Games

I wrote about games as art before, so I should mention that Georgia Tech University has held a conference called Art History of Games. The talks are fortunately available on Youtube. Certainly worth a glance.

I just played my first game of role-playing over the internet today. I’ve played IRC-based role-playing games before, but these have centered on the text; this time we used mainly voice chat. I shouldn’t be surprised in this age of technology, but I am: it was easy. We wanted to use voice chat for communication and chose Teamspeak, mostly because all of us had experience with it. Apart from some hardware problems, voice chat worked like a charm. Video chat would probably have been even better, but voice chat seems easily sufficient. ...

It seems that Roger Ebert has changed his opinion of games. The acclaimed movie critic admits that he cannot make the judgement that games are not art because he is not familiar enough with video games. But it seems that not everybody agrees that this is a good thing.

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.