First Deploy With Octopress

Thinking I could move all my blogging to a single place I tried using Octopress. It seems nice and light, converting markdown text to static html-pages. In practice, it wasn’t that easy. It might be the ~ in my site address or a broken conversion between Wordpress and Octopress. There is a warning on Octopress pages that it is a blogging platform for hackers. They weren’t kidding. I managed to import my old blog posts from two Wordpress blogs without losing much info on the way and without anything breaking, so I guess it can be considered a success. I almost gave up midway, but after visiting #octopress on Freenode I got some advice and everything in working condition. ...

February 8, 2014 · 1 min · 145 words · Jonne Arjoranta

Real, Fictive and Virtual

The concepts real, fiction and virtual get tossed around pretty casually around game studies. It seems that “virtual” is a lasting favorite, used to rescue any ontologically vague situation by slapping a seemingly clear category on it. The problem is that calling something virtual is far from clear, as the whole category of virtual seems to be a mess of different things only vaguely related to each other. ...

February 8, 2014 · 4 min · 703 words · Jonne Arjoranta

Dissertation Summary

I recently gave a mock-lectio praecursoria as part of a course I’m taking. It summarises some of the work I’ve done for my dissertation. See below for more. The games I reference in the end are Depression Quest, That Dragon, Cancer, and Papers, Please. ...

January 29, 2014 · 5 min · 893 words · Jonne Arjoranta

Computers Run on Metaphors

Computers are built to run on metaphoric relations taken from earlier forms of technology and human experience not related to computers. An obvious example is the concept of a file, stored in a folder. That is, of course, a metaphor taken from earlier forms of organizing information in filing cabinets, when information was stored on sheets of paper instead of bits on a hard drive. ...

November 9, 2013 · 5 min · 905 words · Jonne Arjoranta

Meaning Effects in Video Games, Talk

I gave this talk at the Games and Literary Theory -conference at Malta. It describes the contents of the paper I submitted to the conference. ...

November 2, 2013 · 12 min · 2382 words · Jonne Arjoranta

Understanding Player Interpretation: An Embodied Approach

Here is a slightly edited version of the talk I gave at the Philosophy of Computer Games 2013. ...

October 3, 2013 · 10 min · 2001 words · Jonne Arjoranta