The first day of Adult Play seminar was an interesting combination of all kinds of different approaches to play and playfulness, and how they relate to toys, games and other playful things. The sessions from the first day touched upon DayZ, ARGs, political larp, play in the workplace, design games, talking chairs, adult toys, miniatures – and of course, the Goatse of Grief Play. The first session started with a dose of DayZ. Two different papers were presented about the zombie apocalypse game, first one by Lawrence May and focusing on how players document the game through pictures, evoking history and intertextuality while doing so, drawing upon, for example, war photography. ...

My dissertation Real-Time Hermeneutics: Meaning-Making in Ludonarrative Digital Games is now available on this website. You can easily skim it through and see if there is anything that interests you. In case you find it useful, the whole book is available for free through the University of Jyväskylä publication archive. Like everything else on this site, the version you find here is available with a Creative Commons license. Drop me a comment if you find the text interesting. ...

Here is a sneak-peek into my dissertation, which will soon be published by the University of Jyväskylä. In this chapter, I argue that there are some things that are best expressed by games. In addition to the features that games have in common with other media, they are also apt in expressing ideas in particular ways. One of the ways this works is through what Bogost (2007, p. 85) calls the rhetoric of failure: ...

Deus Ex: Human Revolution starts with an explosive start that shatters the life Adam Jensen was trying to build, and launches him into a career of chasing down a conspiracy. In doing so, the player guides Jensen through many types of activities, most having to do with sneaking around and taking down enemies with his cybernetic powers. While doing the core activities of the game, the player is rewarded with experience. Shoot an enemy and you are rewarded with 10 points. Choke them unconscious and get 50 points. Experience is also awarded from things like exploring the game world and finishing quests, or to put it in other words, being thorough. More experience may be lurking in any nook or cranny. ...

I recently changed the site over to Jekyll. The previous version was written by me in HTML5 on top of HTML5 Boilerplate and the blog was handled by Octopress. I liked Octopress, with the simple-enough static site generation, and the ability to write stuff mostly in markdown. Octopress is built on top of Jekyll, so I looked a bit more on how Jekyll works and found a theme I liked, Skinny Bones. I made some changes, to better suit my use, but mostly the theme was great. The great thing about Jekyll is that I could make the games page automatic, making adding more games very easy in the future. Of course, figuring out how to do that took some time. ...

I recently tweeted a high-profile article on the Guardian about Felicia Day and GamerGate, the online movement mostly visible on Twitter, but also making waves visible enough that big news outlets like the Guardian see it newsworthy. Soon after, I received messages from GamerGate proponents (and that’s both great and terrible about Twitter – anyone can message anyone), telling me how that is not what GamerGate is about. I understand their concern: they identify with GamerGate and when others write that GamerGate is about something they don’t identify with, they feel misrepresented. The feeling is understandable: “They say I stand for harassment, but I don’t. They need to stop saying those things about me.” ...