Philosophy

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: ...

The short answer: of course they are! The longer answer? Possibly, see more. ...

There are two ways to understand this question: What makes us, humans, play games? What makes games playable and enjoyable? The first question is a question for the study of humans, namely cultural studies like anthropology. There is also the view of evolutionary biology, psychology or biology in general that can shed some light to the question by explaining play as a function for other purposes. Namely, this is one of the possible answers: function or for what other purpose does play exist. There are several possibilities, like maintaining social integrity, teaching small children about rules behavior etc. ...

Two of archetypical creatures found in horror movies, zombies and vampires, have also found their way into philosophy. To eat the delicious, undoubtedly larger than average brains, and sweet, sweet blood of philosophers you might think. No, but as serious theories of the mind and humanity. Stop laughing. Zombies Since Descartes, mind has been an important part of the philosophical lingo. Philosophy of mind is experiencing a boom in research and intentionality is a hot topic for conversation. There is also a rather new hybrid of philosophy and several other fields of research called cognitive sciences. ...

Johann Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens” is one the classics in the study of play. I’ve been trying to read it but I also have a lot of essays to return during spring so my reading has been dragging itself slowly toward summer. I like the way Huizinga defines play. I’m reading it in Finnish, as I was lucky enough to find the book in my native language - it makes reading a bit more enjoyable and faster, but it also means I have to get my hands on at least the English version for comparison. Finnish is a tricky language for writing about play. Luckily, I found the definition in English also, so I don’t have trust my own translation for commenting on it. ...