Shards 2007

I'm thinking about my future more and more these days. The fact is that my contract ends in the end of February or maybe in the end of March, and after that I'm gonna need some new work. Since our project applications did not work out, I'm not sure if the lab can pay me after that -- it's quite unlikely, to be honest.

In terms of research, I have one more application for personal funding running, to Suomen Kulttuurirahasto. I think I have good chances of getting funded; unfortunately, in the Finnish system 20% should be considered excellent chances. Coincidentally they announce their funding or lack of it just before my contract is over.

In terms of research, there have been sincere and light talks with some University of Nottingham people, and some uncertain but heavier talks with some Swedish Institute of Computer Science people. If the Nottingham thing happened, it would be around few months, if the SICS thing happened it might be around six months. Both offers are from computer science labs: I think I've learned to work with them a bit, but my dissertation work would benefit more if I interacted with humanists as well.

If those botch, due to reason or another, I'm in a big crossroads. I believe I could return to communications business, either as an information officer, as a journalist or as a consultant. That would be a good life -- a good life half-done PhD.

Or I could try to make the switch to the games industry. Don't hold your breath, though.

Oh my gawdd, it's consumerfest again!

I hate the jingles. I hate the traffic jams. I hate the weather. I hate stressing about presents and people hoarding useless junk. I hate the overwhelming pseudo-religious wave of hypocrisy. I hate eating same foods for a full week. I hate...

Whatever.

Have you ever, like ever heard a Finnish male telling you about a story he just read from Literally translates as "We Women". A "survival guide for modern woman" with circulation of 130.000 and 48 issues annually.Me naiset?

That's my thought for the day, been wondering it for a while. I read a few dozen issues, and yeah: Every issue seems to have at least one or two stories that I guess an average reader of Image or Helsingin Sanomien Kuukausiliite would find interesting. Of course they tend to have a female angle that shows in small details -- they seem to prefer female interviewees, for instance. Nothing outstanding compared to the male bias of Tekniikan maailma or Wired.

But no, I've never heard any male telling about this interesting story he read from Me naiset. Or from a magazne with a less alienating name such as Cosmopolitan, Gloria or Vogue either.

I find that funny, trying to imagine my dad, my boss or one of The Guys opening a discussion with "Did you read that story from Me naiset?"

Stranded in Tokyo. British Airways cancelled our flight, so here we are with 24 fewer hours of lifetime. I'd really love to be on a plane home, it's been a long and exhausting trip -- and I also wonder whether I'm getting ill. I think I am, and the 7 hours we spent travelling to airport, queuing around and waiting for information didn't really help.

Nice trip with a crappy ending, I must say.

Tokyo also gave me the environmentalist angst I always get in the metropols. Visiting Tokyo, New York or especially Los Angeles reminds you of the fact that we are the generations that extinguish all fossil fuel of this globe, up until we change the climate into something we can no longer sustain. The human civilization that comes after us will be able to live out of our scraps for centuries.

(The next day: Not that easy! SAS screwed our replacement flight by four hours, so we also lost the replacement from Copenhagen.

In Finnish universities we have this salary reform UPJ going on. It sucks in so many ways I can't even count, but I got a new one this month.

The system is based on two salary ladders. One for researchers and teachers, and the other for everyone else ranging from managers to janitors. A coworker still working with his master's thesis was unhappy with his salary from the former scale and decided to go for the latter one.

His salary went up by 34%.

I'm not kidding. The gross payment he gets from the University increased by a bit more than a third overnight. How can you justify this through a bureaucratic gimmick?

The thing is that the researcher scale starts from grade 1, where you are expected to be a junior researcher or research assistant having your master's done but still working with your doctoral dissertation. That's grade one. Even though the system explicitly says that your salary is based on your work instead of your degree, it's almost impossible to get researcher grades 3-4 without a degree. But the other evaluation team looking at non-academic staff is much more lenient, understanding that it's impossible to get, for example, good IT staff if you pay them less than €2000 per month.

But how can a system giving that widely different results be fair? And how long it will last until all researchers demand evaluation on the rest-of-the-world scale, and all job descriptions consist of polite fiction hiding the fact that people are, actually, researchers. You know, my position is technically a "project manager and researcher". Should I use that for leverage and leave the pariah class of researchers?

We're planning our trip to Asia. Apparently we have to first hit an IPerG meeting in Brighton, then go on to Tokyo for Tokyo Gameshow, then stay for DiGRA 2007 and finally return to Finland. Finding out the optimal times and routes for flights is obviously quite a puzzle.

Discussing our travel agency, we have found out, among other things, that Finnish government gets Finnair flights to Japan for special prices. Apparently the special price for Helsinki-Tokyo-Helsinki is EUR 2811,60 plus service fees. In economy class.

I don't feel that special myself.

It's been over ten years since I last was in Salzburg. Been here for a couple of days now, but only when I entered our favourite place, Augustiner Bräustübl, I really felt like being here again. The last time was a language course, during which sat in this beerhouse every night for four weeks. Drinking alcohol was forbidden, of course, but we didn't quite care.

It's strange how little I remembered. One vague image from here and another from there, but for instance the layout of this place was quite lost until I walked in and saw it again. I learned to drink beer by downing bucketfuls of das gute Augustiner Bier served mostly in double-pint mugs. I had completely forgotten the taste, but now that I'm drinking one, I'm positive this was exactly the taste back then as well. They still never wash the mugs; you gotta do that yourself before they fill it up.

The brewery has been running since 1621, so it's no surprise that absolutely nothing has changed in here. Austrians love to put numbers on the walls telling when houses were built and renovated, and the most recent number I've seen in the entire Mülln cloister is 1907.

Incidentally, someone's painted an old proverb on the wall in front of me. "Ein guter Trunk Macht Alte jung". Damn good beer indeed.

Shards has turned into an extremely boring work blog, I wonder if anyone reads it anymore. I have no idea, possibly due to not caring.

Anyway, I just updated my research plan, which the work people will possibly find fascinating. As you see, my PhD has tripled in size, now being not only the grand universal theory of role-playing, but now also including the grand universal theory of pervasive gaming, and the grand unification theory of the two.

200% more, you see. Coming out by the end of the decade, perhaps, depending on our future projects and my future funding.

Oh -- now that I got started with boasting, I gotta tell that was just interviewed to The Guardian. I've always been a big fan of that newspaper, and now I'm even more so: They found me by reading Designing Goals for Online Role-Players, DiGRA 2005.one of my papers, and in addition to reading it they also wanted to discuss it. Finding a journalist interested in differences of exogenous, endogenous and diegetic game goals is probably a once-in-a-lifetime -thing.

Today's word is dataporn. You know, when someone "dumps slides and slides full of numbers on Powerpoint without having any idea on what they mean".

WTB: Humanists.

A work update.

You might actually see me in DiGRA Tokyo conference this year. Submitted one solo paper on Tangible Pleasures of Pervasive Role-Playing and one co-authored one on Go see the Momentum website!Momentum.

I don't know how the digital games researchers take our games that are not played on-screen, but their theme, "situated play" would imply that both papers stand a chance in the peer review. If we assume two papers with 60% chance each, I have 84% chance to get my plane tickets.

I'll also definitely go to PerGames Salzburg conference, even though I'm not sure whether I'll have a paper there. IPerG is organizing some tutorials in there, so I guess I have my reason to travel anyway.

Other than that, we're applying money for two research projects where I imagine finishing my dissertation might be possible. One of them is a national three year project on educational role-playing, and the other is an FP7 continuation on what we've been doing in IPerG. One of them would focus directly on role-playing and funded by dissertation-friendly Academy of Finland, while the other would offer nicer international collaboration network and more media sexy area of study. If the both got a funding, it'd be a tough decision.

The final point on my current working situation explains some of the recent silence in this blog: I'm writing to Nyt pelittää as well these days, which is a Helsingin Sanomat game blog. Some of you might find it interesting read as well.

According to a 102-page report, it's a problem that all eight professors of journalism are male on a department where 70% of students are female. I agree. But I wonder why it's not a problem that after heavy competition 70% of the students are women?

The report recommends targeting the next professorship in a way that would allow a woman to get the chair. Should they also devise an entrance exam that would increase the proportion of male students? The issue is conveniently left outside the report.

My typical reaction to gender equality reports and programs is a feeling of alienation. I mean -- I still don't know why men's studies is a small discipline within the department of women's studies in University of Helsinki.

Quit being feminists and go for equalism for change!

I just found out that the in the paper I'm currently writing I came dangerously close to accidental plagiarism. I'm writing a text on pervasive role-playing, using games such as Killer and street-Vampire as examples. Luckily I checked out what Rules of Play had to say about Killer -- since it also says a whole lot about urban Vampire.

I read the book a couple of years back; it has 672 pages and discusses literally almost everything. I feel like my ideas were stolen, even though that book precedes my paper draft by three years.

Damn. I gotta reinvent my paper now. Luckily it seems that the deadline is moving.

Game researchers play a lot of games, at least in meetings. In our project I guess I'm one of the icebreakers on that habit, having done that for a couple of years already. Now that Burning Crusade came out, I spent several days in Palma, Mallorca, mining copper and selling it to all the brand new jewelcrafters around. I don't think anyone minds, actually -- the half that doesn't play games writes papers and works with their email.

What can you expect when you put people into a five day plenary meeting?

Actually it appears that we gamers are often among the most active participants in long meetings. Grinding or playing Tetris keeps you awake but doesn't prevent listening. The guy next to me was reading everything from Preacher to project reports on his screen and was completely phased out at times.

It's actually very much like knitting -- except for the social impact. In game researach conferences a lot of people play constantly as well, but they also get nasty gazes for doing that, even though most of them focus much better while playing. Of course you have to play in a fashion that doesn't stop business.

In my case that meant death in the jaws of a dragon. I lost my concentration when I suddendly had to fast talk myself away from doing some nasty, boring bureaucratical work.