July 2004 – frans goes blog

Summer is perfect time to do whatever you want. At least in principle: I can just about still remember times when I spent long Northern summer nights reading or playing. Nowadays, other priorities take hold. Summer is perfect time to work; that is true for an academic. Winters are filled with dozens of projects, past, present, future: planning, reporting and administration work. And there is of course teaching and other things like DiGRA and other association work I am involved with. When summer comes, I am just desperate to do research: the work I actually want to do most of all. So, I just sit inside, read and write. Wonderful!

There has not been so much time for games of books. I did read some more from the Culture series by Banks. There was also some straightforward action, Top Spin (a tennis game) and PainKiller. Looking at the recent releases, I have not found so much originality, but then again – for a summer night of entertainment, even yet another tennis game, or first-person-shooter can do.

After some days of driving around Finland during my summer holidays, we ended up into Finncon, the national science fiction and fantasy convention in Jyvaskyla. The event was its usual pleasant mixture of talks, presentations and good company (this time the invasion of teenage Anime fans in their cosplay outfits brought more colour to the geeky mix).

The foreign special quests were Robin Hobb, John Clute and Gwyneth Jones, whose readings I especially enjoyed. It is really pity that her work is so hard to find, at least in our country. We had interesting discussions both at the science fiction researchers’ meeting in Friday, as well as in the SF Research panel in Sunday. My personal highlight, however was the Games as Fiction and Fantasy session we had organised with Jussi Holopainen (Nokia/NRC), Mikael Kasurinen (Remedy) and Mike Pohjola (the author of Myrskyn aika RPG). The topic was impossibly complex, and time was ridiculously short, which made it all great fun. Audience was active in making questions, and I hope we created some conceptual clarity, even if much was of course left unanswered.