Truth be told

Not often is the game scholar mailing list GAMESNETWORK the scene of passionate outbursts.
But in the proud tradition of this blog of posting digital snippets without commentary, here’s two interesting methodological recommendations for intrepid young scholars in the field:

Scholar 1:

And for that matter too many of you are studying WoW. Stop it. You’re boring the crap out of me.

Quickly followed by Scholar 2:

…nobody but academics and corporate marketers care about Second Life. This should be a sign to all involved. The only people I’ve met in there are researchers, academics trying to stalk other academics (me included), people selling their badly designed t-shirts, and corporate salesmen. Its my idea of hell, and research on it is my idea of a journey therein.

Kiss your email problems goodbye

Throughout my thesis writing I found techniques to solve a variety of small-scale IT problems, lifehacks in so many words.
I won’t bore you with them. With one exception: My email setup. Here’s what it achieves:

– No lost emails “ever”, and no need to delete emails
– No more worrying about SMTP servers when on the road (after six months you’ll forget that there ever was a problem)
– The ability to have all one’s emails in one big archive (if you’ve stored your historic correspondence somewhere)
– All this without changing your email address(es)
– Use all your email addresses through one webmail interface
Continue reading Kiss your email problems goodbye

Guess the source

A tiny quiz: Where do you think the following snippet originated?:

“Uncertainty is becoming a basic condition, a human, existential condition that we cannot run nor escape from… We must participate in a discourse on the premises of uncertainty and examine and seek out meaning and options in dialogue and relation to others, in order to find a solution to the, in this time, complex issues.”

No, I’m sorry, you were wrong. This is an excerpt from a newsletter from my daughter‘s kindergarten.
Be honest with me, would you say it’s time to panic?

Reverse rhetorics

I’ve become acutely interested in argumentation in preparation for the course on Digital Rhetorics (Danish course website) I’ll be teaching next semester. On that note, I found the following quote quite interesting:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it. [emphasis added]

… not to say funny.

A canon of significant games

Some time ago the Danish minister of culture initiated an effort to establish a series of cultural “canons”, listing the most important works in a range of genre/media.
This initiative, of course, spurred on all kinds of ignored forms of expression to publish their own lists. And so, along with colleagues from the Danish game researcher network spilforskning.dk and at the suggestion of Multimedieforeningen (the Danish game business association), I have been involved in picking out the 20-something most important videogames ever. In our humble opinion, of course.

And the listed are… (with links to descriptions in Danish):

Our initiative has recieved some attention. For instance:

New article on videogames and economic game theory

chicken

The Christmas issue of Game Studies has hit the streets. This implies that my own article The Games Economists Play – Implications of Economic Game Theory for the Study of Computer Games has now been revealed.

Here’s the abstract:

It is a source of confusion that economists for decades have worked on “game theory” while studying economic behaviour. However, while not focused on games in the recreational sense this perspective does provide a highly meticulous complementary framework for the understanding of computer game structure and player behaviour. This article attempts to extract useful analytic concepts and insights from economic game theory and to give suggestions for how these might be put to concrete use in the study of computer games. A non-technical introduction is given, the framework is applied to computer games, a brief case study is performed and finally ideas for future research are presented.

What more can you ask for?

And hey, merry Christmas out there.

Fear of reptiles



Billede039, originally uploaded by Agent Smith.

You can’t really tell from the picture, but you must believe me. In this very moment there is an angry green robot dinosaur clawing at my office door and roaring ominously. That’s when you just know that it’s Wednesday. (If you don’t believe me, drop by and check it out).