This was a curious day, November 30th. We had a deadline of a book project focusing on children’s view and experience of media and information society very early in the morning (and we came in an hour early with Laura for that, sigh…) There will be two book chapters on games research from us there, I am part of the editorial board also. Then there were an overlapping period of project meetings, I was told that someone had stolen the videoconferencing equipment and data projector from our meeting room, and I was trying to sort out some of the submissions going into the DiGRA 2005 conference from our GameLab. On the way home, I dropped in to the post office to pick up a copy of the hefty tome of “Encyclopedia of Play” (Leikin Pikkujattilainen, WSOY), which contains my brief piece on digital play, games and game studies. Nice quality, as a physical object, that book; even if the contents are somewhat heterogeneous, to say the least.
Now it is well past the midnight, the last submissions are all in, I hope. Sipping some Casillero del Diablo (Syrah), I feel this weird mixture of gratification and uneasiness, that seems to be the spirit of our time, if there is such thing. It is like you can reach almost anything if you work hard enough for that, the stars are there, almost touching your outreaching fingertips. And simultaneously, there is the broken window, door that cannot be locked, the tower that is eternally under construction in that castle of achievement. No crown, only the public servant in a grey suit asking for an addendum into the annex of an application form that relates to some obscure process somewhere in the future past of this bureaucratic desert of the (un)real… Should be sleeping already, obviously. Cheers.
frans goes blog 