game studies – Page 39 – frans goes blog

Updated: travel schedule with web links

I updated my travel schedule and listed also the web pages for those conferences and seminars:

DiGRA 2007 in Tokyo (game studies), Sept. 21-30: http://www.digra2007.jp/
PTS2007 in Amsterdam (gambling and addiction research), Oct. 4-6: http://www.a-klinikka.fi/ajankohtaista/paihdetiedotusseminaari07.html
Making Cultural Heritage Truly Inclusive conference in Helsinki (experience design for museums), Oct. 12: http://www.accessibility2007.info/
Changing Views on Technology, Media and Cultural Approaches research seminar in Joensuu (media culture studies), Nov. 8-9: http://www.joensuu.fi/tietoyhteiskunta/changingviews/
Future Play conference in Toronto (game studies), Nov. 14-18: http://www.futureplay.org/
National Conference of Communication Studies in Vaasa (communication and media studies), Nov. 30-Dec. 1: http://www.uwasa.fi/viestintatieteet/english/conference/

Note that the dates are my travel dates, and thus not necessarily those of the entire conference or seminar duration. See you somewhere around this globe this fall!

1-18-2008

This is for you, interested in alternate reality game style puzzles, viral advertising and fantasy movies. Search words:

1-18-2008

Cloverfield

Ethan Haas Was Right

The Monstrous Movie

Slusho

Recently getting my hands on Ian Bogost’s new book, Persuasive Games, this was a nice coincidence: a news piece telling about board games produced under the German Nazi regime coming into auction — an interesting, albeit perverse example about the propagandist use of games. See: BBC NEWS | UK | Nazi board games under the hammer.

Full HD

Full HD
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Samsung M86 ‘Tulip’ 37″ television (LE37M86BDX/XEE) was our choice for our living room. A “full HD” television is also suitable for game sessions, and even for that photo editing stuff in the living room, close to your family. 1920×1080 resolution is enough for many things, but the distance from the screen to the sofa is of course different as compared to the typical PC screen use situation. I still need to learn more about fine-tuning and calibrating a HDTV screen. Here is a nice “dummies intro” into television tweaking, using THX test patterns from a commercial DVD. This screen is not perfect (is there such a thing?) but it should work for us for some time now and into the future, too.

Golden Compass, Stardust, LOTRO

Fantasy in its various shapes and types has been my enduring passion from the childhood days. This summer many nights have been spent adventuring in LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) game world, familiar from years of literary adventures in the Middle-Earth. Then there are the movies. From my favourite authors, Stardust is based on a novella by Neil Gaiman (as a graphic novel with illustrations by Charles Vess). Still waiting for this to premiere in Finland, this should be fairly ok. Another interesting question mark is how the movie version of Golden Compass will look like (based on the charming His Dark Materials novel series by Philip Pullman). The trailer at least looks fantastic enough, or what do you think?

Baby eating wiimote

Vauva ja wiimote / Baby eating wiimote
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Our baby tested the Nintendo Wii console and the final verdict was that the wiimote controller does not taste particularly good.

DiGRA 2007 program announced

As the DiGRA Japan team just announced, they have just released the full program for DiGRA 2007 conference. Quickly glancing through, the very first impression: looks promising! Take a look at: http://www.digra2007.jp/Program.html.

Edit: The second look: there seems to be some timing conflicts in this version, though. E.g. in Friday at 16:30 one is forced to choose between MMORPG symposium and the panel session of RPGs (“Character, Player, Game”). The audience for both is pretty much the same, though. There are overlaps also in game design research presentations (Aki Järvinen and Jesper Juul having their sessions at the same time in Saturday), but I suppose it is impossible to avoid totally such overlaps in a conference that is so tightly focused on game studies as DiGRA conferences are. Hope there will be some finetuning of the program yet, though.