Managed to publish my first article in role-playing theory, in the second issue of International Journal of Role-Playing. The article is about how role-playing games are, can and should be defined. There is a bunch of great articles in the journal. Suggested reading for anyone interested in (academic) role-playing game theory.

I recently gave a lecture on pervasive games. In preparing that lecture I took some notes that were almost an introduction to the subject itself. It seemed a pity not to use that text, so here is a short introduction to pervasive gaming. Pervasive Games Pervasive games are not an entirely new phenomenon, but the research done on them is quite new. We’ll define what pervasive games are in a minute. First, lets look at an example and see if it enlightens what type of games are in question. ...

I wrote about games as art before, so I should mention that Georgia Tech University has held a conference called Art History of Games. The talks are fortunately available on Youtube. Certainly worth a glance.

I acted in Juhana Petterson’s participatory art installation, Portaikko, last weekend at Imatra Human Culture art-festival. It was exciting, since I haven’t done anything like it before, but still familiar enough from previous larp-experience. The amount of participants wasn’t spectacular, but easily enough to feel like a success.

I just played my first game of role-playing over the internet today. I’ve played IRC-based role-playing games before, but these have centered on the text; this time we used mainly voice chat. I shouldn’t be surprised in this age of technology, but I am: it was easy. We wanted to use voice chat for communication and chose Teamspeak, mostly because all of us had experience with it. Apart from some hardware problems, voice chat worked like a charm. Video chat would probably have been even better, but voice chat seems easily sufficient. ...

It seems that Roger Ebert has changed his opinion of games. The acclaimed movie critic admits that he cannot make the judgement that games are not art because he is not familiar enough with video games. But it seems that not everybody agrees that this is a good thing.