frans

Fan studies conference

There is a really interesting two days conference on fan studies in our university, taking place today and tomorrow. It is an open event, so please be welcome. Matt Hills from Gardiff just presented the opening keynote, giving a comprehensive overview on the various narratives that have been offered about fan studies and about its role and development. See: the programme in Finnish.

Hermanni

Hermanni
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

This is Hermanni, a living cake that has been in our care for the last 10 days. My version was in the end spiced with banana chunks, hazelnuts and hazelnut chocolate pieces. Tasty! But I must admit that the principles behind this kind of chain letter cakes escape me — the dough is distributed from friend to friend, fed with sugars and then divided and fed again. And eventually you can put it in the oven and bake it. And eat. Supposedly it gets its yeast directly from the air or something?

Stiga Collector

Stiga Collector
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

One practical thing to consider in gardens is the lawn. Our aim is to have less grass and more “woodlands” or natural look in our yard, but still there will be more than enough grass. This morning was spent setting up Stiga Collector 46 S Combi, which we got after a lengthy comparison process. This is a compromise, of course. The professional, solid-body lawnmowers can cost 1000 euros or more. This one is not as sturdy in its construction and materials, but it has the right feature set: 3-in-1 cutting, collecting and bio-slicing functionalities. And since Stiga is coming from Sweden, you can trust Finnish stores providing spare parts and service for it also in the future.

Pinsiön taimisto

Pinsiön taimisto
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.Another extremely busy week behind, and time to relax by doing something physical. This weekend we traveled to Pinsiön Taimisto, a nice plant and garden sale c. 12 km from Tampere. They have rather good collections of trees, bushes, various flowers and also garden path stones, gravel and sand. This is important as we move towards the next stage in the garden project (albeit planting all these trees requires some serious shovel-work, and we have much to do in the house project, too). Keeps you busy, and also better fit, I hope. Gardening is a nice counterpart to the digital life.

A new Angel in our aquarium

A new Angel in our aquarium
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Vappu was too cold to be outside, mostly. So we fixed places inside instead. We got some new fish, including four natural-coloured Angelfish in our aquarium and seeing how they took the moving (rather well, and in good spirits) was fun. More photos of fish, butterflies and babies in: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2007-05-01/

Understanding games through games

Kongregate has an interesting series of game studies lessons in the form of simple web games available (from Pixelate), please take a look at the Kongregate: Play Understanding Games: Episode 1.

New research publications

This should have gone out some time ago already, but there have been some delays. But: the Mobile Content Communities (MC2) project has finally got its final report book published. This is probably not yet announced anywhere officially, but I got my copies directly from Marko Turpeinen in the FENIX results seminar, so I know these books exists. Thus, I heartily recommend getting your hands on Mobile Content Communities (Eds. Marko Turpeinen and Kai Kuikkaniemi), HIIT Publications 2007-1 (ISBN 978-951-22-8757-4). It contains some key article publications from our games research lab as well, including:

Tero Laukkanen, “Creative Gamers: Examining the Modding Culture and Its Mobile Prospects” (pp. 137-153)
Laura Ermi, “Gameplay Experiences and Mobile Contexts” (pp. 156-166)
Britta Neitzel: “Fluid Places: On Real, Virtual and Fictive Spaces and Places in Digital Games” (pp. 167-174).

And there are many more interesting articles in there as well that deal with community-centric design issues, user-created augmented reality games, mobile communications and such case studies as Habbo Hotel users, Neverwinter Nights, live action role-playing (larp) and geocaching. This publication is a summary of several years worth of work, build by an international team of 21 people working together — hope it gets its readers even if it is part of an academic publication series rather than product of some major commercial publisher.

Update: this is now available also as a PDF for download: http://pong.hiit.fi/dcc/papers/mc2_final_report.pdf

Winter Assembly & DiGRA Finland meeting

Winter Assembly & DiGRA Finland meeting
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Aki Järvinen, Elina Koivisto, Tony Manninen and Olli Sotamaa are here explaining how they became games researchers. This is part of Winter Assembly, a 1000+ gamer event in Tampere taking place this weekend; Neogames centre and DiGRA Finland co-organise a games researcher meeting with kind support by Assembly organisers. Lots of interesting talks, huge numbers of games sessions and a good example of fruitful cooperation among all sorts of parties.

Plant paradise

Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

New owners of a garden, we are eagerly visiting greenhouses — this week in Honkasen Puutarha in Kangasala, which proved to be a real plant paradise.

Test-driving Joost

One of the interesting things I have been playing with recently is the new Joost tv: an online, on-demand television style video service. It is rather easy to use, and even my old PC in downstairs almost manages to run it (time to upgrade, yep), but the content is the actual king here, of course. It has some anime, some very B-class science fiction, but the diversity seems to be increasing, so this system actually might have a chance. We’ll see.