I finally managed to finish and return my master’s thesis. It is about the theory of games, but unfortunately only available in Finnish. You can find it online, if you happen to be interested and understand Finnish. Please ignore the typo in the abstract. The thesis is for a quite limited audience. I thought I could post something interesting for the people that don’t understand Finnish by mentioning an interesting TED talk. Jane McGonigal spoke about the possibilities of using gaming to fix real-world problems in her talk titled Gaming can make a better world. You can blame her for being an optimist, but I really think you should watch the talk. For those of you that are in a hurry or have a short attention span, I gathered some highlights: ...

To a great surprise to everyone, this post is not going to be about the fuss surrounding the killing of civilians in Modern Warfare 2. Instead, I’ll write about a few older games. ...

Recently, I touched upon the subject of games as art. This is by means unexplored territory; in fact it is so well traversed that the great movie critic Roger Ebert has commented on the subject. Unfortunately, he voices a negative opinion. He bases his view on arguments I can’t completely accept, while I do agree that not everything that is of value is art.

Like everybody and their mother, I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2. The game includes a lot of dialogue and after a chat with a supporting character I was quite sure Shepard was flirting with him. This is in no way unexpected, as it seems that Shepard is quite omnisexual and will flirt with anything that seems to have approximately two legs. What got me interested was that this was a male character, being flirted with by my male Shepard. I got online and checked: No, no homosexual relationships in Mass Effect 2. Unless you’re a woman, in which case you got at least two candidates. It seems that you can have sex with four kinds of different aliens (the galaxy seems very… compatible), girl-on-girl action is okay, but when it is about two male characters hitting the pillows, it’s a no go. Way to chicken out, Bioware. ...

The short answer: of course they are! The longer answer? Possibly, see more. ...

While I wholeheartedly think that science is mostly methodically uniform, there are two things that seem to differentiate the social sciences (or humanities) from the natural sciences. (That would seem to put me on the side of methodical antipositivism, if one is into labeling.) There are two distinct differences between the reality the natural sciences research and the one of social sciences study. While these differences are not immediately apparent, they are easily understandable when pointed out. They also lead to some methodological consequences that must be taken into account. ...