Shards

I just had a small epiphany. Preparing a lecture, I was thinking about the significance of Dungeons & Dragons for the role-playing in general. As we know, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson of course did not invent role-playing when they created their games.

What they did was that they productized pretence play in an ingenious manner. A great feat, no complaints about that.

Epiphanies like this make me intolerably satisfied about myself. I'm sorry, had to blog this right away.

In a week, Spotify has liberated my identity totally from my music listening habits. Now that half of everything I can imagine -- I have a bad imagination -- is but a few clicks away, I can listen to random things with zero committment to style, aesthetics, artist or anything.

It's actually very very fun; I've spent so much time with wild experimentation, random artists and guilty pleasures. I even listened to some country just because I could. I used to surf YouTube for random musics, but Spotify just takes it on a totally new level. Today I typed in first "andante" and then "allegretto" just for classical moodhunting.

Physical music distribution is so totally over.

Next step: Figure out how to let me listen to Spotify on my phone. I wonder how Nokia Comes with Music works in practice?

Somehow I get totally disorganized when traveling. First I was in GDC for a week, then went to Playful Experiences seminar to Tampere, then spent my Easter in Fastaval in Århus and finally last weekend in Knutepunkt in Oslo. I stare at my calendar and have no clue on what should happen tomorrow or during the next week. The flu does not help.

I'm not commenting on Playful Experiences since I was in the organizing committee, but GDC, Fastaval and Knutepunkt were all inspiring and eye-opening events. GDC is the place with the best-prepared presenters I have so far seen, Fastaval showed me how tabletop role-playing should be done and developed in conventions, and Knutepunkt maintained the excellent standards of the previous two years.

My head is so full of ideas I don't know where to start unloading. Well, I already started a new paper completely out of the blue, looking into why people play bleed games. It is funny, that paper might actually bridge our work on playfulness with my personal role-playing related research interests.

But still I have no clue on where I should be tomorrow or today, I just realized that Olli's defense is on Saturday already!

In other news, it would appear that a major recruitment freeze in a certain mobile phone company will put me back on my grant again in June. That's great news for my dissertation, but my finances will suck so badly it's hard to believe.

It's not like this blog has been very active lately in any case, but now I'm focusing my blogging efforts to our Pervasive Games blog. It's a sort of an extension to our forthcoming book: After you submit a manuscript, you will have to find some place to vent everything you can no longer add to the chapters.

At least there are three of us blogging there, so it should be more active than this one for a while now!

Yesterday I uploaded the last delivery of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design texts and images were sent to our publisher. The book should come out this year, but I have no idea whether that means April or December.

Here's the Table of Contents, with my one-sentence summarizations of the gist of each chapter:

1. Games and Pervasive Games
   Basics and definitions; what are pervasive games and why are they interesting.
2. Pervasive Game Genres
   Pervasive games range from ARGs to treasure hunts et cetera.
3. Historical Influences on Pervasive Games
   Looking back at loads of creative works that did similar things before pervasive games.
4. Designing Spatial Expansion
   Everything about space and pervasivity.
5. Designing Temporal Expansion
   Starting, ending and structuring a long pervasive game.
6. Designing Social Expansion
   How to entertain and exploit bystanders.
7. Pervasive Game Design Strategies
   Holistic design strategies from game mastering to tangible experiences and so forth.
8. Information Technology in Pervasive Games
   How to use and how to not use pervasive technologies in pervasive games.
9. Designing Pervasive Games for Mobile Phones
   The 3.3 billion cellphones of the world are the premium platform for pervasive gaming.
10. Ethics of Pervasive Gaming
    Horror stories, close calls and lessons learned.
11. Marketing the Category of Pervasive Games
    How to sell these games to people who don't understand what they are?
12. Art and Politics of Pervasive Gaming
    Exploring the artistic power and relevance of pervasive games.
13. Pervasive Games in Media Culture
    How do pervasive games relate to the changing media culture?

In addition, there is a foreword by Sean Stewart, a portfolio of case studies discussing 13 very different pervasive games, and an appendix summarizing the central properties of technological tools that are handy for making these games.

I'm Quite enthusiastic about this!

If you plan to have a career as a project researcher, you have to learn to understand your comfort zones. At least for me personally, starting a new project or entering a new field is always very uncomfortable. I run out of self-confidence, lose sleep and sometimes also dodge work. It happens to everyone, but the first time is the worst.

Looking back at last year, this is how my Research Activities 2008 are positioned on my comfort zone.

• Pervasive games research -- Very confident.
• Role-playing games research -- Very confident.
• Mobile games and services -- Comfortable.
• Viral games -- Borderline comfortable.
• Ethics of pervasive games -- Borderline comfortable.
• Sociology of play -- Borderline uncomfortable.
• Play as performance -- Uncomfortable.
• Playability and usability -- Inconfident.
• Psychology of play experience -- Very inconfident.

As you see, the stuff I've been working on for a long time is now in the comfort zone. Stuff that is not closely related to my major disciplines is very hard to haul towards the top; a lot of sweat and blood has been put into the ethics to get it even that far. I'm afraid that getting on top of playful experiences will take even much more effort: It is a difficult problem with no proper answers and my education is lacking.

In a well-managed organization you should be able to work simultaneously with your strong and weak areas, gaining confidence and publications from old areas while getting adjusted to new projects. Steering the ship takes time, and researchers hate to abandon their past projects before exploiting the data and experiences fully.

Luckily, our team at NRC is full of seasoned veterans who are very good at coping with this kind of change. This creates an athmosphere where at least I feel more comfortable to deal with the discomfort. Much better than the worst-case chain of short Tekes projects where researchers are under constant pressure to adapt rapidly.