Our Lab released the first course series to pilot game studies as online learning today. The phone has been ringing, and I have been busy (with my croaking voice, still in that summer flu) explaining various media people that yes, games are indeed researched, and that yes, there is need for education at this field, too. Later, while I was reading Jessica Mulligan’s Biting the Hand column series (1997-2003), I came across Raph Koster answering Jessica’s pro-entertainment piece with “The Case for Art“. There are other columns and discussions either openly or indirectly referring and linking in, and – rather than going to the debate itself – it got me thinking about the nature of column writing. This kind of blogs can be used, or perceived, as columns, too, but they can also be many other things. I enjoy reading several columns from traditional printed magazines, as well, but there is not similar kind of hypertextual openness in that medium. Some day, some way, I would like to be able to try and create a hybrid, a vehicle for truly polyphonic expression.
Month: June 2004
thousand sorts of fun?
Deeper existential concerns aside for a moment, one of the main wishes of many people is that they would enjoy their life. “Having fun” seems to one way to express this goal, but enjoyment comes in so many guises. Amoeba, kaleidoscope and chameleon are among my favorite metaphors these days, trying to get a grasp at this mutable and polyphonic nature of ours.
My capacity of having fun has been hampered somewhat by the summer flu that got hold of me last week. These things just seem to last, at least a week or more. Damn thing! I had hopes for the Midsummer Day. Now I just got an unannounced early installation of the new network connection, and an ADSL box which of course declined to serve these pages to the web any more. Some expensive calls and three feverish days of debugging later, I finally got the new flash bios update for the ADSL box, which managed not only to fix the NAT routing error, but also installed a new firewall service. Nice.
Am I enjoying all this tech, or not?
Hard question to answer, really. When you are walking the road, do you enjoy the sand and stone under your feet?
books and places
Last couple of weeks have meant transfer into the summer mode: mostly focusing on writing the game studies stuff that I cannot get done during the academic year. I have also started to read (both work and pleasure) as much as I can find time for. Summer nights in Finland are great for this. Look Windward, the latest of Ian M. Banks Culture novels, I think, my latest treasure. Not much energy for games, just occasional glimpse of Halo, then some gameplay videos of future releases (curious form of media art, in its own right). Last week I was spending my evenings working on the gameplay experience laboratory specs for our Lab. Looks promising.
frans goes blog 