Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game

Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens is a collection of scholarly essays that seeks to represent the far-reaching scope and implications of digital role-playing games as both cultural and academic artifacts. As a genre, digital role playing games have undergone constant and radical revision, pushing not only multiple boundaries of game development, but also the playing strategies and experiences of players.

Divided into three distinct sections, this premiere volume captures the distinctiveness of different game types, the forms of play they engender and their social and cultural implications. Contributors examine a range of games, from classics like Final Fantasy to blockbusters like World of Warcraft to obscure genre bending titles like Lux Pain. Working from a broad range of disciplines such as ecocritism, rhetoric, performance, gender, and communication, these essays yield insights that enrich the field of game studies and further illuminate the cultural, psychological and philosophical implications of a society that increasingly produces, plays and discourses about role playing games.

More information: http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=159141&SearchType=Basic

Sekä Julkaisufoorumi-hankkeen että yliopistojen uuden rahoitusmallin avulla tavoitellaan kannatettavia asioita: halutaan nostaa suomalaisen tieteellisen tutkimuksen ja julkaisutoiminnan laatua ja lisätä kansainvälisyyttä. Nyt kaavailuissa muodoissa molempiin esityksiin sisältyy kuitenkin piirteitä, jotka ovat räikeässä ristiriidassa julkilausuttujen tavoitteiden kanssa.

Julkaisufoorumin ja ministeriön rahoituskaavailujen katsotaan olevan lähtökohdiltaan kapea-alaisia ja mekaanisesti toteutettuja. Niissä ei oteta huomioon eri tieteenalojen julkaisuperinteitä ja -tarpeita, eivätkä ne perustu tieteen sisältä nouseviin kriteereihin. Molemmat mallit laiminlyövät tieteiden monipuolisuuden ja -muotoisuuden sekä eri alojen historialliset traditiot. Mallien pohjalta mahdollisesti syntyvät tieteen ja tutkimuksen ohjausmallit vinouttavat tutkimuksen kenttää ja vaikeuttavat luovan tieteellisen työn tekemistä.

Kannanotossa kysytään, miksi suomenkieliset tiedejulkaisut automaattisesti asetetaan alemmalle tasolle kuin kansainväliset, etenkin englantilaiset. Kotimaisen julkaisemisen aliarvostukselle ei ole mitään sisällöllisiä perusteita. Tutkimuksen laatu ei perimmiltään ole kielikysymys, ja kaikilla tieteenaloilla tarvitaan sekä kansallista että kansainvälistä julkaisemista. Tieto- ja tiedeinstituutioilla on myös yhteiskunnallisia tehtäviä, joita korkeatasoinen suomenkieliset julkaisut tiedeyhteisöjen ohessa myös palvelevat. Tiedejulkaisujen arvioiminen ja arvottaminen nyt suunnitteilla olevalla tavalla on epäoikeudenmukaista eikä täytä tarkoitustaan.

Kannanoton allekirjoittaneet seurat esittävät, että sekä Julkaisufoorumihankkeen että ministeriön rahoitusmallin lähtökohtia pohditaan vielä kerran perusteellisesti. Tärkeä kysymys on, nousevatko mallit todella tieteiden sisäistä tarpeista vai enemmän hallinnollista tai muista tieteen ulkopuolelta tulevista perusteista. Ehdottoman tarpeellista on hakea avoimesti ja tasapuolisesti kestäviä sekä kaikkia toimija- ja tutkimustahoja tyydyttäviä käytänteitä.

Tavoitteena tulee olla maamme monipuolinen ja -muotoinen tieteellisen tutkimuksen ja siihen liittyvän julkaisutoiminnan turvaaminen sekä kansallisesti että kansainvälisesti.

Lisätietoja asiasta antavat:

• Minna Autio, Nuorisotutkimusseuran puheenjohtaja, 040-8405810, minna.autio@helsinki.fi
• Markku Jahnukainen, Suomen kasvatustieteellisen seuran puheenjohtaja, mjahnuka@helsinki.fi
• Emilia Palonen, Valtiotieteellinen yhdistys, 040-5077198, emilia.palonen@helsinki.fi
• Risto Rinne, Suomen kasvatustieteellinen seura, (02)333 8811 rinne@utu.fi

This week I visited the Netherlands to discuss possible collaborations in game studies, by the kind invitation of Joost Raessens, Sybille Lammes, René Glas, and the University of Utrecht. The buildings of the university create a nice mix of old and new, and there are some photos you can have a look at my Flickr photo stream:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=21506315%40N00&q=utrecht&m=text

It is hard not to like a Zagg case. With a little practice you will have a user experience that is close to a PC, with only a fraction of the bulk. The physical keyboard really makes a difference. iPad with the virtual keyboard is clearly a consumption oriented device, whereas the proper keyboard sets you free to handle most of those things that our working life largely relates to. In addition, the lightness and versatility of iPad is mostly preserved (be warned, it does get somewhat heavier though), and the use is still much more spontaneous than with a full PC. But you cannot carry this thing in your pocket — in that area iPad cannot compete with your mobile phone.

For a business user the main downsides of iPad+Zagg combo are mostly related to the limitations of Apple’s iOS. The file management is painful; files that you have handled reside in the internal memory allocated to each individual program, and it is mostly impossible to save directly from an iOS app to the file hierarchy that your other computers use. In some cases you need to resort into emailing the edited document back to yourself as an attachment, which is ridiculous. Luckily, there are workarounds like subscribing to Dropbox service — there are several nice text editors, for example, that can be linked to your Dropbox account so that you can sync your iPad productions into a place in the cloud. Apple provides their own iCloud, of course, but Dropbox leads the field at the moment at least.

The keyboard feel of Zagg/Logitech is not exactly the best PC keyboard experience I have had, but it is solid and good enough for myself at least. There are really useful additions like arrow keys (hooray! the thing I have missed most from the iOS virtual keyboard), volume keys, cut-copy-paste keys, plus dedicated keys for getting to the iOS home screen, for locking the screen, and for changing between international keyboard layouts/languages, which is also very handy. Also when consuming media, like while reading or watching a movie during a flight, having a stand for iPad is of course a useful thing.

The only half-serious usability issue I have had with this thing so far is related to the locking mechanism of Zagg case: there is no such thing. You are supposed to squeeze the iPad between the rubber cushions inside the aluminium case so that it locks into place. This is not so easy. You need to use a bit of downwards force, have the iPad in precisely right angle, secure the other edge of iPad to its place with your other hand while you press the other edge to its proper position with another one. Additionally, if the case slips off, it will automatically unlock the iPad screen. Apparently there is the same magnetic auto-unlock feature in play as with Apple’s official “smart cover”. I wish Zagg/Logitech engineers would had come up with less tricky closing mechanism. But the benefits of the keyboard case are so obvious that it encourages you to work over the learning threshold.

Apart from the lightness and compact form factor, the battery durability is probably among the best features of having iPad & Zagg as your main ‘laptop’: you can keep typing notes and surfing for materials for a full day meeting, come back to hotel in the evening, continue working, and find out that your battery is still at 64 %, just like I just found out today.

Verdict: Zagg/Logitech keyboard case for iPad 2 is a pricy, but well constructed accessory that really changes iPad into real business tool, if that is what you need.

http://www.uta.fi/sis/en/studies/disciplines/infim/studies/game.html

CALL FOR PAPERS

You, Me, User – Conference on User-Generated Culture
Friday 25, May – Saturday 26, May 2012 in Helsinki.

From social media to video games and from online fan production to machinima the phenomenon of user-generated culture has secured its position in the mainstream during the last few years. This shift has resulted from the blurring boundaries between media production and consumption as well as between professional and amateur authorship. The phenomenon is claimed to be characterized by collaboration, accessibility and democratic potential. During the You, Me, User Conference we approach the user-generated culture, or in other words, multiple situations where culture becomes modified, produced and distributed through everyday practices, social and new media.

The Finnish Society for Cinema Studies (SETS) invites presentations which explore the questions surrounding user-generated culture. The conference will bring together Finnish and international scholars of a wide range of relevant fields of studies. The conference will offer a chance to focus on a new and active field of study and is open to presentations from a wide spectrum.

Keynote speeches are delivered by David Buckingham and Frans Mäyrä.

Professor David Buckingham (Loughborough University) is a media education researcher.  He is especially interested in children’s and young people’s interactions with electronic media, consumer culture and civic participation. His most recent book is The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture (2011).

Professor Frans Mäyrä (University of Tampere) has focused on media culture, digital media and games. He leads an interdisciplinary research group on games study where game culture, players, their activities and gameplay experiences are approached. Mäyrä has published Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture (2008), for example.

We seek paper proposals from various fields, such as film, television, games, internet, music, art, literature etc. It is our intention to organize the symposium around questions, such as:
•       What is user-generated culture and how to conceptualize it?
•        Changes in the distribution channels of audiovisual media due to user-generated culture
•        Changes in the consumption of audiovisual media due to user-generated culture
•       Fan as an author?
•       How does user-generated culture blur the boundaries of production and consumption?
•       Politically, socially or culturally significant forms of user-generated culture.
•       Global and local implications of user-generated culture.
•       Does user-generated culture produce new forms of community?
•       Problems of control and copyright in user-generated culture.
•       Does user-generated culture produce new forms of community?

What are the problematic dimensions of user-generated culture (censorship, legal issues etc.)

Proposals including an abstract (max 300 words) and a short CV should be submitted to Conference Secretary Maija Uusitalo by email: amkuus@utu.fiby 19.2.2012 at latest. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 1.3.2012.

Organizers:  Finnish Society of Film Research in concert with National Audivisual Archive, Media Studies (University of Turku), Cinema and Television Studies (University of Helsinki), Aalto University, School of Communication, Media and Theatre (University of Tampere) and Koulukino.

More information:

http://sets.wordpress.com/user-generated-conference/