain they would be there. It was just a matter of recognizing them. But even so I wasn't always prepared. It wasn't in me to lean back, look detached at every instance and say "Oh, interesting, so this is how Swedes deal with this." I just got unhappy and angry, reacting like what I was: A foreign worker, "fremmedarbeider", feeling insulted by what I encountered.

It took half a year and some intense reading of the local newspaper to realise that what I faced wasn't a personal affront, but a cultural difference.

Sweden is a throughly regulated country. So is Norway, so what's new, hmm? The point is - Sweden is even more so, and they take a lot more pride in their organisation and their ability to make and follow their sensible rules. There are signs everywhere, reminding all of how to organise life simpler and better for all - bikes to the left, walking to the right, don't park your bike here, smoke over there, don't walk in the ski-tracks and don't run against the common direction. Being a good little Norwegian who understands that rules are there to make life easier for all, I didn't get annoyed by their existence. What got me was when the regulations started to make things really difficult. When the nurses didn't want to let me get in line for a doctor's appointment because I had a different kind of personal number - a temporary number and not a permanent one - when I couldn't get my computer hooked up to the printer because I had no precise affiliation at the University - when I couldn't pay my rent automatically because I couldn't get the right kind of account, because I didn't...

Not that I am a stranger to bureaucracy. Far from it, Norway has its part of it, and I am kicking angrily at quite a few regulations which are going to make me hurt when I come home after this. What I am a stranger to is how I get received when I try to understand it. Even so, it took a Swede to help me understand what troubled me.

In one of the local newspapers, they had a series of interviews with local people who chose to work in Norway for a while. At the moment Swedes are in the position Norwegians were in some years ago: It's economically a good deal to work in the neighbouring country for a while. The Scandinavian countries have always had this kind of common movable workforce - I come from a long line of migrating workers. But back to the interviews. There were the normal issues - Norwegians were like this, Norwegians were like that, and yes, I could see how that would be annoying to somebody who didn't grow up in Norway and Norway really isn't perfect. And then it hit me, the comment that made me understand that what I was facing was a cultural trait, not something that happened to me, personally. "I had this problem with my identity, so I couldn't get paid, but they said 'we'll fix that.' And so it all worked out, Norwegians are good at that."

I realised, suddenly, that what I had been missing was somebody saying "we'll fix that." Or perhaps "let's see what we can do" or "call me in 10 minutes and I'll get back to you on how to deal with this". Now this may sound like common politeness, but no, it doesn't mean that Swedes are rude or unfriendly, because they are in general a lot more polite, correct and friendly than Norwegians. We are a grumpy and far too direct bunch. It's more a matter of individual expectations of agency. Norwegians believe that they can fix something if they just figure out how things connect. Swedes believe that things can be fixed by following the correct steps.

It doesn't mean that things can always be fixed by some friendly person who knows how to manipulate the rules. Sometimes you get back 10 minutes later and what you get told is "sorry, but you really need to get A, B and C first". I find that what I miss is the belief that it's possible to do something, to be sourrounded by people who expect to be able to negotiate with their environment. Or perhaps I am just homesick.

Tweet, tweet

I am far behind the curve, and slacking, obviously... Still, I am starting to see how it can be fun. What am I up to? Twittering, of course, the not-so-new craze of long-distance gossiping.

With my back protesting any posts that take more than 5 minutes, Twitter is perfect: I get 140 keystrokes to play with, to let the world know what I do, and I don't have to sit around reading long blogposts. Restrictions give freedom, and all that.

But already I am starting to wonder if there are "Twitter stories" out there, like the-phone-book, where all stories had to fit the sms format.

If there are none, we could make them. Collaborative twitter collections, each message an individual story, but each story connected to what happened before, somehow.

Stones and art

Those of you who read Norwegian, here's news about one of my talented sisters. Solfrid Olette Mortensen is an artist who started out working in textiles, but now weaves her patterns with whatever comes to hand. Currently one of her projects is being realised in stone, as she has drawn the pattern for the pavement in Farsund.

Next time you are out walking, look down, not up, and enjoy the mosaics upon which you walk. One of them is drawn by my sister.

The day I got Second Life spam

It had to happen, of course. It was cleverly camouflaged as an offer to publish an article on Second Life, but it was not addressed to any journal, it was addressed to a sender. But because of past involvement with journals, I opened it.

What was in there was plainly an attempt to sell the business idea of Second Life:

Edm AB--- Greetings fellow Earth dwellers... My name is Anand Goberdhan and I’m here to share with you the possibilities that are available

Within the metaverse called secondlife. Http//www.secondlife.com is where you can find the system requirements and software to interact with the world... system specs aren’t really that out of the ordinary! I am running a pc that is two yrs old...half of its ram has went dead...and the video card i use was merely 80 dollars Canadian (a year ago to boot). It seems that a lot of people joined the revolution...shortly after a name I’m surprised i remember..a lady by the name of Anshe Chung officially became a millionaire off of a ten dollar investment in the metaverse.

I actually spoke with a woman who says she knew her... and she was a VERY GOOD BUSINESS WOMAN. I guess you could call her the Michael Jordan of the metaverse. As it stands she is officially the first online game PLAYER to ever earn a million online. I know, you’re wondering ‘why is he telling me this?,’ and the answer is very simple...

The first game player to make a million dollars MADE IT OFF SECONDLIFE. She accomplished this 2 yrs ago...they must have signed up 15 million new people since then. But (and i kid you not) this world is an entrepreneurs PARADISE. You can...run 50 shops... and have the money split up equally between multiple partners...

I am sure that Linden Labs will claim to have nothing to do with this spam, and say it's some over-eager entrepeneur who wants to draw more people into their game and business. To me, it looks like a classic pyramide scam. Linden Labs may not have anything to do with it, but operators within SL are certainly not strangers to the fact that money can be made of selling the hope of more money.

It is a quite interesting little example of how the patterns of the flesh world repeats themselves in the digital world, and when we start talking about virtual worlds, scammers definitely belong. This is their arena after all, the dreams, the unreal, the potential and the possibly possible - that is what they sell to us, their tricks, and where better to do so than in an arena of possibilities?

Don't you hate epiphanies?

Sometimes, as my sister says, "the coin falls down." You know the feeling, it's when you get the joke and you see how something works. But that's where the image ends, because you can't really talk about coins falling slowly or coins falling quickly - gravity is gravity and me being slow to realise something does not keep a coin suspended in free fall for ever.

Sometimes though, the image of coins falling is spot on, and today the coins were falling too many at the time. It was like I pulled a handle and they all came rushing - sadly not to stream into my hands and leave me rich and happy, but to cram themselves into the same little slot before I had a chance to appreciate any of them.

I had an epiphany. I have started to hate those, but it's how my research brain works. I sit around, looking at a stack of books, then I read them, randomly, looking for - something - then I write a little something totally unrelated, and I play a game and I surf online and I get involved with finding a pair of purple pants for my rogue (she really needs a pair of pretty epics, you know), and then I go listen to some lectures and before I know it time is running out. Do you think that's the stressfull part? Nooo, the stressfull part is what comes next. Because I start doing all kinds of stuff so I won't feel I have wasted my time, taking on work and booking trips and such, and THAT is when all the coins drop at the same time. Suddenly I see what I am looking for, and it's right in front of my eyes and I have to write it down NOW, but I have said yes to so many other things and I can't...

I hate it. But I live for it. Ambivalence and contradition. They feed me.

The Cute Cat Theory

Finally, somebody has taken the time to show in a systematic fashion why having tools available can be a way to support democracy, even if the tools in question most of the time is used to show pictures of cute cats. The Cute Cat Theory (thank you Fabio for mentioning it) by Ethan Zuckerman shows that if people are able to post pictures of their cute cats online, they can also post pictures of crimes against humanity and political unrest and activism.

Baghdad Girl's blog is a good example of that, most of her posts are about cute cats. But in the last post on her blog so far, written 27th of August 2007, she writes:

My memories are fading away...
"I wish there is some thing I can do". This sentence I have been repeating a lot these days. Every time I ask about the situation in Iraq I become angry and sad because there is nothing I can do. I wish some one can tell me what can I do to save what is left in Iraq.

I have left my house, my room and my cats that I know nothing about any more. When we left we didn't take every thing in the house with us because it is impossible, that house and every thing in it is a treasure, It was built 35 years ago, and now It is going to be looted just because it is empty and there is no one to protect it.

Some members of what is known as national guards are checking every house in Hay Al-Jamia, where my house is, these days. Do you know what will they do if they find an empty one?? They close the roads leading to it, bring a lorry and loot every thing in that house. That is what about to happen to my house and it's 35 years of memories.This is the army that the American government and the Iraqi government are helping to build, they brought every criminal, thief, and looser gave him a gun and send him to the streets, the new army together with the armed militias with the help of Iran, are destroying the country.

If the people who suppose to protect the country, are the ones who are destroying it. What future does Iraq still have???

Raghda

She has been giving her readers a little glimpse of the life of a girl and a young woman growing up in a Baghdad in war, exams, scores, cats and all, and then the story ends with flight, loss and looting. Personally, I think the stury of Baghdad Girl is as important as any documentary of warzones. And her cats are really, really cute.

Henry Jenkins on why academics should blog

It only took him 6 years to come to that conclusion.

Women in Games 2008

Just putting it here, so I know where to find it, and you can find it too!

Women in Games is a very good series of conferences discussing exactly that - Women in Games, in research, in the industry, in the games themselves. This year it is at the University of Warwick; September 10th - 12th 2008.

Worlds apart

I have recently been reading two books which have made an impression on me - for wildly different reasons. One is a Swedish book on their recent debate around pornography and prostitution, Petra Östergren's Porr, Horor och Feminister, the other is Edward Castronova's Exodus to the Virtual World.

Reading these books simultaneously has been a truly weird experience. I came a little late to Östergren's book, as it is written mainly for the Swedish debate. It is a highly political book where Östergren reports her own research on pornography and prostitution, how this has been received by feminist activists in Sweden, and how pornography and prostitution is discussed in the Swedish public sphere. It is fascinating reading, not the least because of the feeling that Östergren is fighting what she sincerely believes to be the good fight: she has come around from being highly suspicious of the sex industry to becoming equally suspicious of the public image being painted of this industry. She introduces us to the results of her own research; hundreds of hours watching porn of all types, years of contacting, getting to know and interviewing prostitutes.

Östergren's conclusion is clear all the way through the book. She is very much against the recent law which made prostitution illegal in Sweden, and she shows how the process towards having this law accepted has totally ignored any sceptical voices among the sex-workers. The only permitted "voice" has been that of the generic tired, worn-down prostitute saying "yes, what I do is horrible and should be outlawed." She demonstrates how this is an example of hegemonic violence, and writes with a passion on behalf of the women she has learned to know in the course of her research. It is a emotionally raw piece of writing, which still manages to stay within the world of documented facts. Yes, she excludes the traditional image of the abused whore from the book, her examples are the ones who deal well with their jobs. But she is honest about that, and she is also right: that story has been told, and it's been told frequently.

It is a fascinating book both for the alternative take on a familiar topic, but also for the clear and elegant argument all the way through. She fights for a better world, and she uses her skill and her knowledge to do so, honestly and in a well-researched manner.

This has been my breakfast treat this week, before I have immersed myself again in game writing. Parts of the time focusing on games has been spent going through Castronova's more recent book. Being another political document throwing an alternative view out there, it is comparable to the Östergren book in the passionate and highly alternative views it presents. The similarities end there.

I have to admit I hope Exodus to the Virtual World is an ironic statement about the state of games scholarship, development and commercialism, and that I am just not getting the joke. Alternatively that he did it for the money, in which case he succeeded, I did buy the book after all. To accept that a scholar who is otherwise so sane and clear in his arguments in the field where he knows what he is doing has suddenly decided to write this book and means it seriously, is really a far stretch. Yes, we can all write not-so-good books, but this is a political statement promoting such a totalitarian system in the name of "fun", that it goes from being not-so-brilliant to being scary. It actually made me reconsider the dangers of studying games.

Östergren writes about how the Swedish critics of films are only allowed to work with pornography for a limited time, because after that they are supposedly emotionally stunted, and blind to what might offend others. Exodus to the Virtual World made me wonder if there should be a similar rule for game research: That after 5 years with games we have to work with something else, say - news reporting from Palestine or the economy of alternative energy - for two years before touching game studies again.

This doesn't keep me from taking advantage of the book though. There are enough clichés used that it's turning out to be very useful when refering to common misconceptions. I guess this shows that I am just becoming an emotionally stunted game scholar.

Post games symposium

There were a lot of thank-you's said during the Umeå 2008 game symposium. First, HUMlab for hosting it and the department of culture and media and the faculty of arts at Umeå University for funding towards it. Then to the HUMlab staff who are really exeptional in their friendly approach to everything from PR to remembering the last practical details and making sure people find their way.

But most of all the participants should thank each other. Each presentation was somehow unique, and contributed to an increase in common knowledge. Each discussion was different, and as it went on we still started to see a net of interconnections, from the first lecture to the last workshop. If I was to have wished for anything, it would be that we could have had an even broader scope, because after three days together we had all learned a lot about the usefullness of a lot more than our own approach to knowledge and understanding.

Perhaps Mia Consalvo summed up the most important aspect of the symposium though, over dinner when all had gone home. "I have been writing about this stuff," she said, thoughtfully, "all alone and isolated among the faculty where I work. Then I come here and I find that this is what is being discussed. I am not crazy! I am not alone!"

No, we weren't alone. Not during the lectures, not at the meals, not in the cabin with the booze and the one shower (sharing one shower with 13 other people really drives it home that you are not alone), and particularly not while chasing each other around in the lazer-tag zone. The silence as all left was overwhelming, and Umeå feels even more quiet than before, despite all the left-over bottles collected after to be stored in my kitchen cabinet. Or perhaps because of it.

But you all came here and made it special. Thank you.

Tomorrow: Humans, Culture, Games

After 10 days of culture bootcamp, activities ranging from lecturing at a University that dates back to 1506, to searching for traces of Etruscan culture while riding escalators, I am back in Umeå, getting ready for tomorrows great symposium.

I have to admit though, that if I had been able to put some more cruel pressure on Luca Rossi in Urbino, to make him organise this instead of me, we would have met here:

To the people who still make the way into the clutches of winter way up north: I really hope I manage to make it worth it!

Italy!

Tomorrow I am out of here! Not that Umeå is bad, I am just so delighted to be able to go south towards spring when the thaw just ended and it started snowing again here. Snow, pines and rural charms are fine, but it's about time to have a cappucino and wear something other than hiking boots.

I am off to Urbino, where I'll be giving a lecture Tuesday. My friend and fellow Truant Luca Rossi has invited me to give a lecture to his students. The topic is "The story and research of digital games", and I'll give a quick little game history, talk about the development of games, give a little analysis example (nintendo DS anyone? If you have it or can borrow it, check out the old, but nice game "Project Rub".) and discuss the social and cultural uses of games. Bit topic I can talk for a few days about, I'll try to do the highlights tour.

Afterwards I'll be touring Umbria, and expect to eat myself sick sometime during easter, before I return to Umeå. The return will be packed with anticipation though, as I am returning to the game symposium in Umeå!

Stortingsmelding nr 14, 2007-2008

For those of you who read Norwegian, there is now a Stortingsmelding - which I don't know the word for in English, but it is a report financed by and delivered to the parliament - on computer games submitted in Norway. It was finished and published March 7th. The rest of this post concerns itself with what looks like it's my presentation of Norwegian games research. That's why I will continue in Norwegian.

Jeg gjorde noe av mitt materiale tilgjengelig for forfatteren av stortingsmeldingen, for å gjøre det enklere for ham å forstå mangfoldet i spillforskningen og finne fram til andre forskere i Norge som driver med spillforskning. Resultatet av dette finnes i dette avsnittet:

Siden 2000 har dataspill som forskningsfelt eksplodert. Den norske spillforskeren Torill Mortensen peker på at det i dag blir forsket på dataspill innenfor jus, filosofi, litteratur, kunst, medievitenskap, pedagogikk og psykologi – i tillegg til den teknologisk rettede forskningen. Det arrangeres konferanser med dataspill som hovedtema over hele verden, og det publiseres flere og flere bøker om temaet.

Resten av denne delen av stortingsmeldingen gir et overblikk over deler av norsk spillforskning. Flere av de norske forskerne jeg nevner i mitt materiale er ikke tatt med i dette, og hadde jeg hatt noen innflytelse på innholdet hadde vekten på kulturstudier og mediestudier vært mye tyngre, og den tekniske forskningen tonet ned. Men det er interessant å se hva som blir lagt vekt på, hva som blir nevnt og hva som blir utelatt, i et slikt dokument. Dette blir tross alt et viktig arbeidsdokument for oss i framtiden.

Fashion and games

Randomly clicking through image series in the online version of the Norwegian paper Dagbladet, I found some interesting images that indicate that even fashion designers may be playing WoW.


Look at those shoulders! Those have to be at least a rare drop, if not an epix. And that mask is something any undead could wear with pride. More epic fashion drops here.

CyberPsychology

It sounds a little omnious, but no worries, it is just a rather interesting addition to the study of what happens online. Journal of CyberPsychology & Behaviour contains studies of what people do online, and represent a much needed forum for psychological studies of people in digital worlds. In volume 11, number 1, we find the article Gender Swapping and Socializing in Cyberspace: An Exploratory Study by Zaheer Hussain, Mark D. Griffiths, which gives us the not-so-surprisign news that 54 % of the men in MMO's play female characters, while 70% of the females play male. So the chance that the cute female bloodelf in your group is played by a girl is very, very small.

The end of a long distance affair

For those who know me, the love-affair I have with Amazon is nothing new. I go to their website from the comfort of my own computer, they let me pick and choose from a huge selection of books that all exite me, and then I get the books home to enjoy, to keep, to have as mine. It's been true love, for years.

Until, suddenly.

Last week I was waiting, exited, for the next shipment. I have ordered a stack of books I really looked forwards to reading, and so I was checking the mailbox every day for the box with the familiar "amazon" print. What I found was a note, saying they had tried to deliver, but couldn't. Hmmm.

OK, there was an address and a phone number to where the package was, so Saturday morning I checked online. The address is several miles away, in an area I can't get to by bus. The snow is deep here, and I am not really all that fit, so trecking through it on foot would take the better part of the morning. But, well, it was Saturday, I had the time. I called the number though, to be sure. No answer. They were closed Saturdays.

There was a nice little message on the note, saying that I could call their number, and have the package delivered, at my own cost. I looked at the distance, and it would be something between 50 and 100 SEK by taxi. I really want those books, so I called to arrange for them to deliver. Now the phone number didn't go to the delivery place, so I had to make another call, which I managed, I am not that helpless... I did however get a little bothered when I heard their price for delivery. 350 SEK to deliver a little box of books, from a distance away that's about 6 minutes by car.

So now I have a few options, all bad.

I can walk over; I'll spend 2-3 hours on the trip and I'll make my back problems worse.
I can take a taxi, and spend 100-200 SEK to get a box of books worth about 300 SEK.
I can ask them to deliver it, and pay 350 SEK delivery for a box for which I have already paid for delivery.
I can return a stack of books I need to Amazon.

I did write Amazon about this, pointing out that this new delivery policy doesn't really work. There are several other delivery spots much closer, the post office is not that far away, sometimes I get packages at the local gas station. They had picked the absolutely worst delivery option for me with their change in delivery policies. They are refunding 8 £ from the shipping costs. It is something, but it doesn't really do it for me in the future.

This may be the end of a long and loving affair. Oh, cruel Amazon, so many years, and you throw it all away for what you think is a more convenient shipping option?

Games research in Umeå, March 2008

So it's public, the thing I have been working on the last couple of months. I have been fretting myself into exhaustion many a day over a game research symposium to be held in Umeå 26th - 28th of March. Who would have thought that something which needed so little work on the content side would need so much work on the logistics side? The contributors to the symposium have been working with me all the way, and in March we'll all hang out down in HUMlab for three days. I can't wait, I want it to happen NOW.

And if you are in Umeå or anywhere close in that period: there are lectures open to the public, seminars/discussion groups open to researchers with an interest in games research, and workshops open to the first 18 who sign up (staff at UmU get a head start).

See you all here!

Stuff white people like

One thing white people like is to read about what white people are like. So if you are white and want to learn more about your ethnicity, or if you are curious about what white people like, check out Stuff White People Like, and remember, when you see a white person riding to work on a bike, congratulate them on saving the earth.

Alive!

Winters have always made me feel like a bear. I become sleepy, lazy, and really grumpy when disturbed. Why am I surprised that I feel even more so when the winter is darker, colder and longer than I am used to?

Umeå had some almost familiar weather for a while, with snow, ice, sleet, rain, snow in what seemed like an endless circle. The last month has however been stable, and the layer of ice on the pavement is a dark grey from dirt and rubble. In the forest the snow is still white, but it's frozen hard from being slightly warmed during the day, then frozen solid in the night.

But now I am waking up, starting to get work done, and feeling happy about all my little plans.

First: March 4th, I am giving a lecture in Hamar, Norway, where they have a little game education. I got to put together 4 hours doing favourite stuff with a small handful of gamers. I have to admit Hamar isn't my idea of a glamorous place to go, but hey, I am spending the winter in Umeå! And I get to do nice things together with interested people, that's enough to go anywhere.

Second: March 18th, I am giving a lecture in Urbino, Italy! And I managed for once to convince my husband he should come with me! So I get to travel, talk about some of my favourite things in the world, meet Luca Rossi, who is a really wonderful person to hang out with, and I will do this in the company of the man who has had the patience to deal with me for 26 years.

Third (big deal coming up): March 26th - 28th, at Umeå University: Humans, culture and computer games; Exploring how people use and live with their chosen online activities, a symposium organised by me and a wonderful group of games researchers, financed by Umeå University and the enthusiasm of the participants. Program is very, very close to being done and ready for publishing, link will come as soon as possible.

Fourth: I'll be in Copenhagen 8th of May, giving a lecture. Just the thought of that makes me smile, Copenhagen is my favourite Scandinavian city (and it beats quite a few other cities too), and I get to visit ITU, where I have so many wonderful colleagues and friends.

And after that I just have to cross my fingers and hope I get to present papers at the Player conference in Copenhagen, and then the AOIR conference also in Copenhagen. What can I say? It's a great city.

Livingstone and Jenkins

Sonia Livingstone is a quite well-published, and in media studies, well known researcher on media, audiences, youth and the use of new technology. Some of her more current work engages the concepts audience and public, and go through a wide range of discussions around these ideas and how the development of new media influence them. She approaches this from an angle of European media studies, something which is aquiring if not the status of a different discipline, then definitely a distinctive flavour of debate, discussion and the probing of concepts, ideas and theories which is different from the more sample-directed American version.

Reading Livingstone next to Henry Jenkins' work carries with it a sense of this distinction. Where Jenkins delivers interesting and knowledgeable examples of how new media changes certain interactions between users and the traditional senders, Livingstone chases down the meaning of the changes in a theoretical as well as a socialogical context. This makes reading them in combination interesting, thought-provoking and oddly satisfying, as both hint at lacks and weaknesses with the work of the others, as well as filling out and confirming other parts.

So, let this be the cocktail of the week, a tall glass of Livingstone with a dash of Jenkins, served warm and comfortable and sipped in the presence of an active, connected lap-top, for referencing and curious checks on described phenomena.

I am so booooored...

For some reason, I am never bored for a very long time. Even in situations where there is otherwise no stimulation, in waiting rooms, on public transport, I don't get bored. There's too much going on in my head for that - OK, some of it may freak me out, and I may become stressed, unhappy or depressed if I end up on a negative track, but I am rarely bored.

When I do get bored it's in situations where I am in a kind of borderline state between escaping into my own head, and paying attention to something I know I ought to focus on. Only guilt and politeness keeps me trying to focus, and I fight my inner desire to do something completely different. Plan next weeks lectures, for instance. That can be fascinating if the alternative is listening to 30 minutes of positioning over administrative territories and professional status. As a random example.

Facebook is one of those places where I tend to get a bit bored. There's so much going on that doesn't really concern me, and so I phase out most of the information that flows past me, and I go to check who beat who in the most recent vampire game. Or if my dragon pet is underattack. It mostly is, it is a pathetic fighter. However, today somebody had posted a really interesting link. Netzwurker Mez, who is a cyber-poet, put up this fascinating little article on... boredom.

It turns out that boredom is a major cause of drug-abuse and crime. Idle minds and idle hands, etc, seems to be true. But also, boredom is the source of great thinking and great ideas. Well, I have to admit, some of my best lectures and articles have been born in some of those loooong meetings where there's nowhere to go but into my own brain.

And also, there's a little game-related metion in there, with a connection to flow:

Encouraging children to entertain themselves in mentally active and imaginative ways and to avoid passive, quick-fix entertainment could also reduce boredom. “We provide children lots of entertainment in the form of television and iPods to prevent them from developing their inner skills to contend with boredom,” Sundberg says. Engaging in active entertainment, such as playing sports or games, is also much more likely to produce flow, Csikszentmihalyi says.

Now, connecting boredom and games, we get grinding - the repetitive tasks which does lead to progress, but appear to be mindless. Today many of the big online games are being criticized for the grinding they demand from the players. Perhaps it's wrong to be so critical? The players I interviewed in 1999 saw grinding in the form of levelling as a neccessary act which filled its own important niche in the inner life of a game. The eagerness with which so many youngsters who would be bored to tears if they had to read a "stimulating book" grind, is astounding. What's going on with all that grinding? Is boredom another force of human pleasure and creativity?

I think I need to look at that, a little.

Fear and Facts

This is old news by now, but for Scandinavian readers it's a pretty piece of good news. The Swedish National Board of Youth Affairs has just published a report on youth who are heavy gamers. This is a study of health, political activity, social issues, stress levels and academic performance of young people who define themselves as playing a lot of games. The main finds are:

They are of no worse health than others, quite the opposite, they report less headaches and less stress than non and low gamers. They also report about the same physical activity level.

They are not more criminal or problematic than non or low gamers, quite the opposite, there is a tendency towards less use of alcohol than their peers.

They are as politically active and -conscious as other youths their age.

They are slightly less academically ambitious than their peers. This can however easily be traced to their backgrounds, as it seems like the heavy gamers to a slightly larger extent are recruited from families where the parents have little or no education.

All of these deviances are however minor. The main conclusion after reading this report is that young people who play a lot of computer games are pretty much like everybody else, have the same problems, but are perhaps a little more relaxed about their lives.

While this is no bomb, it's certainly a nice confirmation of the "feeling" many games researchers who are also gamers have had for a long time. Unless specifically looking for the problematic stories, the general impression is that gamers do just fine, and are perfectly normal people. And here it is, the confirmation that this holds true - at least for Swedish gamers.

New Year

And again I start on a new year. It's the seventh year of my blog, something which feels rather scary. After seven years all the cells in a human body is supposed to have been renewed/exchanged, so every seventh year you are, physically, a new person. I don't know how correct that piece of folklore is, but the thought is interesting. Perhaps that means it's time to renew something else as well? As I am back in Umeå after a wonderful Christmas spent physically and mentally hugging my family, I have a lot of time - too much perhaps - to consider what needs to be renewed. But that's what I am here for, and these dark winters are made for it.

As for winter: not too cold, but snowing, tiny sharp little crystals that blow into your face. Biking is exhausting in this weather, but with my winter tires it's doable. It's definitely time for layering.

It was the day before Christmas

And mother pretty much wanted to just cancel the whole stupid affair. Not that I'd ever do it, but this year the spirit has been rather hard to find. Still, I have presents, and I expect a minimum of people to be offended or disappointed. I have made cakes, 6 types, 5 of which are edible. My husband, bless his devotion, claims te sixth is edible too, and makes a valiant effort to prove it. The jokes made over those cakes are good, at least. My daughter has landed in Norway, and it is very likely that she will make it all the way here for Christmas. I have no present for her though. That was her father's territory. I really wonder what will come out of that.

The house is fairly clean. There's a limit to what I can do about a house that's been lived in by two men with a particular type of blindness, the type that makes dirt invisible, in just 5 days which also need to be long enough for baking, work and shopping. The tree is up, a day early, and altough it's small, it had room for almost all the decorations. So yes, it's the regular riot of colour and glitter and stories from the past.

I love this house, and I love Christmas in it. But I have never trusted myself with this kind of love of one place, as I have always had to leave the moment I am getting settled in and comfortable. So it is with a bittersweet mix of happiness and fear that I settle down to enjoy the work of the last few days. Tomorrow it's Christmas. The sun has already turned, and days are growing longer. There is more daylight here than in Umeå, and I can sit in the livingroom drinking it in, as the light reflects off the fjord, and I am surrounded by it. But when the night falls I light candles and wish, greedily, for more - warmth, light, the blessing of summer. In the north seasons are not just things on the calendar. In the north seasons are painful truths, changing your body, your comfort, your hormones, your activities and the patterns of your life, until you live by the rythm of the changing year.

And so it's Christmas.

Elg, elk, moose

Now to the "elk" debate. After the story I posted in November about the boy who saved his sister from an "elg" and then applied WoW skills to saving himself has been swirling around online for a while, I caught an interesting twist in the translation of "elg". I translated it as moose, but people pointed out it was not a moose, but an elk. Then somebody in a comment on this blog talked about seeing a herd of 200 "elk" in the US, something which made me pause, as you'd never see a herd of "elg" in Scandinavia. So off I went to our friend, the Wikipedia.

Now I could have looked for a more authorised source, but in this case Wikipedia looks pretty good. What it shows is that the American "elk" is a different animal with a different spread from the European "elg". "Moose", however, is said to be called both "moose" and "elk", only it's called "elk" in Europe. If you look at the pictures, you'll see that the moose and the elg are more similar than the elk and the elg.

In the Norwegian article there is a discussion about the use of the word "elk", as apparently it's also used about a type of deer, in American English. Looking at the picture of the "elk" in Wikipedia, that looks more like a deer than an "elg". So - the translation was perhaps not that wrong, and the elks are more than they seem to be.

Folklore

Saturday I heard somebody talk loudly just outside my windows. Peeking out at the world, a little groggy still from jet-lag, a condition not made any better by the dark and my tendency to hang out in Azeroth until past midnight, I discovered hectic activity on the parking lot. As soon as I managed to hook up to the net, I found that yes, something was going on next door, at Västerbotten Museum. There was a Christmas Market, going on for two days, and it was obviously a big deal, as the traffic was quite heavy.

Sunday I decided that I would just have to visit it. So I grabbed my wallet and zipped up the down-jacket (yes, it's winter here again) and headed over - without too high expectations. Turned out that yes, it was worth it!

The Museum grounds were filled with little sales stands, set up around a gravel path that lead in a circle. All around that circle there were people standing, selling everything from gingerbread and mulled wine to handmade sami knives and traditional Scandinavian hand-knitted socks. In between there was hand-blown glass, a smith working with medieval methods, peruvian knitted alpacca wool sweaters and reindeer kebabs. A couple of places along the gravel roads there were fireplaces where people could pause and warm up, and inside a lavvo (lavvu) - a sami tent shaped much like a tipi(teepee) - there was also a fire, and a chance to warm up on more of the different spicy drinks that belong to Christmas in Scandinavia.

I was quickly caught up in the fun, and ended up doing a decent chunk of the christmas shopping right there, on that gravelly path through the museum. Also I ended up with a slab of smoked reindeer meat, which I quickly realised I have to finish before I go home to Norway. It's not easy to go from shopping and cooking for four people to just one - particularly not as I then go home and cook for a family again. But the meat is delicious, so I am sure I'll be able to finish it - and if I can't, I'll just have to find some friends to help.

Feign death really works

After playing World of Warcraft, the 12 year old boy knew how to cope when he was attacked by a moose in the forest.

In the article he describes how he first yelled at the moose, distracting it so his sister got away, then when he got attacked and the animal stood over him he feigned death. "Just like you learn at level 30 in World of Warcraft."

Now who says you can't learn useful stuff from WoW? All I have to say is - I am really really glad his skills at feigning death were not resisted by that beast. Imagine if it had been an immune elite...


----------------
(Now, after this story was told to me by a friend long after it had made its way around the net for a while, I decided to google a little, to try and figure out how come I get all these comments suddenly. That's when I saw that people complain about the translation of "elg" into "moose". Yes, you are correct, it should be "elk" not "moose". The problem is that when ever I use "elk" English speakers ask "what's an elk"? Then I have to explain that it's the European version of moose, and that is what you will find in Norwegian forests. So, I picked moose rather than elk. Sorry about that, to all the elks out there, I know you hate being called moose just as much as Norwegians hate to be called Swedes.)

A confusion of seasons

I am deep in the process of translating something I wrote in Norwegian into English, and having an interesting insight. While I have become fairly confident about writing in English, I realise that my Norwegian is so much richer, subtler and also more precise than the English, it's embarassing to know I considered myself almost fluent in English. Luckily I brought a Norwegian-English dictionary.

I am in my usual "let's get away from everything" spot while writing this, and it's autumn in New York, not yet winter.


When I left Sweden for Australia in September, it was autumn, too.


Going to Perth, Australia, I came to a somewhat feeble spring, although the spring flowers were busy blooming once we got outside the city.


It did however warm up once I went north (which is still a little odd to me) and reached Tokyo. The japanese were making excuses for the weather being so unseasonably warm, and the early autumn felt like treasured (if somewhat overwhelmingly hot when in the lecture halls) summer.


But back in Umeå, the temperature dropped quickly, so when I left for New York in November, winter had settled in firmly. My son was visiting just at the right time to run errands for me and get winter tires for the bike, so now I am the proud owner of a bicycle outfitted for winter biking. Scary, but I will try it as soon as I am back there.


And this is what I left when I went to a New York that is cool, moist and very autumn like. A total confusion of seasons, from September to November.

Accounts

Note to self: Find the books where I have written down the different passwords and log in names in the totally fail-safe secret way of never ever having the book(s) anywhere relevant to logging in.

I am trying to work out of the Umeå Library, and while the library is lovely (not a single bad thing to say about the library) I am suffering from total account overload. Moving to Umeå has given birth to at least 5 different codes just connected to new cards (money, locks, copying), a printer code, two new mail accounts, a new log-in for a blog and one library account, as well as a long list of different ip-adresses I need for access in different spots, and several new physical keys. I have tried to keep track of all this in writing, as my brain is NOT made for remembering that kind of stuff (I blame the meningitis at age 22. It actually did blow a chunk of my memory, and for quite a while after regaining consciousness I did not notice that what I pronounced was not what I thought. This is a kind of Aphasia, and while the doctors brushed it off and claimed I was functioning far too well, and forgetting names, words and concepts is perfectly normal, I felt there was a marked difference in my ability to function at this level.). However, I have not been particularly successful, for what am I to do when I don't remember where I wrote it down? Like right now, what user name did I use for logging into my library bookshelf? What is the version of my personal number as it is written in Sweden? (Only thing I remember is: Not the same as in Norway.)

At least I know how I need to spend the morning. Tracking down all these different scraps of paper and very important note books and collect all that information, data security be damned. Anyway, if somebody really want to spy on my library bookshelf, by all means, have a look.

Happy geek in gadget-love

Warning: Long story with happy geek-ending.

Sure, travelling on business class at the occasional random upgrade is nice, if you're picky about your food, British Airways isn't the one you want to be on, or if you're picky about the way you are addressed by the staff and don't want to be called "love" and "hun", then by all means stay clear of Continental. For handsome men watching, go Air France, Air Canada or Quantas, and if you have a thing for truly beautiful women, Singapore Airlines is your best bet. But if you, like me, travel with whatever gives you the best price and the best connections, then these things are pretty much outside of your control.

Yesterday I discovered something which was not.

But let's start at the beginning, and the beginning is almost 27 years back in time. That's when I met this young man who was sweet, smart, funny, sporty and sexy, and on top of that had a great taste in books and music. After a year or so of making him realise what a good thing it would be to hang out with me, we moved in together in Bergen. That's when something I had never realised I missed was introduced in my life: music which was not played by a live orchestra or did not randomly happen off the radio.

Since then I have been surrounded with it, and mostly stuff I really like. When the kids joined in, the music played in the home changed and expanded, and there was always something, so much in fact that NOT having music on all the time became a relief, a signal to me that I was alone, I could focus on my own things, I was at peace.

It only took a month of living alone to realise it was a bit too peaceful. I felt a very unfamiliar, powerful urge to listen to music, and I started thinking about the kind of music I wanted and liked, and how nice it is to have the option of making it happen.

This lead to an excursion into Akihabara in Tokyo, where I came out with a bag full of iPod Nano's. I can't buy something like that only for myself, you know - I have been a mom for 21 years, it's a hard habit to shake, if I even wanted to.

Finally home in Volda, I could start uploading the stuff I wanted. For a while I revelled in picking only my music, and found that listening to an iPod is perfect for long boring bus rides for instance to Molde. The disappointment was huge when I got on the plane to Trondheim. The little apple earbuds couldn't do anything about the ambient noise generated by air engines, and I really couldn't hear much. Having to turn the sound all the way up to hear anything made me realise how much the background noise exhausts me on airplanes. I tend to wear headphones when ever I can, just to hear something other than the drone of the engine, and I get really tired on the long flights.

I didn't know what to do about it, but I started checking other headphones at least. The iPod was still a success, and when the loving sweet men at home discovered that I liked using it, they immediately colonized it. Bye bye dreams of controlling my own music choices... I like that though. After all, both father and son are sufficiently sensitive to know what kind of music I will probably like. Actually, I think they know it better than I do.

Anyway. We were talking about headphones.

I found some really garish looking headphones at the airport, but didn't pick them up, as I was thinking of just getting a pair of Koss portable headphones. Simple, elegant and a good deal at the price, what could go wrong? However, the son, who had already managed to convince me to get a pair for him (see how this mother thing works?), told me to reconsider, as they did nothing to reduce noise from the outside. That's when we stumbled over noise cancelling headphones.

OK, you have indulged my rambling about my wonderful family for long enough now. The keyword is: skullcandy. Those garish headphones I had noticed are produced for extreme sports fans, and built to last while snowboarding or sliding down rails in the mall - no matter what, skullcandy wants you to do it. That includes beating your boyfriend mercilessly. Hmmm. Luckily the headphones I found at the airport in Oslo, called Proletariat, look like an undercover skullcandy set. They are noise cancelling headphones at less than half the price of for instance a Bose headset. Are they as good? I don't know, but they worked well enough to make a difference for me. After the young lady at the store had broken the heavy plastic wrapping open, and we had extracted the headphones and their little travelling bag, the airplane connection plug AND the two AAA batteries that came with the headphones, I assembled, plugged, turned on - and felt my shoulders drop.

It is a difference. I got on the plane to Stockholm and hated having to turn the headphones off when the "fasten seatbelt" sign came on. I hated it even worse on the propel plane from Stockholm to Umeå. I am going to have to sacrifice some of my habitual hand-luggage to bring them with me, but these are coming on the planes with me, in all foreseeable future. I used to sniff with a touch of disdain at the people who felt such a need of high fidelity that they brought their own headphones on the plane. No more - I suddenly know what they are bringing; a chance to escape that endless, exhausting drone, a chance to let the shoulders drop and some other sounds to penetrate. Travelling as much as I do, this is one of the things that makes a difference no matter what company I travel with, where I go, how the seats or the service are. I can use them with the iPod, the computer, the games, the airplane television and radio, the only problem is that they are a little too bulky for comfortable sleeping, but I am sure I am going to manage that too. After all, I am in love with those headphones, and love makes the strangest things comfortable.

JoinGame!

Today I am in Trondheim, at the first meeting of "JoinGame", which is the Norwegian Noveau name of a group organised to work for research and innovation on games in Norway. A lot of different people here, from academia I immediately recognize Gunnar Liestøl, Hilde Corneliussen and Sara Brinch. I am sure I will find more!

Daylight

The sun still comfortably high above the horizon, the google daylight map shows the progress of the sunlight as autumn turns to winter.

Not the Tetris Tower 3D

Which is the Tetris game's physical manifestation outside of the computer, and which I discovered thanks to Gonzalo, and which I think is right up there on my wishlist, just for the geek-value.

No, the game I am looking for now is a game I used to play with the kids (while they were still that, and not young adults who only want to triumph horribly in Risk or some other game they have spent time mastering without me). It has a similar kind of set-up as the tetris tower game, but instead of dropping tetris blocks it drops little squares with patterns of hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs. In order to score you had to have a certain number of one kind in a row, up, down or diagonally. It is a cross between tic-tac-toe and a card game. I can't remember the name of the game, but it reminds me of the Tetris Tower design, and I'd love to be able to reference it while I write about Tetris going 3D.

Have any of my quick, competent and eager readers a lead on which game this is? I'll go look in my secret hiding places, and cross fingers that we havent' thrown it away... or that it is here, and not in my mother's cabinet.

Tikken, kogg, sisten

I am looking for the English word for a very common game. It's the game where one person is "it" and has to touch another, to pass "it" on. It mostly involves a lot of running around and touching quickly, a competition of speed, endurance and tactics. It's played pretty universally I think, in one form or another, and in Norwegian there are endless words for this depending on local dialects. This means that it's hard for me to get a decent translation. "Sisten", the east-Norwegian word, shows up as "lastly, latest", while the others just don't register.

So, if anybody know what I am talking about, then please, you are IT, and you have to tag me with the right word to give it back and run free.

Right to Play

In Tokyo, Gonzalo Frasca gave me a button stating that "Play can change the world!" He is not the only one who has thought so, but one of the people who has taken it further than most is the Norwegian speed skating athlete Johann Olav Koss. Today he is President and CEO of Right to Play, an organisation which was started as part of the preparations to the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994, originally named "Olympic Aid." Johann Olav Koss won three gold medals in the Lillehammer Olympics, and donated large amounts of his winning to Olympic Aid. Since then he has dedicated his life to giving children living under extreme hardship a chance to play.

I am not sure if Johann Olav Koss thinks of computer games as important in this context. The children he tries to help are not troubled with obesity and low school performance, nor are they bored and abandoned in the middle of material abundance. They are starving in deserts, fleeing warzones, struggling in slums. He might though. I would like to be able to ask him.

I think perhaps, if we are to take games seriously as political and educational tools, we should look to the experiences of Right to Play. Until then: Part of the donations October 21st here in Norway - when the national broad casting opens up the television screen to a good cause, and people knock on doors all over the country, asking for contributions - go to Right to Play. If you're in Norway, this is one of the best causes I can think of. Play can change the world.

Conference reviews

Piled Higher and Deeper has the answer to a very hot issue both at DAC 2007 and DiGRA 2007. Enjoy.

There's jargon, and there's what I understand

Prompted by Espen, and because his name had been mentioned in different contexts, I sat down to read some of John Hopson's writings at Gamasutra. The most recent work was his "We are not listening", a featured article adressing game researchers from the position of the game industry.

After the keynote at DiGRA 2007, where Mark Prensky talked about: Keynote: "Escape from Planet Jargon: Making Research More Useful to Practitioners", this was kind of a in-the-moment-topic. The Prensky talk had been fairly unimpressive, and I knowing Hopson to be both intelligent and thoughtful, I hoped he would have a better take on the issue than Prensky. I am afraid to say, my hopes were sadly dashed. Hopson did however make it clear that he didn't mean to address ALL game resarchers, only the one targetting the game industry, which I guess is a mitigating circumstance. Still - well, here's my thoughts while reading "We're not listening".

Page 1: caveat

I’m not saying that academics have to care about what the industry thinks of them, but for those who do this is the best advice I can give on how to make sure the industry takes your work seriously. Secondly, I’m going to assume that you’ve already done your research and have the findings ready to go. This article is about the final mile, going from finished research to real implementation in a shipped game.

Hopson here assumes that it's the job of the researcher to present the material, to "sell" it. Others have professionals to do that, it's called marketing departments. So what he says here is basically: if the business is to care about your work, good doesn't matter, marketing does.

Page 1, rule 1

The researcher must lay out the entire impact of the idea, from the cost of implementing the proposal to the resulting changes in player experience and the metrics for measuring that impact. Getting players to identify with the main character is great, but researchers have to finish the rest of the sentence: “This will help players identify more strongly with the main character which will result in an improvement in measures of overall player satisfaction and an increase in total playing time.”

Hopson makes the assumption that the researcher is doing research in order to identify exactly the kind of questions which are important for game developers, namely, how to make a player play more. That is probably true for his research, at the Microsoft lab, but it's certainly not true for other types of research. Knowing that a player has a very strong identification with the main character can be a way to discuss time management in education and development, dramatic structures in critical studies, the impact of games on society in sociology. The researcher does not have the same agenda as the industry, unless he or she is paid by the industry. It also assumes that an academic who knows a lot about how gamers react to the game, is also an insider on the questions game developers ask, and are able to identify the important findings in their own material, which would be important to the game companies. This demands an inside knowledge which researchers who already work in the game industry, for the industry, has. The rest, as he himself points out, although in a roundabour fashion, don't have access.

Page 2, rule 2: here we go with the jargon thingy.

Academic writing is abnormal. I know that by the time you escape grad school the rolling cadences and ritualized forms of the journal article are graven on your very soul. But really, you might as well present your research in the form of an interpretive dance as hand a producer an article written for academic publication. Reading an academic article is an obscure and highly specialized job skill, one which most of your potential audience doesn’t have the time or desire to learn. It’s up to the researchers to make their work accessible to the audiences they want.

This is as uninformed coming from Hopson as it was coming from Prensky. Every specialised field is packed with specialised concepts. Have anybody ever tried to read a user manual? Yes, there are bad academic articles out there, where content is questionable and form is taken to the extreme. But Hopson also knows very well that a lot of important terms and structures are there for precision and clarification, not to ritualize the communication. Academic writing directed at other academics is not directed at specialists in some other field, or laymen, and to exclude the precise language developed to deal with complex terms would be irresponsible. So the game developers can't read it? It's why they hire academics in their research departments, people who know the language, have the connections, understand the field. In a game developing company it's Hopson's job to keep updated on the language, the structures and the references, and bring that knowledge back into his organisation.

Use examples from bestsellers. A good example from a popular game is more effective than a great example from something they’ve never heard of. Industry people often suffer from an “if-they’re-so-smart-, why-ain’t-they-rich” attitude towards smaller titles. Even if the small title is a perfect example of how the theory works, they’re going to be less likely to listen if they haven’t heard of the game ahead of time.

This basically says: It's all about making more money, not about making better games, so if a game is better but isn't a huge bestseller, the developers aren't interested. "Good = huge selling game, screw all other analysis." And with that I think game researchers can just pack up and go back to our departments, as nothing innovative will ever reach the ears of developers. I'll not even start bashing the other advice on that page. It's all about turning your thesis into a 5 line ad. Sure, if that's what you want to do, please listen to Hopson. If you had hoped to communicating a complex understanding or a new idea, well, your odds look very short.

Page 3, rule 3

Working in the games industry can be brutal, involving fast-paced schedules and eighty-hour work-weeks at times. The people listening to your talk already have a full workload. They’ve already been cutting features to make their production milestones, often features that represent some of their best ideas and strongest held beliefs about games. And then there’s this academic who’s never shipped a game standing up there telling them to rip out weeks of work in order to implement some pet theory. Give us a break!

Yes, I'll give you a break. After rule 2, I think we already agree that innovation, complexity and precision is a waste of time when talking to developers. They are all lab rats anyway, going by programmed responses, so trying to communicate new knowledge is a waste of time. It is a pretty bleak presentation of game developers though, but I guess we already knew it was a cut-throat business where the thoughtful die fast.

Page 3 rule 4:

However, to make that research useful to developers, it’s important to take the next step and give concrete examples of how classifying one’s players helps to make a better game. Ok, so we now know that 10% of our players are “Type 3a explorer-monkeys.” Now what? Does that mean 10% of our content should be exploration-focused?

This is about normative research vs other types of research. What Hopson says here is: Game developers want cookbooks, and they want to be told how to do things right. The problem is again that no researcher can know that something they have observed will make things better if implemented in a different setting. This is something only game researchers already involved in game development can have a chance to test out. John Hopson can say: "Before we finish this, let's try this approach instead, because I have read this analysis which says that..." and then Microsoft can run a test on that, and see if his theory actually works. Game researchers outside of companies don't have that kind of access or that kind of tools.

Second, he says: Do only one kind of research. Don't do explorative or descriptive research, do normative research, create rules for how things should be done. Basically: Do the kind of research we like, and we'll listen.

Page 4, rule 5 and 6:
The question of access also makes rule 5 and 6 useless to a game developer. There's no way a scholar can prove that a theory will work unless somebody builds the game where it's been implemented. To do that we'd have to do all the things that Hopson specifically says not to do, such as citing other research, referencing, quoting lesser-known games and looking at what has been done before. It's the only way an academic not working inside a company can do these things, and accordign to Hopson, it's not valid.

The same goes with asking a developer what they need. Let me point to rule 3: The developers don't have enough resources to tell a researcher what time of the day it is. Why should they answer more complex questions, which might force them to listen to a complex theory?

I know John Hopson means well with his advice, but it's advice from a scholar who since his Ph D has worked inside of a game development firm. It basically says two things:

1) To be able to talk to game developers, you need the kind of access you have when you are already working with game developers.

2) Game developers are narrowminded, only motivated by profit, and don't want to learn new things.

The first is useless advice to any academic who wants to get into the field. The second is very close to being insulting to his colleagues, the game developers. But most of all I wonder at the job of game researchers in the development firms. Aren't they the ones who are supposed to bridge this gap? Isn't that why they are hired, with all their education and their connections to the research field? Sure, I have enough skills and knowledge about marketing to dumb down - eh, I mean, clarify my writing for a target group when I need to. I don't, however, have the dual skills that somebody like John Hopson has a chance to develop. He and those of his ilk are the ones who can bring new and interesting research to the eye of the game developers community. They are the ones who may really make a difference.

Voice, luggage, bed

It was in a karaokebar in Tokyo I last had a voice. The luggage I last saw in Narita Airport, but reports have it that it's been spotted in London. When I arrived in Umeå I was afraid the fog was too thick for me to find the bed, but it was where I had left it.

I feel spread all over. My head has barely gotten out of Australia, as the impressions from DAC 2007 in Perth are still zooming about. I think what made the strongest impression on me was the bioart exhibited in The Bakery by SymbioticA: Still, Living. While not everybody's favourite, the art touched me, made me curious, disgusted and impressed, all in one, strangely moving - or perhaps I was just impressed with the name dropping, as the curator was talking about his meeting and discussions with Gombrich, who I was sure must have been dead a long time ago.

The memories of the exhibitions in Australia are oddly overlapping the exhibitions on the National Museum of Modern Art (MOMAT) in Tokyo, and the complex images of artificial organisms and biologically coloured membranes from australia overlap the intricate beauty of Japanese weaving and painting. My dreams are vivid and wild, and I dream in patterns: Flowers on silk, water over stones, light through leaves, algae on membranes, preserved skin, growing and spreading mikroorganisms. It is going to take a while to start remembering and thinking about this trip in sentences, categories, logical terms rather than a caleidoscope of faces, voices, colours, tastes. I'll get there though - that's the good thing about being alone, I have time now.

---update-----
And for those who didn't already catch my error: Ragnhild Tronstad pointed out that it was not Gombrich (who died in 2001, and while not having been dead as long as I thought still was not the man in question) the curator refered to, but Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht. No less impressive reference, and now if you excuse me, I'll go check out some of his books.