Shards 2005

My utopia for the day is cybercommunism. Even though I've been lead to believe that a system like capitalism is a necessity for production and distribution of material wealth, I have hard time seeing why we should stay in such a problematic structure when it comes to distributing our endless digital wealth. Cybercommunism and material capitalism can coexist, too. A three-point action plan:

Demolish copyrights! The copyright we need is the right to copy whatever you want as much as you want. Artists and producers should be given the bragging rights, however, and they should keep tabs on what's liked from download numbers and polls. The central ethical guideline is "Do whatever you want unless it harms someone else". Downloading doesn't.

Establish third-party ransom organizations! Ransom is the profit model where an artist creates a product, and declares that once the audience has paid him a certain amoount in donations, the product is released for free in the Internet. We need established systems that can handle the millions of euros going back and forth and solve situations where the donations either exceed or eventually fail to meet the ransom prices. Only works at least halfway ready should be ransomed, to ensure the delivery on ransom -- and to enable the smaller crowds or critics to describe the product to the ransom-paying audience. A lot of newspapers work like this: As long as papers are sold enough, the content can also be made available for free in the web.

Fund the content-producers societally! Since the technology and the society makes it hard for the artist to get decently paid for his work, this needs to be done institutionally in addition to ransom systems. In order to avoid the conservativity death trap of public service television companies, a multitude of funding institutions need to be established, and the people making decisions within them must equal the demographics of culture consumption. Funding decisions need to be informed by both download ratios and artistic critique. A lot of academic research is done like this: University pays me for working, but almost all I do can be downloaded from some corner of the net. Cite as much as you want, but I get the bragging rights.

As long as our society chooses to live in the cybercapitalist order of the 80's, the new EU copyright legislation makes sense: Downloading movies with BitTorrent should be illegal, and the officials should be given tools powerful enough to uphold the law. But the truth is that the first adopters have been running towards cybercommunism for a decade now, mostly without realizing what's the fundamental logic of going there. In Finland, the latest scandals (Lex Karpela and Sony rootkit fiasco) have contributed a lot to the self-understanding of these people.

I suppose the copyleft people have been thinking along these lines too. Gotta look at what they say.

To some this is old news already: I began as a columnist in PC Pelaaja, a Finnish biweekly magazine on computer gaming. What I got is basically a typical ivory tower column, where a researcher climbs down to meet the masses and tries to express a complete idea in 3000 characters.

My opener is about Manifesto Games and the state of game industry. It's in #2, which was published last Thursday and is still in the shops for a week or so.

It seems that my face fills a whole page, in colour.

A neuromancer friend pointed me to Carey Goldberg, the 30th of November 2005.an article in Boston Globe, where the neuroscientists of the brand-new Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex of MIT tell about their huge new facilities. Neurology will be extremely interesting in 10 or so years, when they finally begin to produce results a layman can comprehend.

Like, the research on lie detectors:

Some day, he [Susumu Tonegawa] said, a device the size of a Red Sox cap will be able to read out and analyze data from billions of neurons so quickly that it will be possible to tell whether the person wearing it is lying.

I don't know -- I'd like to make a brilliant analysis of this excerpt, pointing out some grave societal concerns I have. But then again, all I could say should be obvious to any reader of Shards.

Interesting or not, I couldn't look at myself in the mirror if I was the father of a foolproof lie detector.

Visiting Copenhagen is extremely nice, as it is a cool city with great people. You know who you are.

I got a special opportunity to visit IO Interactive earlier this week -- the guys who make the excellent Hitman series. I was left with one question: Where are all the making of -documents of digital game industry?

Only when I got to see how they work with my own eyes, I began to understand the incredible amount of work to be done with one of these games. One guesstimate was that one Hitman game might take some 100-150 years of work to be completed, with the levels taking maybe one year each! No wonder this stuff only pays of if it hits top ten.

Even keeping the minigame gospel of Gonzalo Frasca and the gaming industry rants of Greg Costikyan in mind, I have to confess that some AAA titles are in the peak of gaming coolness. The lifelike scenarios of uncompromising Hitman are precious indeed -- even if the game takes a century to create and two weeks to play.

In addition to visiting IO, my tour d'Europe included a project review in Bonn by independent experts, who quite appropriately blasted my christmas holiday by rejecting one of our deliverables, and the ongoing Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice.DAC 2005 conference, where I talked about Exploring the Edge of the Magic Circle. Defining Pervasive Games.Exploring the Edge of the Magic Circle.

It's all official now. The University of Tampere Faculty of Humanities accepted me as a doctoral student to the Department of Literature and Arts. And the work will be done in the interdisciplinary discipline of Media Culture. My supervisors are Mikko Lehtonen and Frans Mäyrä, and in my application to the faculty I guessed that I might be finished in 2009.

Check out my initial research plan for a doctoral dissertation on role-playing.

(In Other Blogs: My plan has caught the attention of the media, the hobbyists and the research community.)

Lately I've been thinking about stakes people have in games. I think of them as an umbrella concept including time, money, effort and emotion put into a game that the player risks losing as a consequence of that game. In professional sports the importance of stakes is easily understandable, but when we get into what's going on in non-profit playing of persistent world games or cheering sport audiences, the things get interesting.

In a recent post, a hardcore player of World of Warcraft gives an illustrative story on how it feels to achieve an immensely time-consuming high-stakes goal. This guy spent months fighting on Azerothian battlegrounds in order to accomplish one of the most worksome tasks of the game, gaining the title of High Marshal along with the super weapons attached to the title.

This fellow, who appears to be a mature thinker, old enough to be having a real work and educated enough to present his points concisely, uses the stakes to explain the psychology behing his weeks of intense, ceaseless grind. The simple deal is this: Once you've invested a lot of time and realize you will lose the investment unless you invest a lot more, you get caught in a bad way. You can't quit, you can't win. This guy took a vacation from work to grind harder in order to get over it.

What is strange that the players know that even if they win, they gain nothing but a closure to the effort. The ultimate rewards gained are rarely put to use, since there is nothing to gain afterwards.

Even on a "soft" server like Argent Dawn, where the competition is nowhere near as steep as the PVP servers [...] those that have achieved rank 14 have at times succumbed to exhaustion, psychological burnout, and general malaise in regards to the game. The system creates a burnout or shell shock affect in the players that participate in it, causing them to cut back on or cease playing the game entirely. In effect, this system can cost Blizzard customers just as constant overtime can cost a company an employee. Anecdotally, many different players on the Blizzard forums report that the rank 14s on their servers all but vanish after achieving their ranks.

You can walk away without having lost the stakes, but that's it. You can walk away without being a quitter, but that's all you get.

I finally read the Finnish national epic, Täällä Pohjantähden alla by Väinö Linna. It was simultaneously a disappointment, a very good bunch of books and an illuminating view to the history of Finnish nation-state.

The disappointment part comes from the fact that even though its fun and smart, I found it much less fun and smart than Tuntematon sotilas; in short, the entertainment value was significantly lower. Though I never got bored with it, I was never compelled to obsessively read further either.

Structurally, though, it is a very good piece; the touch of decades passing is very concrete as Finnish countryside gets modernized by electricity, phones and cars as the years pass. For a kid like me, having known the last generation of the book personally, it's easy to relate to the events of the book; to understand the what-if:s present, and to understand the incredibly short history of the modern, industrial society. Remember: The dad of a computer engineer might easily have been born in a house without electricity. Linna is very strong at tangiblizing things. Partly this is art by accident of course -- I'm not the intended reader as the books were written in the 50's.

The illuminating view to the history of Finnish nation-state is something I'd like to have with a second opinion. Though I believe Linna has his facts correct, I'm ideologically a wee bit suspicious about the way he presents things. Speaking through his characters he raises the issue of Svinhufvud and Mannerheim contemplating on taking over and going fascist before and during the second world war. According to the Finnish school history we never were ideologically allied with the Axis even though we fought Soviet Union with them, but history being written by whites I'm not inclined to trust my schoolbooks either.

Bottom line says that this is a must read for Finns; scrap Seitsemän veljestä already and get this instead. Non-Finns, don't bother -- you wouldn't get it linguistically nor culturally.

The guys of Nightwish gave boot to their figurehead and singer Tarja Turunen. In doing so, they have given meaning back to two years of my life in a very concrete fashion; if this isn't a brilliant example of publicity management gone haywire, then nothing is. Give yourself an excercise by reading the public letter the other members of the band published on Nightwish website, apparently without discussing with her first, and also Iltalehtiher comments from today's papers.

Compare this way of handling the issue with quarreling in private first, and then publishing a release of two paragraphs, making a deal that no-one comments anything in public. It's not really that difficult; here's my press release for you guys.

Tarja Turunen leaves Nightwish

The lead singer Tarja Turunen leaves Nightwish after nine successful years, due to internal differences. In future she plans to pursue her career as classical singer, while Nightwish looks for a new female singer with similar style. The band members do not want to comment the issue any further at this time.

[Insert some cool crap about the next album here, assuring that life will go on and music will be great in the future as well].

Everyone gets out with dignity and no mudslinging tars the image of the band in the eyes of the fans. Just pause for a moment, get a deep breath, write a short and concise description with facts only, show it to a professional and read it 20 times through. That's it. Now that Turunen got bashed publicly, she promised to bash back in a press conference soonish, undoubtedly getting a lot more publicity for the unpleasant situation.

Well, you don't need to be a PR professional to play in a metal band. But I bet the guys at the record company are getting nightmares from the media-adventures of team Nightwish.

In Memoriam: Matti Wuori.

One of the smartest and most compassionate Finnish intellectuals is dead. Wuori was a true humanist and a painful voice of dissent keeping inconvenient truths in daylight at all times. I especially respect the way he defended people few of us considered worth fighting for, and the way his calm voice and razor-sharp intellect kept the principles of human rights on the agenda of public discussion.

Whenever I disagreed with him, his statements forced me to thoroughly scrutinize my stance, and more often than not I changed my mind. Wuori was never influenced by the changing moods and quick movements of popular opinion.

Wanted: A replacement for public conscience.

My exile from reality goes on. It's my second month in Azeroth going on, and I note that my work has suffered a little from playing World of Warcraft, while my other role-playing activities have been practically hibernating. Yes, I do consider myself obsessed, perhaps even addicted according to Mark Griffiths' biopsychosocial criteria of addiction.

He says that addicts exhibit many or all of the following elements in their behavior: Salience, Mood modification, Tolerance, Withdrawal, Conflict and Relapse.

For the latest weeks, work and Warcraft have been the salient elements in my life. Right now I'm greatly irritated by the fact that my server is down and I'd be quite satisfied if playing right now. I'm quite tolerant now for excessive doses: I could play for 12-16 hours during one day without getting bored at all; though it would be even physically painful in the end. I'm not sure if I suffer from withdrawal, perhaps a bit mentally -- I'm thinking about it all the time now -- but not physically. It is in conflict with my other activities. I haven't tested on relapsing; probably after two-three weeks of not playing I wouldn't relapse; however I remember cutting my Star Wars Galaxies subscription out of the fear of relapsing.

If I broaden the scope to computer game addiction rather than Warcraft-addiction, it's clear that these periods of spending more than 40 hours a week with a game happen about once a year. Games that have made me do that include Civilization series, Ultima series, Planescape: Torment, Warcraft 3, Arcanum and many others. A quality game is like an excellent book you'd rather read than chat with your friends. This game obsession is naturally overcome when the game becomes repetitive, boring and easy enough. For me this kind of a completion of a game is a break point, and I have no need to begin with another game then. While gambler's slotmachine is an endless and repetitive cycle, this obsession draws from exploration of new.

If you happen to visit Defias Brotherhood server, feel free to tag along with Malbard of The Forsaken Legion.

Okay, I'm really irritated now. And just made the decision that I'll never ever buy any more crap from D-Link.

The brief recap of my problems began with the purchase of a set including D-Link G-604T integrated WLAN+ADSL router, and WLAN card for my home computer. I figured out that as WLAN systems have occasional problems talking to each other, having the both from the same manufacturer would make my life easier.

That's the theory anyway.

Well, the WLAN didn't work perfectly. After days of tuning, I got it to work 99% of the time, leaving only the problem that it disconnected a couple of times every day for ten-or-so seconds. Just an irritation, except a mortal one when you are playing online games.

The real problem was that out of the two systems, ADSL doesn't work either. Called Saunalahti tech support some 10 times about days-long unexplainable disconnects. Their story is that my box was trying an ADSL-2 handshake, in a situation where neither my box or my net service had nothing to do with the protocol. At times it worked just perfectly, and at times Saunalahti and D-Link decided to do days-long handshakes.

So, I just bought a new piece of equiment, hoping to get both of these major problems solved. Even though the Finnish regulations say that you can't sell an ADSL box not approved by all the major ISP:s, my experience with Saunalahti and D-Link made me call again the customer support, asking that if G-604T really is incompatible as they blame, what box is compatible then? So I bought Telewell EA510 instead.

Perfect so far, except for the fact that it doesn't talk to the D-Link WLAN card in my tabletop computer. Now I can get to internet with either my laptop WLAN or with an ethernet cable from my computer. But the WLAN+ADSL system still fails me.

I believe that installing and troubleshooting these systems have taken 40 hours during the last year, including hours of queuing in various customer supports. In addition, I've lost a couple of weeks worth net connectivity, which has also hindered my telecommuting. Where can I send the bill?

We're making See the Call for Papers here. Note: No participation fees!an academic seminar on role-playing studies at Tampere University, which will take place in March 2006. The idea is to make an intimate event of discussion with a limited but international attendance, where people discuss works in progress and various approaches to the role-playing phenomena. If we both like what we see and happen to have an excess of time, we may also edit a publication together with the participants afterwards.

To draw an audience, we got Frans Mäyrä as our chair, and Greg Costikyan and Craig Lindley as the commentators in the seminar. So it's going to be cool. In practice the seminar is organized by me and Petri Lankoski.

Not bad with the budget of zero.

Thanks to Nokia Research Center and IPerG for support.

(Update: Greg Costikyan was forced to cancel his attendance, unfortunately. We are looking for a replacement.)

I'm finalizing my paper proposal for the Call for Papers in The Forge.role-playing book by Bryn Neuenschwander and Ben Aldred. I've earlier said that I'm never going to do this, but now I've grabbed the hot potato right by the balls: I'm trying to define role-playing. I'm going to state aloud the rules of role-playing, which is the thing that is always explained allegorically in the obligatory "this is how you role-play" chapters of role-playing books. Quite different rules compared to the gibberish Gary and Dave put out in their original 1974 white box Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.

Here's what I'm proposing, a bit of gibberish of my own:

1. Role-playing is an interactive process of defining and re-defining the state, properties and contents of an imaginary game world.
2. The power to define the game world is allocated to participants of the game. The participants recognize the existence of this power hierarchy.
3. Player-participants define game world through personified character constructs, conforming to the state, properties and contents of the game world.

All gaming according to the rules above is role-playing. All activities lacking one of those is not.

The plan is to publish the full explanations and rationales to that in the book, but I'll just point out that interaction refers to social interaction, and that this is supposed to include tabletop role-playing, larping, online role-playing, freeform role-playing and so on, but also supposed to exclude single-player activities. Role-playing requires two participants, and one of them has to participate in a player position.

Feel free to mail me or catch me in a bar if you want to beat them until they bleed.

I so wanted to like Massively multiplayer Elite, basically.Eve Online. It's supposed to be a cool persistent world game that solves many of In DiGRA 2005 conference I wanted to see online role-playing goals that are desirable, plausible, sensible, consequential, optional and social.the problems of role-playing in online worlds. The game enables the players to act sensibly in the portrayed world, creating their own lives and fortunes as the game proceeds in a sensible and plausible manner. Teamwork, corporate action, economics, player vs. player fighting, it all should work perfectly.

Maybe. But me, I just fell asleep playing it.

I mean, the gist of the game is flying around with an autopilot, monitoring the flight in case some pirates stumbled on the way. That's quite close to the thing people are paid to do in nuclear plants. At times you get to watching the autopilot extracting ore from asteroids. You can spice it up by chatting with your mates twenty star systems away while waiting. Despite all the potential, I felt lack of purpose in the huge galaxy with no incentives but resource hoarding.

So I installed the ten-day trial account of World of Warcraft. After a couple of days it is clear that this game is pure bubblegum. Compared to contemplative, slow-paced and intensely brainy Eve, Warcraft is fast food. By the time you finish the two-three hour tutorials in Eve, you're far off killing things in Azeroth. Killing is generally more fun than industry management, and what McWorld really excels at is keeping the entry level low and the difficulty progression interesting.

When I begun in Game Research Lab of Hypermedia Laboratory of University of Tampere.Gamelab, Frans gave me a heap of papers to read, including a bewildering bunch on amusement park design. Back then I didn't understand why, and thus priorititzed reading them into far future. Now I get it: The truth is that World of Warcraft takes a long step from "persistent world" towards "online theme park".

Seems to be fun, though.

Returned from Moira, a Swedish larp about Nordic fairies and mythology. Used three days and some 300 euros to play a Finnish forest troll among Swedish elves, gnomes and fairies.

In all honesty, it must be said that it of course wasn't worth 300 euros as a game. Thinking about it, I can't come up with a larp that truly would be worth that much money. But I think it was worth it as an educational trip.

It was a part of my larger larper process.

I've been role-playing for 18 years now. The fact is that if I'd been doing kung fu, pole vaulting or saxophone playing for that long, I'd now be a very serious athlete or a semi-professional hobbyist. Only playing the sax with other excellent players. I'd been formally educated by the state to play the sax, actually. And been flown around the world to pole vault with the best of the pole vaulters.

So, considering myself a This is a shameless plug of an excellent rant on false seriousness in role-playing.serious role-player, flying around the world a bit in order to play in different cultures is a necessary part of being that; in addition to furthering my identity process, I actually learned a huge lot about larping and larp in Sweden. That part I think made the trip worth doing.

The IAAF police state on my doorstep made me contemplate my relationship with law lately. Having a cop squad at every street corner for nine days is scary indeed. I also ended up having business with police for the first time in a decade I think.

I'm one of those suckers who ride a bike on sidewalks.

My biking on sidewalks is very dependent on the circumstances. On smaller streets I certainly mingle happily with traffic, but I'm not doing that much on four-lane roads. My pet peeves are the broad sidewalks on Mannerheimintie without biking lanes, Mechelininkatu that is very troublesome to circumvent sensibly and Topeliuksenkatu which is packed with overspeeding cars.

The thing is that law can't make a circumstantial judgement on what is sensible and practical. The Topeliuksenkatu sidewalks are broad and usually empty, so biking there makes much more sense than slowing the big boys' car traffic down. Avoiding one short block's worth of sidewalk on my working trip would require me to cross Nordenskiöldinkatu traffic lights twice every morning.

Imagine what would happen if all bikers begun to obey the rules at once: to bike in the middle of the lane like the cars do, riding the comfortable speed of 20 km/h. If all bikers kept in mind that we have the right to use the lanes of Hämeentie just like the cars do. No riding on sidewalks, no voluntary detours in order to avoid traffic hotspots.

I believe that our biker system "works" only because people break the law regularly. But once you have too many cops around, you can't do that any longer. The system is crammed. I actually explained this to the aforementioned cop.

PS. Is there a regulation against long-haired male cops? I've never seen one. Am I the only one who sees a problem in a law enforcement system comprised of like-minded group of people?

I met the liveliest and happiest person I've perhaps ever met a couple of days ago. I've known her for a couple of years now, but never before she's expressed such vitality and joie de vivre as now. So happy it made me co-happy with her, and even almost envious of her happiness.

She'd just been cured of skin cancer.

(Yes, death is again the topic of the day.)

One of the weirdest trips, perhaps, getting the mildest case of deadly skin cancer, and getting off the hook with minimal physical damage. When you're done with the months of quite extreme mental strain, you learn to love life in a new way.

If I got cancer today, I probably wouldn't tell that to anybody. What can you say? "Oh, I'm so sorry about that; hope you get better soon. Did you see Sin City, by the way?" Transforming a cancer discussion into a normal discussion wasn't easy even now that the news were good and no more tragedy was involved, even when no further best wishes were needed.

If I was dying of cancer, the absolutely last thing I'd be wasting my time with would be discussing the illness. But the cultural taboo of death drowns any other subject very easily, even when the suffering party makes a conscious effort at dismissing the topic. How do you move on or stop wallowing if you are constantly reminded of your personal tragedy?

"Who cares about Sin City, if this gal hadn't been succesfully cured just a month ago, the cancer could be killing her right now for Christ's sake!"

Oh dear; I have another friend -- coincidentally we're all stock of 1978 -- waiting for an organ transplant. I hope he gets equally good kicks out of his trip when its all over.

An accidental hangover.

It's not rare enough nowadays that I first plan to sit somewhere yakking about stuff having a couple of beers, but then end up to drinking my brains off in the morning hours.

I'm not a heavy drinker, but somehow I know far too many people who seem to think that I should push the threshold. It's the devious combination of offering rounds and expecting rounds to be offered, that creates a pressure to drink just one more. A cycle I strongly plan to break the next time, whether it can be done without breaking the good mood or not. I heavily prefer three beers over thirteen beers, but some people are bad at taking a "no" for an answer.

12 hours after yesterday's plan was devised, I was (again) at home, trying to sleep through the occasionally heated debate of two friends; one too drunk to be kicked out even though he lives within a walking distance, and another who lives back in Espoo, unable to get home that late/early. I almost catched the sleep when they decided to add some voice to stress the senselessness of their statements -- this time debating whether they should actually discuss the issue at all in that condition. I realized that there was no way out of the situation for me, and grew so irritated I couldn't sleep for hours.

So, it's eleven in the morning, one of these guys -- the one who chose to re-decorate the bathroom couple of hours ago -- is still snoring around, while I can't sleep, but can't do anything sensible either since I pretty much didn't sleep myself either.

Luckily I've got some Carnivale left.

I've explained this one too many times lately. Its time to use my power as a personal publisher to propagate my view to the networked mass audience. I insist on writing "larp" instead of "LARP" for three reasons.

First, larp is a noun derived from the acronym LARP. In the cultural sphere where I come from, this transformation is partly due to Finnish and Scandinavian influences, translating larp as "larppi" in Finnish, "lajv" in Swedish and "laiv" in Norwegian.

Second, this mess with acronyms is too bad already. I try to keep words such as RPG, MMORPG, CRPG, LRP and MMOG outside my vocabulary. Abstracts of the papers discussing the differences of these are a pain to read. In Changing Views: Worlds in Play.DiGRA 2005 some dear IPerG is another wonderful horror-word, an acronym for Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming. Written incorrectly as "iPerG" by some.IPerG colleagues "Narrative Structure in Trans-Reality Role-Playing Games: Integrating Story Construction from Live Action, Table Top and Computer-Based Role-Playing Games" by Lindley and Eladhari.introduced TTRPG and TRRPG to further increase my headache. The next time I see those guys over a beer, I'm happy to hear them say that "when you add a MMORPG into a TTRPG you get a TRRPG".

"Hey guys, you want some wowels with that?"

Third, I'm not sure if larp means "live-action role-playing" anymore. Some people (Brits mostly I hear) insist on dropping the action and discussing LRP:s instead, which I kind of understand but consider very relevant. The form has evolved beyond its roots. The worst thing would be to devolve to the situation of the 90's MUD-scene, where they played MUDs, MUSHes, MUCKs, MOOs, MMORPGS and many other weird acronyms, also debating the meanings of those letters. Many people discussing MUDs insist on calling them multi-user dungeons, domains or dimensions according to their own preferences.

We discussed these issues thoroughly when we edited Beyond Role and Play. Turns out that you never need to use those horrible acronyms, except for mentioning them once in the keyword list. What's the problem of discussing "online role-playing" instead of "MMORPGing"?

It's couple of hours past midnight. I'm sitting in the back of a game master van in Stockholm, observing the execution of a very sophisticated Nordic-style larp. The rain's beating the roof, we hold our breathes in the darkness lit only by the ambient glow of computer screens. Currenty we have six laptops and three people here, crammed in a small space with lots of audio equipment, synthesizer keyboard and other miscellanous stuff.

The sound of rain is tempered with constant, quiet buzzing. We have to listen to one certain microphone constantly -- just in case the players needed our attention. Our preciously few players are doing their stuff 50 meters away from us, probably completely unaware of our crappy hi-tech van. They must know we're watching them from time to time -- our cameras watching them are not that well hidden. Martin and Linus are looking at a map of Stockholm, tryings to coax the players in taking a certain course of action -- but I can understand the players' unwillingness to face the beating rain.

I'm kind of tired, but kind of excited. It's the 14th hour of my weirdest day at Studying pervasive gaming in IPerG.work.

I'm a train pariah.

I feel like that some twice a week, but today, having been kicked out of my seat now three (3) times, my irritation exceeded the blogging threshold.

You see, being a freeriding piece of crap (I use 30-day tickets) I don't get numbered seats. Everyone else in the damn train does, except for us 25-or-so regular faces. Means that I sit down somewhere, and someone comes to train and kicks me out of my place, even if the car is half empty.

Okay, there's a special over-booked section in the train for us. Depending on the train, it's in random car, and comprises of random seats. Usually its car three or five, seats are always upstairs and they range from 63 to something like 80, but that is subject to change as well. The conductors regularly have no idea on where the section should be, and give pained looks if asked about them.

Increasing its service level I guess, VR has introduced all these sorts of cool options for people. Such as sections for allergics, families, laptop users and whatnot, cheerfully for no extra price. In practice, of course, these options are available for folks with seat numbers, not for the third class passengers.

Behind my ticket it says that VR grants a refund for unused ticket, if your plans change and you have to cancel it before its over. Before I went to Hungary, I tried that thing out, having some 15 days left. The VR desk officer tells me that this is cool, but they gotta subtract twice the single-fare price for every day the ticket's been valid so far. In my case I had half of the ticked unused, but the subtraction would have been some meager 600 euros. Yes, it means that after one week or so, the subtraction exceeds the price of the ticket in the first place.

Considering that I spend only 12 days in Tampere every month, paying 375 euros for month of this fun tastes like shit. No wonder half of the people I know who frequent in Tampere choose to only pay the student prices.

Diligence and making sacrifices are not always that ethical. I've come to put together a piece of philosophy regarding these two virtues of protestant ethics, looking them from the sociological angle of sanctions. In the social scientist vocabulary it is important to understand that sanction is any positive or negative prize given for some action. The difference of positive and negative sanctions is slim, since the lack of a reward is a punishment and the lack of punishment is a reward.

Our society assigns sanctions for overworking folks. If you work a couple of years some 50 or 60 hours per week, you get social and economical benefits. In a simple (capitalist) logic this means that it is just and right that the people doing the effort get rewarded. Of course in the meritocracy we live in, the constant competition assigns sanctions to people who don't overwork as well. For instance, you don't get to be a game designer if you don't want to work your ass off.

This leads to the question if the advantage gained from excessive overworking is an ethically fair advantage. In the protestant ethic rewarding the diligence is sound and sane, in my altruist hedonism it certainly is senseless. In my ethics, the system shouldn't persuade the folks to enter the rat race with sanctions. Actually it formally even doesn't; those regular 60-hour weeks are not exactly legal overwork.

In creative work such as mine diligence is not even the virtue to go for. Though EC requires us to write some reports time to time, the point of our work is not in diligent report writing but in rigid-yet-creative academic thinking process. Writing the reports certainly help us to keep focused in what we set out to do, and also keeps up the pace in some sense -- but the best ideas are scarcely related to report-hammering.

I'm not afraid to admit that my most efficient hours are more valuable than my least efficient weeks. If I can't find the working mindset and preferably the inspiration as well, I read ten pages per hour and write the purest of crap.

Seeking the flow goes well along with my hedonist ethics. The downside is that my working process is 90% stress and 10% work, since I get stressed from the unready work.

Spent a week in Hungary with WiOL, visiting Szeged, Esztergom and Budapest. The trip pretty much changed my view on the country, or perhaps created one where none existed.

A concert trip changed into a culinary adventure; drinks -- wines, tokaji, Unicum and beers -- were especially nice, but the cakes and greasy deep-fried foods were good, too. Passed the chance to visit Hungarian baths, but saw some futuristic popcorn museology about the past and the present of the country instead. Met the best Finnish-speaking non-finns ever. Experienced the best singing venue (I'd say the best choral instrument) of my brief singing career in Szeged.

The Hungarian national pride was strongly present everywhere. To my ears our Hungarian guide was quite shocked by the fact that we happened to sing a drinking song to the tune of Pacius's Suomen laulu. "That's wasn't very patriotic", he said with his fluent Finnish, sounding like the Hungarians would never do the same with one of their anthems.

The Hungarian history of Hungary -- perhaps beginning from the 9th century with Árpád the Conqueror -- is laden with superlatives. I wonder if all this is a post-communism sentiment, a strategy of coping with communism or really a long tradition. The the nationalist sentiment expands to the Hungarian expatriates as well; they care especially of their kinsmen living in Romania. I don't know how much really the Hungarian hates the Romanian hates the Hungarian -- or the Croat hates the Serb hates the Croat -- you can't understand the problem if you live up here.

In Esztergom we were formally yet warmly welcomed by some member of the city council before the concert. They had a short reception for us by the city hall, where we were given a brief speech running from the history of Esztergom to the friendship of Esztergom and Espoo. The locals were very hospitable, perhaps because we were their guests, but I felt like our common ugric background made difference as well -- there's a reason why the Finnish-speaking Hungarians do it very well. When we stopped to see a monument for the rebuilding of the bridge leading from Hungary to Slovakia, I begun wondering if I'd ever stop to show my guests the monuments of Mannerheim or Sibelius in Helsinki. The Finnish modesty (or humility) would also prevent me from praising the architecture of the Finlandia hall, and even my This is the cheesily used slogan of Helsinki air defence brigade, where I did my military duty.defensor capitolii background wouldn't make me consider telling them about the victorious cunning of Helsinki air defenders in the second world war.

After hearing the speeches, we promptly proceeded to sing them a set of songs about Karelia and Kalevala, finishing our concerts with Finlandia hymn.

Oh dear, who looks like the nationalist now?

Months later, I still consider "Butt-Janne's" definition of a blog extremely bad. His argumentation has otherwise good points, but falling back on the excuse that the concept was undefinable is not very intelligent. It doesn't fit in the intuitive idea of a blog, since it leaves out things that are definitely commonly considered blogs, and because it includes things that certainly are not considered blogs. Claiming that something is not definable is always a very dangerous statement.

Blogging -- and considering its significance and legal status -- becomes much more intelligible and understandable, when we begin discussing personal publishing, or some sub-forms of it, such as personal micro-publishing in internet. And lo, everything is clearer.

Personal publishing indicates that the person producing the content and the ideas pretty much writes in his own voice, in his own name (or alias), taking care of the whole process from the idea to publication. Often personal publishing happens on webpages such as what Janne described, but often not as well. Forms of personal publishing may include content in any format or media. Public the material is published may be an unrestricted mass audience, or a selected group.

Personal publishing may be commercially supported or based. In my books, News from the Lab qualifies as commercially supported personal publishing, at least if the informal style and casual approach are truthful. Helsingin Sanomat newsfeeds don't constitute personal publishing in any cases, since news articles are journalistic content, produced in a journalistic process -- the authors always speak with the voice of their medium and the voice of their editor in chief, in addition to their own. Commercial publishing does not guarantee a journalistic process and the journalistic process does not need professional journalists.

That's how I see the difference of blogs and traditional media, and that's why they are interesting. That is also the reason why blogs are not any more interesting than newsgroup messages, bulletin board systems or mailing lists.

Of course, the societal effect of blogging has historically been different to those of newsgroups, due to reasons such as the ones provided by Janne. But we are not dealing with a new phenomenon here.

Reflecting this new concept with old problems, go ask yourself if commercial or non-commercial personal publishers should be granted the right of protecting their sources according to your legislation? Should commercially funded personal publishers be allowed on blog lists? Do all the sites on those lists constitute personal publishing?

I'd unravel the distinction beginning from these 168 000 hits!

The time for a political statement: I do oppose the upcoming European Constitution quite strongly. Back in the 90's, I remember the desperate anti-EU lobbying groups propagating the view that Finland loses its sovereignty by joining EU. Now that we are actually making this decision of letting EU majority votes supercede our own legislation -- even when we vote against them -- I think this definitely calls for a referandum, even though the Finnish constitution does not make that explicit.

"Referandum is impossible to organize", claim the constitution advocates, and I agree that it is really hard. The new constitution is over 300 pages long piece of heavy bureaucratical jargon, even as it attempts to simplify and condense the contents of Rome and Maastricht treaties. However, I believe that a democracy is responsible to teach its citizens about how it basically works. If the system is too complicated to be taught in high schools, it is too complicated. If the system is too complex to be summarized well enough for voting, it's just too complicated to work as the foundation of a society.

Now the alternative is not explaining the new constitution to people, going on with the integration in the fashion Heikki Patomäki calls the technocratic top-down process. This would be yet another long step on the EU path of building a faceless, unaccessible bureaucracy making decisions behind closed doors. In a system without a public sphere of political discussion, necessity and efficiency are the strongest ideological powers influencing decisions.

If the European Constitution is subjected to proper discussion and democratic decisionmaking in Finland, my decision might change. At the moment I don't know enough about it to make a justified decision, and I consider that every cititzen as active as I am should have the right and the responsibility to know enough.

Doing a bit of research for this shard I found out that some officially wise people have had thought some stuff along the same lines. Especially I subscribe these comments of Heikki Patomäki, J.P. Roos and Risto Heiskala.

I begun playing Morrowind during the Easter holidays. I knew I shouldn't have, but I did it anyway. I was told that Morrowind is special, you see, because you can do anything you want in it.

That is true. You can make a career in some of the several guilds available. You can join some political house doing stuff for them or go around looting for ancient ruins -- and do this with a fairly complex character with a lot of different weaknesses and strengths.

On the other hand, in Morrowind there are few things to do. You can chat with folks in a fairly inconsequential manner. You can enter places and break people and monsters in them. You can escort folks and deliver packages to places. And you can do the stuff making your character tougher in doing the monster-bashing, like enchanting items and trading stuff with merchants.

The hugeness of the world makes the player confuse a bunch of games of progression mistaking them as for huge game of emergence. According to Jesper Juul the former are ready-designed games with set objectives and a fixed order of doing things, such as adventure games and the most of the computer role-playing games. The latter are games with few simple rules, with complex and intriguing gameplay emerging from the player's freedom to act using the rules -- such as Go or The Sims.

After some 30 hours of play my conclusion is that in Morrowind you can't do anything! Even though you proceed very far in the progression game within the Wizards' Guild, the only difference is that you get some treasure, some people call you with a fancy title and some folks do not talk to you at all. In Morrowind you can't act upon the world, and the world can't react to your actions.

It's a terrible shame. The rule system is interestingly complex and the huge world is occasionally incredibly beautiful and immersive. Just wandering around the world looking at places is a very nice experience. Walking in the air over castle walls really feels like being high up there, while diving for treasure in an accidentally found shipwreck looks and feels just like it should. But the story content is equivalent to cab-driving in a beautiful world full of places to go without people to meet.

In addition to my time, I'm selling my publicity to my employers. While certainly there has always been some public stigma attached to occupation and the quality of work, in the information society this again cuts deeper.

It is curious to notice that in none of my employers have dealt with the issue in any way. Working as a communication officer in a Finnish organization, it's taken for granted that your perfectly googlable press releases are deposited in the net indefinitely, not depending on whether you were a trainee or a civil servant at the time of writing them. In the university research business it is taken for granted that the employee's name starts to appear as an author in myriad multitude of places, ranging from prestigious journals to crappy conference publications and reports you perhaps never even saw.

You gotta trust a lot of people in this business. The latest irritation goes to the Digital Games Research Association.DiGRA Changing Views: Worlds in Play.Vancouver conference, which ever-so-thoughtfully both rejeted my short paper submission and Google it up yourself!put it on a public website. According to DiGRA now, it's both uninteresting and out there for all to see -- I hope no-one's stupid enough to cite it or desperate enough to steal it. Oh, the promise of removal upon request does not suffice, as I haven't been personally informed about it being published. And even if I was, its in a million caches already anyway.

How do my web pages deal with this?

• If I mention a person by name, I prefer to avoid full names, using links instead.
• If I happen to use a full name of a non-public person, I send him a notification.
• My Reading Diary is non-googlable, as my opinions are just opinions, not intended as reviews for the widest possible audience.

You got your principles already?

Someone's making a lot of money out of there: World of Warcraft has now 1.5 million subscribers worldwide. Multiply that by the subscription fee of some $15 per month, and you end up getting 22.5 million dollars monthly. Judging by figures provided by Mulligan and Patrovsky, 22.5 million dollars would be a sensible guesstimate of the production costs of the game.

Money-farming (playing to get virtual stuff to sell in eBay for living) appears to be a growing problem for the scene, since there are plenty of folks in poorer countries, sensibly willing get a living from bashing virtual orcs. The problematic structure is that all on-line role-playing games represent idealized, hard capitalism. Everyone with perseverance will prevail, amassing constantly increasing profit over time. If you are smart and diligent you get your riches quicker, but even if you are dumb and lazy, in a couple of months you'll have so much money you can never spend it, except on perhaps some incredibly rare collector items. In virtual worlds there are no taxes to pay, and the only welfare is based on random charity, often given to players of pretty female avatars.

The Observer story on money farming.Caracal, Romania is far from idealized capitalism. But anyone putting up a virtual startup in there, buying a game account for some $60, is guaranteed to get to live the American dream on the virtual side. Cashing the virtual success in real currency is easy, because the games are based on players spending excessive amounts of time toiling for the goodies the successful experienced player can get in a moment. The alleged problem of selling virtual stuff in eBay is the in-game inflation in the game world -- it is the logical consequence of harvesting infinite resources. To combat inflation, the game designers integrate money sinks to their game, in order to take cash out of the system.

I'm not sure what's the problem with the inflation, as it is be the best natural money sink automatically balancing the currency entering the system. Certainly, the inflation might be very rapid in some games, but that would just require cutting some zeros out of bank accounts every now and then. The game provider's solution was to suspend 1000 player accounts, of course without a jury or a trial. I wonder how much the decision was influenced by the nationality of the playes -- An illuminating discussion thread on World of Warcraft official discussion forum.whether they were Chinese or not.

Even if the Pentagon had spent the whole 70's thinking about it, I doubt they would have invented a more powerful propaganda toy advocating capitalism than a contemporary mainstream persistent world. In a world without social problems or environmental issues -- in a world where cornucopia of money and goods is the only problem -- capitalism is presented in the light of truth reminiscent of social realism.

Lately I'd had a plenty of very pleasant, exhilarating adrenaline-packed ego trips. Strangely, they have come out of performing in various forms. I'd say they've been better than sex, but so many things are that it makes little sense.

The last three-or-so sessions of my role-playing campaign Marethílin Perilliset have been excellent. Emotional games with a top-notch mood and a strong feeling of being there -- combined to the enthusiasm and trust of the player crew. They've left me exhausted but shaking happy for hours, destroying a day or two of work. Literally exhausted and shaking, getting high from hormonal activity.

In The Nordic-internationl larp convention in NorwayKnutepunkt I hosted an immensely intensive debate about technology in larps. Unlike other debates in Knutepunkts, this one never got stuck, never looped around, and never once a dumb guy gave a pointless long-winded monologue. After 90 minutes, we had just started, and my excellent participants were craving for more. The quickest 90 minutes in long time.

Yesterday, I got to know how it feels to perform to a packed audience of screaming fans. Not my fans, gotta admit that, but fans of A band defying definitions. Maybe they might consider themselves a parody of Finnish tango-influenced schlager music. Or not -- I really have no idea.Martti Servo ja Napander, who asked 20 singers from WiOL conducted by Erkki Nurmi.us to join their gig at One of the more important rock clubs in Helsinki, hosts a crowd of 700 people.Tavastia. Beforehand I was very scared that throwing an a cappella version of one of Servo's greatest hits (Ufo tarjosi kaakaon) in the middle of the show would get the audience upset or frustrated.

No. Instead, they went crazy.

We had serious trouble of hearing each other, and the audience might have had problems hearing us since one critical mike was misplaced after the soundcheck. But it made absolutely no difference, since the crowd was so wild they sang the half of it themselves. Yay.

I want to be a performing artist. I want to go live at Donington, and you can have all my little sex in exchange.

(Addendum: We also got the opportunity to carve our name into stone on Tavastia backstage.)

A dear friend tried to commit a suicide last night. Incidentally or coincidentally I happened to be the last guy in contact with the person in question, so I'm a bit shaken now.

I can easily count 20 friends who have been taking medication for mental problems during the last five years; more to the point, I can easily count 20 friends who have been open about it. Many of them have been very close to me; best friends and relatives of all ages. Typically the reasons are loneliness, burnout or personal tragedies. Another friend struggles to get better on a long sick leave, while one of them falls to depression every time trying to quit the medication.

The society is sick. Luckily, the most of these people do better by now.

For infatuation junkies, The Nordic larp event, this time in Norway.Knutepunkt is the place to go. Like in every single KP so far, again I found yet another the love of my life. Being a veteran of non-actualized internordic relationships, I took it with a scary blasé. A bit later an informant told me that losing the emotion was not just a good but an excellent idea, due to issues of availability concerning the object of attraction.

In the post-high of the coldest Knutepunkt ever I concluded the two definite high points in my Viubråtan-experience.

• The Upgrade!-freeform game by Tobias Wrigstad and Olle Jonsson. They said they wanted to make a tacky example game about cool methods in order to not let the example game to make the methods look good. However, the game depicting a swinger reality-tv gameshow was very cool, as were the methods. Vi Åker Jeep, you gotta fanboy now.


• My debate on how to make larps better with technology. 90-minutes of intensive brainstorm with very smart people participating. We had enough brainpower to fuel the world-destruction plans of an evil genius, and spent it on the problems instead of sidetracking to endless debates. Thanks to all who were there.

In the news; Denmark is putting up a hundred-pupil boarding school for 15-year old kids. As a specialty, the teaching methods will use a lot of role-playing techniques. Seven-number budget is more understandable in the context of tens of thousands of young Danish larpers. In Sweden, there are some pretty interesting reality-gaming experiments going on. Reality games are games not revealing their ludic nature, thus leaving the voluntariness of the players questionable; compare it to candid camera without camera and you're getting closer. Despite the fact I'm fairly critical, I was asked to participate ethical discussion concerning one of these. I'll report back with that later.

Visited Berlin.

Saw the airport, the hotel, the meeting place and some bars. Learned that "Grill-Platte" equals five different beefs with french fries, rice and salad. Found excellent dark beer in an unmarked, nameless run-down bar far from everything, only to find out later it's the specialty of the place and available nowhere else. Returned to airport hours before the boarding in order to continue work with some Swedes to the bitter end. Read the first half of Cybertext during the trip back.

Intriguing, captivating and interesting trip. Didn't personally feel but perfectly understood the pain of the heavy-duty business travelers. Those guys work for their platinum lounges.

I read Sotaromaani, the less-edited manuscript version of Väinö Linna's Tuntematon sotilas, during the holidays. I had read it earlier once or twice, but was quite surprised on how good the book actually is. Good content in good form.

When Tuntematon was published the first time, it created a nation-wide debate on whether Linna's view on the Finnish World War Two was too gritty and grotesque and whether it defamed the fight and sacrifice of national heroes by it's down-to-earth realism. Linna's soldier swears, steals, lies, cheats and verges on mutiny, while his officer is war-loving fool in constant conflict with his underlings. His work, even in it's trimmed form, was blasphemy to the blue-white nationalists, self-defending their motherland by pushing our eastern border far into the Soviet territory.

I made a presentation on the book in the elementary school. Back then I never really understood why the very believable book was considered derogatory. It was self-evident to me then that the kids on the front were kids on the front rather than pretty heroes willingly dying in the spirit of Sillanpää's poetry. I like to believe that the de-glorification of the Continuation War was a lot due to Linna's influence in Finnish cultural atmosphere.

The first two paragraphs capture the essence of Linna's style surprisingly well.

Alas, I've been told that the translations, such as The Unknown Soldier, are not that good -- the book is anyway pretty unintelligible to foreign reader. But to all Finns who haven't read this classic yet, I give Sotaromaani a ten-point recommendation. It's also interesting to see the "censored" parts of the book, which consist mainly of some ten bitter pages during the latter half of the book, explicitly accusing Finnish military command of various moral and strategic mistakes.

I'm trying to proceed to Linna's Täällä Pohjantähden alla -- that classic I've never started.