Shards 2006

Many friends and affiliates of IPerG read this blog, so it's probably worth advertising here too: We're organizing an open house afternoon in Kiasma, Helsinki on the 13. of December. Everyone's welcome from press to public and from industry to academia.

In a nutshell it's four hours of talks and demos on the coolness we have put together during the last two years, and we're trying to haul some playable prototypes in there as well.

Prosopopeia Bardo 2: Momentum is finally over, and it's time to start spilling the secrets. Keeping them for months hasn't been easy to anyone working in IPerG or P, but the hardest part was probably done by our ~30 players living a double life for five weeks.

In Momentum you were expected to larp yourself in a world where magic was real. After the first week of playing the players did a ritual of possession, inviting dead rebels of different eras to inhabit their bodies, in order to wage a mythological war on conformistm. This spawned four more weeks of occult adventure in Stockholm.

In practice you played yourself in your ordinary life the most of the time, but in the evenings the players called forth their inner rebels. Terrorists, pacifists, eco-radicals, martyrs, intellectuals and other sorts of activists gathered in an abandoned reactor hall under Stockholm to plan the war on conformism. In the base they planned the war, studied occultism, researched internet, debated and communicated with otherworldly sources. Often they went on field missions; sneaking, searching, urban exploring, puzzle-solving and gathering intelligence on the enemy.

Many players say they spent full five weeks in fiction, playing themselves-in-game constantly, never openly stepping outside the game framework.

Some of the coolest highlights:

• Obtain a map of the astral plane. Unfortunately, the map is a painting displayed in an art gallery, and gallerist has no idea of the game. What you gonna do?
• Intel gives you clues on cache of documents in suburbia. Triangulation allows you to pinpoint the area and send a team to check out trashbins, phone booths the like. Do your math wrong and wander for hours in the wrong hood.
• Dead are on the streets and want to make some noise about it. It's time to parade through downtown. Prepare your banners, slogans and torches for the demo on the all hallow's eve -- the police has already been notified.
• More magical energy needed? Throw a party, invite your 50 best friends and get them all hyped up. The faction provoking the most intense atmosphere clears the table in the occult dance duel.

Full exposé will start trickling down forums like Knudepunkt, Roolipelaaja et cetera. If you're in a hurry with your fix, feel free to buy me a beer.

Momentum was made by some usual suspects: Martin Ericsson, Staffan Jonsson, Emil Boss, Daniel Sundström and countless others.

It seems like the International Journal of Role-Playing is about to become reality quite soon. Very nice; my premiliminary huge Thank You! goes to Anders Tychsen and Marinka Copier who, to be honest, have done the lion's share of the job. My main credit in the process is the Playing Roles seminar we put up with Petri and Frans.

At the moment it seems that our main editorial board has an impressive assembly of different angles to the problem, including the perspectives of the industry.

Indeed, this is a teaser. Real information coming soon.

Places to avoid: Hotel Ku'Damm 101 in Berlin, on Kurfürstendamm.

Imagine a different brand of Ikea, one focusing on cold steel and plastic-covered aschetism but trying to sell the cheap-ass solutions as high-end of cool. This is the place with any conveniences in rooms (not water-boilers, not even mugs), but featuring the expensive brand in everything you see. They do advertise "free high-speed internet access" like everyone, but have the probably suckiest variant I've seen so far: Two terminals in the fashionable lounge that you have to use standing, with the crappiest stainless steel "keyboards" I've seen so far.

Recommendable for people who want to start their day with a tiny plate of elegantly positioned hahnenbrüstfillet with paprika-chutney. This place is hostile for human life.

Lately there's been a fuss about the Dutch pedophiles getting organized as a political party, and being even accepted as such by the Dutch system. People are sending emails around, horrified about the fact that there can be such a thing as a pedophile party.

I think it's wonderful! I think it's the best way to have the pedophilia discussion in the society.

The point of democracy is that it's acceptable to try to change the society from within the political system. Excluding people from that opportunity is a totalitarian practice, which also forces those parties to pursue their interests outside the political system. Freedom of speech necessitates that it's legal to demand changes in society. Any changes.

It's not illegal to be a pedophile; actually it's damn tragic. Those people are absolutely denied from ever even once fulfilling their sexual desires. Having been single for quite a while in my life I know the frustration. Add the extreme demonization and social pressure on top of that and there you have a brilliant cocktail. Confess the urge once to your friend and risk a lifelong public stigma.

That being said, child-molestation and raping people are certainly illegal and in my opinion unacceptable. I don't vouch for pedophilia, but I do vouch for freedom to participate in politics. Personally I'd rather have cancer than obsessive pedophilia, in part because the former would earn me lots of sympathy, while even begging aloud for pity in the latter case would be considered vulgar, even obscene.

There's a story in today's Helsingin Sanomat about the final exams of Finnish high school, where they are changing the way they make native language exams. In the new test you have to demonstrate your skills such as contextualizing the information and reading between the lines.

Marjukka Liiten, a HS journalist specializing in education writes a small commentary about some prototype questions they have made to demonstrate the new test. A couple of these questions ask the student to assess the underlying attitudes of some news pieces written by HS journalists.

According to Liiten, the journalists have no time to put any attitudes into their news texts, as they are busy gathering and checking the information and organizing it on paper. This ignorant, oblivious and blatantly clueless journalist (of our leading newspaper) actually goes as far as to call the professor in charge of the exams, to ask whether the exam organizers have some "bad attitudes" against the media and journalists.

Dear Marjukka Liiten, all texts reflect some attitudes. Everyone has attitudes both consciously and unconsciously. Often the most problematic attitudes are the unconscious ones. It's excellent that our high school students are taught to understand this better. I hope Helsingin Sanomat will also organize some training where this is also told to their journalists.

There's nothing as painful as hearing a game researcher speak with too little knowledge of his substance matter. A MMORPG researcher only familiar with World of Warcraft is the most common sight, but I tend to stumble into one or two of these guys in every conference. Once I sat next to IO Interactive game designers who were laughing their asses off to a speaker who was badly reinventing the wheels Hitman series has used for years. Last year I sat in a Ropecon panel on online role-playing where no-one had unfortunately played Eve Online.

Being in that Ropecon panel discussion was real embarrassment, as being unaware of even one critical game may make you an invalid speaker real fast. Even if you explicitly limit your area of study to a certain group of games, you're an idiot if you're pointing out the obvious about some games outside the sample.

It's unfair, it's hard and it's troublesome, and the MMORPG researchers are in a tough position. Eve Online is an easy (yet tedious) game to access, but being an expert on the field would require you to crash your way through countless text-based MUDs, incompatible oddities like Sociolotron, Asian superstars like Lineage II and months-long grinds like World of Warcraft. Original version of Star Wars Galaxies got mutilated overnight without a proper advance warning, and now you never know if people are talking about the original grindmill or the current shooter. Even if you hate PVP, you need to know how it works in Shadowbane, and even if you love fantasy you should check out Puzzle Pirates. They say that Japanese movie students have to watch 500 flicks every year.

Catching up with MMORPGs by playing them is an impossible task, and the games press I'm reading is not doing their job adequately. As long as no-one is collecting that stuff into MMORPG yearbooks, an aspiring games researcher would do well interviewing hobbyists, designers and other specialists. But honestly guys and gals, even googling around a bit would be an improvement -- though the best value of random websites is finding the correct questions.

Gotta write a deliverable. At least that's what my stomach is telling me.

And all the plume-wheatgerm yoghurt with acidophilus and bifilus bacteria and other health shit can't make it stop. I'm told that everyone eats it nowadays.

This is the part I hate in my work. Deliver a report or a hell breaks loose.

Never in my life I've seen this many cars. Like, seriously, New York City is nothing.

Yes, I'm in Los Angeles. This is a whole different world.

I was waiting for some extremely nice people to pick me up with a car on Santa Monica Boulevard, I had a plenty of time to do sociological observations of the rush hour in this insane city.

In L.A., you can't get anywhere without a car of your own, and even though I was told that in advance, you really can't imagine how impossible that is in here. You know, you can see sky and palm trees anywhere you look at, and in the city of 5 or 30 million people, the price for that is the huge size. This is probably the only metropol in the world where three floors means a tall building. This place is huge, and for some unimaginable reason, they don't have much of a mass transit here.

This is the city of meditation. Everyone's happy, everyone's peaceful and everyone spends two hours every day in solitary contemplation behind the wheel. Many meditate in silence, while other listen to music. Most of the people I saw were driving alone, and half of the people alone were having some relaxed social time speaking to their cellphones. As this is the moment you have alone without your kids and your housework, there is no panic or road rage -- not even when the travel times triple without an advance warning.

As you plan on spending third of your life in bed and sixth of the rest in the car, it's perfectly reasonable to get a huge one with all the bells and whistles money can buy. Some people actually drive hummers in here, and an SUV from the smaller end of the scale can easily fit the parcing slot marked for "compact" cars.

Nothing the environmentalists do in Finland can change anything. They are just cleaning an already clean puddle next to an ocean of waste.

For years I've been irritated with the generalizations, patronizations and outright lies in the Finnish public discussion on prostitution and sex industry. It's easy to dispel the illusions by quickly browsing the Internet: Reading An independent escort, New York.various An independent mistress, Seattle.blogs of The Grand Old Lady of Japanese kink.people in the An extremely lovable rope manufacturer, Seattle.industry quickly proves the point that a load of people Eighteen Things Sex Workers Should Know in The Stranger.engage in commercial sex as they want, in addition to good money, the lifestyle, identity and independence it provides. This is basically also what researcher Anna Kontula is It's mind-numbing to realize how rarely her strong arguments are addressed in the criminalization discourse.saying, if I read her correctly. The sex industry blogs seem to also validate each other, as the people in the scene often know each other.

To state the obvious: Yes, there are problems in the prostitution scene. No, the problems are not inherent to commercial sexuality -- they are extremely inherent to illegal commerce with a steady demand. Honestly, nothing will remove that demand, not even the hideous prices that are asked for sexual services.

Alcohol smuggling has pretty much died out with a state monopoly satisfying the demand. I wonder what would happen to sex-related crime if there was a state brothel next to every Alko. Thinking out of the box we should investigate the pros and cons of Pascha International, the largest bordello of Germany -- offers (relatively) fixed employment for prostitutes, as well as a money back guarantee for clients.institutionalizing pimping instead of forbidding it. In addition to cutting down the criminal money flow, we could establish hygiene requirements and provide the publicly employed sex workers with specialized healthcare and appropriate security.

(This entry, along with the reference material, is exemplifies the style of political comment I believe our Minister of Culture Tanja Saarela wants to censure with her Internet filters.)

My Danish sucks, but if yours is better, you can read everything about Østerskov Efterskole, which is the Danish role-playing boarding school Malik Hyltoft discussed in Knutepunkt 2005.

If I remember Malik's stories correctly from last year, it's a significant endeavor with a some 100 15-year old kids getting in for a year. In addition to teaching role-playing, they will try to teach things like physics utilizing role-play as a method.

There are times when I work. Then there are times when I do everything else but actual work while working; lately I've been extremely little in the office. Between the Games and Storytelling workshop by Jessica Mulligan, Playing Roles seminar, a bit of holiday and everything else I don't even remember when I last had an "ordinary week" in work. Today I returned from Knutpunkt 06, Sweden, and in the end of this week I'll be in PerGames 06, Ireland. The next scheduled major trip after that is Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, USA, right after we've had a multiple day game design workshop in IPerG.

Whoah.

Anyway, my Prosopopeia paper with Staffan Jonsson for Knutpunkt is now out on the open.

Montola, Markus & Jonsson, Staffan (2006): Prosopopeia. Playing on the Edge of Reality. In Frizon, Thorbiörn & Wrigstad, Tobias (eds.) (2006): Role, Play, Art. Collected Experiences of Role-Playing 85-99. Stockholm, Föreningen Knutpunkt. [pdf]

Want to be a games researcher studying pervasive games in IPerG with our team and a bunch of nice international people? Might be your lucky month, since we are looking for a game researcher.

Yes, you have to be physically present in Tampere for the most of time. Personally I'm there for three days a week at the moment, but that varies depending on what we are doing. It's a lot of teamwork so social skills are needed.

Survived the Playing Roles seminar in Tampere. Two days of heavy discussion on the topics of role-playing, ranging from immersion to technologies and theatre excercises to computer role-playing. Lot of malty networking was done as well.

My paper? Some people loved it, many people didn't get it.

We spent a bit of time in the closing discussion in order to come up with follow-up actions. The ambitious plans include creating a digital journal, putting up a special interest group within DiGRA and organizing another seminar in a year in perhaps Visby or Stockholm.

Thanks to everyone who helped organizing the seminar and thanks to everyone who showed up.

Frans and Mirjam already uploaded some seminar photos.

In Memoriam.

If anyone ever, he was a damn jolly good fellow.

(Details)

After saying those two or three sentences in the national news a week ago, an advertisement agency contacted me. The guys at Taivas are doing some promotion for Habbo Hotel, and wanted to discuss the service with an external expert to get some new ideas.

I have this "will speak for food" ideology, saying that if you get to eat while you talk, you are paid well enough for chatting, so we set up a breakfast meeting. In reality, however, I was paid in ego points; I get weird kicks whenever someone takes notes of me speaking.

In addition to being an ego whore, I'm glad to help the nation's exports. And I believe that academia should do more of this stuff, doing small favours to random companies that might significantly benefit from our small investment. We should not do this only for PR; I think it's an important part of the Third Function of university. One reason why taxpayers hired us.

(Good luck guys, I hope I was worth your time. At least you looked happy when we parted.)

After reading a hundred or so stories about the big cartoon crisis from blogs and mass media, I still haven't seen a story that would try to understand the both sides of the debate. Our ability to understand the Islamic world is as bad as their ability to understand us. The rhetorics demanding all cultures to demonstrate cultural understanding are blind, hypocritical and fallacious. Even if striving for cultural understanding was a feature in our culture, it wouldn't be one in all cultures. Whether we strive for it ourselves I'm not sure, but whatever is the case we are doing extremely bad in understanding cultures that differ from ours.

Before going any further, the aspiring multiculturalist must contemplate the following long enough to internalize it: God Is Greater Than European Union. The secular countries can run all around with their democracy, love, liberty, free sex and stuff -- but in a truly religious brain Mohammed beats Voltaire in the first round and that's what matters.

Dear Really Bad Columnist, that's a starting point for you. Just like we believe in no God or indifferent God, some people believe there is a Very Important Tuff Mofo God out there. Even if you don't believe in God, you must understand that some people do, and that's basically why they run around with their bombs or keep turning the other cheek or do whatever stoning women to death thing they do. The dialogue can't start from making requirements on other cultures, since cultures do not have common foundations.

Instead of requiring the eastern cultures to conform to ours, we should be discussing how will we manage to get along, even though our principles are different. Maybe, if we wish to go on with peaceful coexistence, we must change if the other side can't -- maybe we must change our notion of freedom of speech? Meditate on that, remembering that allowing people to insult the God might be even a bigger taboo for some true moslems around here.

Now, let's have some dialogue based on this.

That being said, I seriously considered publishing the images in here in support of the newspapers supporting Jyllands-Posten. My belief system is strongly tweaked in the funny way not allowing me to give up an inch of freedom of speech. I also believe that cultural conflict is inevitable.

Being the nation's last role-player blog to break the news, I want to advertise the upcoming Roolipelaaja magazine. I'm not the only one who has claimed to see some decline in the Finnish role-playing scene lately, and things like Roolipelaaja are the best way to vitalize the scene. Also, I hope that the mag will bring tabletoppers, larpers and mmorpgers together in a new way. I'm contributing to the magazine by writing articles, starting with a report from Prosopopeia, the pervasive larp organized in Sweden by Martin Ericsson, Adriana Skarped and Staffan Jonsson.

Subscribe today; the pricetag is very low for hearing the newest new and coolest cool on what's going on, and by doing so you also help to keep the scene running.

In a way so typical for Finnish role-players, I already heard some complaints on the fact that yes, Roolipelaaja is a commercial product, and some people will actually live working their asses off on it. And I think this is wonderful; with all due respect to makers of Magus, Larppaaja and the like, having someone doing Roolipelaaja full-time is great. Also, a commercial product seeks to attract the whole of the audience, which is a positive change in the scene fragmented by a multitude of society-run zines.

Truth will be out there 3.3.; in addition to hobby shops, Roolipelaaja is available from many major bookstores and news stands.

I was asked to write a story about Sociolotron for PC Pelaaja magazine. Unfortunately they won't get one, since I'm not very keen on turning off all my firewalls the way Amerabyte suggests. After hours of trying, I couldn't make the game work, not even when I opened some 65000 ports for them.

Anyway, making some background work for the story, I googled for sex elsewhere in virtual worlds, Second Life in particular. Turns out that the early adapters are a bit late compared to usual, but catching up in virtual realities. Playing sex with digital dolls is in rise.

Obviously, people with impossible, unacceptable and illegal preferences and fetishes are going for toon-sex as well. An increasing numbers of consenting adults will be found playing with pixelated celebrity teenagers, mylittleponies and non-biological entities in these worlds.

These people will actually have to learn to role-play in order to entertain each other. A very interesting player group for an aspiring role-playing researcher!