I visited Leinola school in Wednesday evening, speaking in a Media Education panel. Finns tend to be rather liberal and open-minded in international comparison, and this was also rather civilized event. I talked about need of parents to 1) pay attention to games, 2) to listen their children in order to understand both them and their relation to games, and, 3) join games themselves, to bridge the digital divide, and to enjoy some free time. Media fasting was also discussed; my point was that it is demeaning our lives and anything of value in media culture to bury ourselves in media indiscriminately — it might be wise sometimes to switch off all media from our lives for a few days. Might try that even myself. Sun, outdoors, what a combination.
Category: game studies
anything games, games research related
larp phd project
Today there was the first PhD seminar in the Department of Information Studies to discuss the thesis project of J. Tuomas Harviainen. With Markus Montola’s work already on the way to the Media Culture, there is interesting research into role-playing in the works. It is just a shame we do not have Game Studies or even Hypermedia (New Media Studies) established subjects that one could do a BA/MA or PhD in our university. In practice it means that I am volunteering or working as a “hired consultant” then to these other departments when supervising game related theses like these. Working title of J. Tuomas’s work: Information Seeking Patterns in Pseudo-autonomous Temporary Realities.
announcing DiGRA 2007 Tokyo
It is now official: the third DiGRA world conference will take place in Tokyo, Japan in September 2007. Take a look at the announcement page in DiGRA.org.
carcassonne easter
Carcassonne start into Easter: four different expansion packs and a nice dinner with Johanna and Heikki. I must confess that I prefer a game with a bit simpler rules: two hours of preparation before the game can even start is too much. But it is so nice to have a break and some free time. 🙂
game studio and talk in itk'06
Yet another seminar (YAS) this week, as we hit the road to get to Hämeenlinna. Interaktiivinen Teknologia Koulutuksessa (that is Interactive Technology in Education conference in English) adversises to be the largest conference in Finland about information and communcation technology in educational use. We have not done so much work in Serious Games or other applied games research areas, but there are many interesting possibilities worth looking there — particularly in educating people to understand the scope and nature of so-called common games. Every game is educational, in the sense that you need to learn a lot in order to be able to face the challenges that are part of many games. But more about it in the conference tomorrow. Welcome to visit Game Research Lab booth: we have a small ‘game studio’ set up for two days in ITK.
See: ITK conference web pages.
new race, wisp (wow april fooling)
This is actually sort of funny: they claim to offer wisp as a new Alliance player race in WoW. See the announcement. Since it is time for the April Fool jokes, this is sort of easy to get, but might confuse someone for a moment. On a more non-friendly note, Blizzard appears to have some trouble getting their WoW account management working this week, and they are not advising their poor addicted players on what to do when the playing time runs out. Tsat-tsat!
gdc pics, flickr
I am using some time this Saturday resting (still recovering from that flu I got while returning from the US without my winter clothing), and putting online some pictures. This link should take you into the selected Flickr set of GDC pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fransmayra/search/tags:gdc/ – and for the full archive, go to http://unet.fi/pics/2006-03-24-GDC/
playing roles seminar
The seminar was very interesting, as I supposed it would be: many great talks and some promising plans of future collaborations. I have now put some pictures (all of which seem to be blurry, btw) both into my own server in and into Flickr. I hope this tag-search link works: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fransmayra/search/text:playing/
– and more in my own server: http://unet.fi/pics/2006-03-31/
rpg scholars gather in tampere
There is busy RPG oriented activity currently in and around Tampere, as role-playing games scholars and students are gathering here from around the world. The event is already more than full-booked, but you can take a look at the programme from the web pages at: http://gamelab.uta.fi/rpg-seminar . Looking towards really interesting couple of days!
what' next?
Having just listened to two GDC keynotes, Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata and Will Wright, that is still the question: what’s next? There are no major revelations, new revolutions taking place every year, and this year’s GDC appears to be such intermediate show, mostly just adding detail to yester-year’s news. Will is always inspiring though, in encouraging us to cultivate our obsessions. Astrobiology rocks!
frans goes blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.