There are, I think, some things best expressed by games, as opposed to other media. When I say ‘games,’ I mostly mean videogames, but some of this probably applies to other games as well. I don’t think these are necessarily qualities of games themselves, but of how we currently develop games; nevertheless, I think these apply at least to games as we now know them. These qualities mostly come back to two things that games have and most other media don’t (or have less): procedurality and interactivity. Games consist of processes and players interact with them. Other things can also consist of processes and be interactive, but games are currently the most prominent example of both. ...

Last year me and Johannes Koski published our study on a series of fascinating and confusing events. In 2017, the artist trio Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner created the installation #ALONETOGETHER. The three artists spent a month in separate cabins somewhere in Lapland, isolated from everything else. In the modern art museum Kiasma, there was a small cabin people could go into. There were cameras in the cabin that relayed everything that happened back to the artists. The artists were also filmed by cameras, but they could only communicate with the audience by typing, with the text slowly appearing underneath their images. They could not see or hear each other. ...

I read a lot of texts on computers and games from the humanities and social sciences perspectives. They are usually non-technical papers that deal with the human side of computing. Because of the context, there is still a lot of discussion on computation, data, digital systems and other more technical aspects. While reading those papers, I’ve noticed an unfortunate tendency to treat computers as black boxes with unknown or magical operations within, especially among the humanities scholars.1 ...

After reading game studies for years, there are a few issues that I regularly encounter and that I find problematic. I thought about writing a more thorough paper about these issues, but that would take more time than I currently have. The issues I mention below are also pretty diverse, so maybe the only thing they have in common is that they’re issues that I regularly see in game studies papers. ...

What do players do when they can’t talk to each other directly? Argue on the forums, it seems to be. We studied the forum users of the popular card game Hearthstone, looking at how they negotiated the use of emotes. Players argued, negotiated, ranted and preached about the proper use of the emotes, frequently disagreeing on what they actually meant in different contexts. Some players seemed to long for a set meaning for the different emotes, but there didn’t seem to be any way to reach a consensus on what that meaning would be, since different people used them differently. ...

I’ve lately been moving away from the walled gardens I used to put my research in and trying to find ways of making my research as openly accessible as possible while keeping it future-proof. These goals are not that hard to accomplish, but they do require some effort and some new tools. In order to research to be freely accessible, somebody needs to make it accessible, because that’s not currently the default for published research, even if it’s funded by public resources. So what would be needed for that to be reality? ...