Month: February 2009

GameSpace seminar in Winter Assembly

Our two-year research project that looked into design and evaluation methodologies of casual, multiplayer and mobile games (also considering money gaming issues) has now finished; today the good folks at Winter Assembly event provided us the rooms to feature the results from research. Pictured is project manager Janne Paavilainen; other speakers included Annakaisa Kultima, Petri Ikonen, Jussi Holopainen and Jussi Laakkonen. The final research report will be published online (forthcoming during this spring). Links:

Edit: here are some camera-phone photos I took in the event: [link].

Games researcher meeting in Tampere

Today takes place (in Telakka restaurant, Tampere) the games researcher meeting organised by DiGRA Finland, Games as Services research project, Finnish Yearbook of Game Studies and Neogames centre. Pictured is Olli Sotamaa and some of the other, c. 30 participants. Much interesting talk and good company!

Didactics symposium keynote

Today I started my morning by delivering a keynote on Digital Games Literacy (in Finnish) in the national didactics symposium (a conference of Finnish learning researchers and teacher trainers). Pictured is professor Bernadette Baker, who spoke about multiple senses of ‘subject’ and how to reform the teacher – child – content relationships. The full programme is here: http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/okl/ad2009/ohjelma.html.

Moving to Windows 7

During weekend, I invested my two free hours to install the Windows 7 Beta (talk about leisure time, there). I was pleasantly surprised that the first public beta already seems so ready. I think that if I can get all my utility programs to run under it, I will probably move directly away from Vista (too many issues in that OS version still). The multiboot Win7/Vista/Ubuntu needed some tweaking — nice instructions are e.g. here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1035999

Windows 7, Beta 1
Windows 7, Beta 1

Remap special Thinkpad keys in Vista?

While I am still waiting for a chance to replace my sub-standard T500 with another laptop, I need to figure out ways to live with it. It is slow, but apparently getting a memory upgrade from 2GB to 3 or 4GB should speed up the Vista considerably. There is nothing you can do to the painful display, it stays as bad as it is. But there are also those couple of annoying little [previous page] and [next page] keys next to the arrow keys. Those are useless, and I want to remap them to [page up] and [page down] instead — that is how similarly positioned keys are used in Acer Aspire One, for example. But I cannot find any way to do that in Thinkpad running Vista. There is a special keyboard customization utility coming along with all other ThinkVantage software, but that allows a rather limited set of keyboard shortcuts to be programmed. And as far as I can see, those forward/backward keys are not supported by the customize utility — which is very silly. I can find instructions how to do the remapping in Thinkpads running Linux (e.g. in http://blog.vrplumber.com/index.php?/archives/2232-Need-to-figure-out-key-remapping-under-KDEX.html) using piece of software called xmodmap. I cannot find anything similar for Vista — but surely there must be a similar Windows utility somewhere?