Frans Mäyrä’s An Introduction to Game Studies delivers what it promises. It’s probably the best introduction to game studies available. It discusses the central concepts in game studies, from the magic circle to game cultures, thoughtfully and clearly. In order to make things more understandable, it simplifies some issues. Mostly, it does this successfully, but there is one thing I think it simplifies too much. It happens to be a thing that appears close to the beginning of the book and is clearly presented in a diagram, making it easy to learn and remember. Because it’s so clearly presented, it’s one of the few things all students pick up from the book. ...

For the first six years the Yearbook of Finnish Game Studies was published as a PDF file, but few years ago I promised that we could publish it in three formats: as a webpage (HTML), as an electronic book (EPUB) and as a PDF. I’d read on how to create a workflow that makes all this possible, but I was more ambitious: I thought that I could more or less automate the creation of all three formats. We’re not quite there, but most of the conversion steps are automatic (see the postscript about PDF conversion for some of the problems). I figured all of this out by trial and error, and by following the excellent advice from the Institute of Network Cultures, especially their "From Print to Ebooks: a Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts". ...

Surveillance capitalism is the idea that we have entered a new phase in how capitalism works. Mining doesn’t focus on natural resources anymore, but on data. Our labour is less valuable than our use of services and devices that can extract value from us. Google is one of the biggest players in surveillance capitalism. Almost everyone uses their products, yet almost nobody pays for them. Google makes money by giving away their products and selling what they learn about their users. ...

Update: I’ve changed my setup. See below how & why. It feels like I’ve been changing how my website works for as long as it’s been alive. It started as a WordPress site, then ran Octopress for a while, but three years ago I changed it over to Jekyll, running the Skinny Bones theme. I’m pretty happy with that choice. Unlike a traditional CMS, Jekyll builds my site offline. There is no back-end and the site is just pure HTML from the user’s perspective. Because there is no back-end, Jekyll isn’t susceptible to viruses or hackers, like a traditional CMS. I don’t need to constantly update the site just to keep it safe and working. ...

The Google memo assumes that computing is naturally suited to men. But is it? After writing this post I made an updated, interactive version of this text. If you want to dive deeper, take a look at Gendered Computing. The discussion on the Google Memo has been lively, especially after Google decided to fire the author. There have been many responses to the events, but many still seem confused about whether the contents of the memo were correct. It correctly identifies that our thinking is often rife with bias, and then suggests corrections to what it identifies as the current Google approach to gender diversity. In short, it states that ...

Surveillance capitalism is the new default way of doing business on the internet. Even businesses that don’t need to collect data do so because it’s so easy. Surveillance capitalism doesn’t require you to consume, it just requires you to exist within digital networks. You are more valuable as a source of data than as a potential customer. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for Google and Facebook to give away all their products. They don’t require you to pay anything in order to grow rich – together they make more money on online advertising than everyone else combined. ...