tech or not?

E3 came and went, with its various games tech news. New devices, like info on the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, and an updated Nokia N-Gage were announced. All very interesting and nice, I however find myself also looking for some breaking news on the actual game design areas. Games that received most attention seemed to be safe-and-secure sequels to old success concepts: Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-Life 2. It is hard to build future just on imitation. Nor just on new tech, even if all areas of innovation are important.

Tried out the D&D Heroes tonight — and in game technology terms, it appears superior to BGDA2, but — again! — something is missing. This time, the immense repositories of creative content built for D&D during the years have translated into a shallow and impersonal game setting that does not help you to get immersed in the fantasy. There is a careful line between entertaining stereotypes and near-mythic structures acting as mirrors for imaginative production, and plain old banality.

home from dublin

Last week I joined HIIT guys in a three-day trip to the Dublin’s Media Lab Europe. Many thanks to Simon Jones and all others in MLE who took time to discuss with us and present their work. Interesting stuff. And the beer was great, of course! (Janne and Fernando here, in the mood…)

looking for the right stuff

After BGDA2 (hm.. the Black Isle website seems to be down at the moment), I was encouraged to continue testing other RPG-style games. However, it seems to be that it is hard to say what are the right holding power factors, or the right combination of them, in my case at least. Neverwinter Nights is an old acquaintance, but I do not seem to find time to actually play the Shadows of the Undrentide expansion that I recently installed. And there is the Hordes of the Underdark pack also available, oh yes. Last night we then playtested Final Fantasy: Chrystal Chronicles with Laura (CameCube and two GBAs with cables involved), and even if the collaborative gameplay has its obvious strengths, there seemed to be something missing. Don’t know. Perhaps it is just the lack of history and familiarity with FF series that was holding us down? Might be that trying again would change the feeling, kupo.

servants of the machines

Continuing the previous note on the firewall configuration slavery; I have been thinking about the increasing complexity of our surroundings. Working with our Morphome project in the Lab have made me pay more attention to the amount of work we do just in order to maintain the machinery that surrounds us. Current information technology is obviously complex and still sometimes unrealiable to the point of being ridiculous, but think also the other technological components of your living environment: how much of your time do you spend taking care of your house, car, bicycle, or clothing? How much of that work you actually want to, or enjoy doing? To put this other way around, what would be the “heart of our humanity” without our constant service to technology, supposedly at our service?

firewall burns

I finally took it over to make my system even slightly better in terms of security, and installed a router with firewall capabilities. Nothing goes as planned, not with IT, at least. Practically whole weekend was ruined, as I was installing, rebooting, reconfiguring in an endless loop. This time the error conditions had a sort of surreal beauty with them: system seemed to work or not work with random sites and services, simply at whim. Phoned my ISP service number, and just after half an hour of queuing (oh, perhaps 45 mins), and with no help, I return home and reboot, just to find everything miraculously working again. Reading the router system logs, the lullaby of electronic times?

life after holidays?

Wow. — More than 3000 emails later, I realize just how dependent we have become on the ICT infrastructure. Not in the prophesised positive symbiotic sense, but rather on the more ambiguous sense of cyborg existence in a world filled with spam. Few days without the net connection means two weeks of race against the new waves of binary rubbish heaping on top of the old ones. Nevertheless: great holiday, great to be back.

off the net

Last week I have busily been rushing towards finishing all the accumulated jobs from my desk. Moderate success only: there seems to be an endless supply somewhere, arriving as a steady stream through email. Anyways, off I go now, happily to experience my first scuba-diving trip ever to Red Sea. So, if this blog never continues, I rest in Egypt.

electronic publishing with a vengeance?

Today we finally delivered the PeTo project report to our university’s electronic library. There were some usual last minute troubles, though. PDF is a curious format with the double function of being designed primarily for screen use with its links and search functions, and yet almost everyone first prints these things to paper. We probably have to start making two different PDF files of every publication, and delivering the high-resolution one to the printing house — our lab should have a pilot project with digital print-on-demand contract with a local company soon enough. Sign of times. Living at the transition period means that you are doing everything twice, all the time.

digital evenings

Hm. Having recently played through the Xbox treat, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II with Laura, I find myself reluctant to take up another big game. I ended up “playing” with the new Winamp 5 with its easily accessible “Internet Radio” (streaming mp3) and “Internet TV” video channels; the semantics of “play” were what we also discussed with Satu and Britta, after Satu’s presentation in the Game Studies Seminar. I really enjoy all these toys — but so do I enjoy also books. Yet, can a book be a toy? Probably not if it is perceived as literature (Espen might disagree)? Saw a kid playing with a book in Akateeminen Bookshop yesterday, though. One of those musical books, makes an endless melody when you open it and play with it. That was a toy book, definitely. Escaped after two minutes of that.

hello world

Hello world! This blog is not meant as a very serious or active undertaking. Rather I see this as my semi-professional diary; and since I am notoriously bad keeper of diaries, we’ll see… 🙂 Anyways, it is good to be able to make and share notes with such a flexible and easy tool. And you are served by the links on the sidebar: DiGRA, Hypermedia Laboratory, Neogames and MindTrek are all communities that I am currently involved with.

[Edit; this was my first post into the original Blogger blog; sidebars and links have changed many times after that — like the associated circles of life, too.]