I started a game of The Mountain Witch yesterday. I like this game particularly for being so easy to pick up and start with a moments notice. This actually describes the situation I was in very well: only a few hours before our scheduled gaming time somebody reminded me that I own the game, and they would like to play it. An hour before the game I searched for all my game apparels and read through the game quickly, reminding myself what this game was all about. ...

After moving into a new apartment and catching the most awful flu you ever experienced I’ve found that trying to keep up any kind of schedule for writing here has been a failure. I’ll try to correct that. Yesterday I sent my seminar paper to the seminar participants. I was forced to cut several pages to fit the length restrictions, which I still exceeded by few pages. While cutting off the excess, I tried to incorporate the feedback I got from my two helpful commentators. Thanks, jiituomas and Thanuir. The paper was far from perfect when I was through with it, but it was better than the draft I sent you. The parts that didn’t get in the paper will be useful when I continue writing on the subject. ...

Last Sunday we played the third game in my series of political games. ‘Political’ does not here mean that they included political action by the characters, but that they had in them political situations reflected from history. Basically, I took historical situations and placed them in a hypothetical future realized in a dystopian cyberpunk-setting. The first two games were about Vietnam 2.0. In these games Vietnam was devastated by war and still collecting itself after Chinese occupation. The UN was trying to keep peace in a situation where part of the country was in Chinese and part in Vietnamese rebel control. We watched parts of Full Metal Jacket and Rambo to get to mood for a sweaty journey through a hostile jungle. The characters in the first game were independent contractors trying to rescue American construction workers that had been in Vietnam to aid in its reconstruction. The construction workers had been captured for ransom by Vietnamese rebels, led - ironically - by an ex-Chinese general. The company they worked for decided that the ransom was not worth it, so workers’ families collected enough money to hire some mercenaries. The game ended with a lot of dead rebels, a wounded general and rescued construction workers. ...

A while ago I attended a philosophy seminar where the last presentation was about using science fiction as a tool for research. For researchers interested in culture and society, it may give invaluable possibilities. The idea is to use science fiction as a “what if”-scenario. Most of the elements of society can be kept constant (gender roles, economic structures) while some (ideologies, length of life span) are altered to see what the resulting societies look like. These scenarios are intuitively understandable, as long as they are close enough to our own conception of society. ...

Next weekend I’ll have chance to play Liquid Crystal again. It is a game in which players create and play robots with no personality to start with. The game is set in a utopian (or dystopian) future where most of the humanity is wiped out and the remainder try to build anew, starting with the city of New Olympus. The back story is largely unimportant, as it is not a game about exploration, unless that is defined very specifically to mean the psyche of the robot played. In another words, it is game of building personalities and seeing how they turn out. Very few games start with a blank character sheet that is completed based on the events of the game, and not the other way around. ...

I’ve been working on my second thesis seminar paper roughly from the beginning of the year. The paper is the second part of the seminar. Together they form my review of the history of game research - mostly the classic stuff starting from Huizinga. There was a lot of interesting things in there, but since I’ve already covered that quite thoroughly in my papers I’m not going to go over it again here. (The papers are, unfortunately, in Finnish. If you happen to be fluent and interested, feel free to ask me.) However, there was one text that was of particular interest: Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. His analysis of game and play is very interesting, if a bit eclectic, but his idea of a sociology derived from games is quite positively intriguing. In the introduction, the translator Meyer Barash, puts it thusly: ...