I'm about to take the road in more than one sense: I'm leaving on holiday today and won't be back online before mid-July (possibly). I've started taking my driver's license and this is possibly the most terrifying experience, I've ever put myself through. Today I was "on the road" with a car for the first time, and some of the holidays will be spent practising not to kill other people when I'm in traffic...

Oh, and the reason why I've started taking the driver's license is that I would really like to be able to hit the road when I go to Georgia in the fall: I've been warned that pedestrians don't stand many chances of fun in that place. It's a close race against time, but if I fail miserably in getting the driver's license before flying out, at least I tried.

Anyway, see you back her in mid-July, until then: enjoy your holidays!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:59 (1) comments

The Danish Internet Mag "Turbulens" has an interesting issue out on "The Smell of Net Art [Dunsten fra Kunsten]. In Danish only unfortunately.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:29 (0) comments

I've been afk for a while, attending the DIGRA conference in Vancouver. Vancouver is a cool city and it was nice to see some familiar faces and get an overview of the current state of affairs in game research. But, honestly, the conference was somewhat sloppily organised (though undoubtably a lot of hard work was put into it), which made aspects of socialising and networking less than successful. Pictures to follow in the photoblog.


Coming back and checking the inbox, I noticed this whitepaper from IGDA on their white paper page: 2005 Mobile Games White Paper. I've been involved (as Head) with some students programming a mobile game design platform, so of interest to them and therefore me.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:23 (0) comments

The University of Tampere has put the videos of their lecture series on Games and Storytelling online. Speakers include Jessica Mulligan, Henry Jenkins, Katie Salen, Ernest Adams, Aki Järvinen and Frans Mayra.

Flux Factory in NY has tried out a quite intriguing art project, a so-called "living installation", Novel: lock up 3 authors in a box for a month and make them promise that after this month, they will have written the manuscript for a novel. The experiement recently finished and apparently all 3 authors completed the mission. From my pov, the really interesting part of this project is that all 3 authors were also asked to weblog during their writing imprisonment - and blog they did! You can find the blogs on a related project website.

The movie "War of the Worlds" has launched a survival game on the movie website. The designers have studied what works and doesn't work in online games. Hence, you can play several "maps" with each their objectives, you can team up with other players to play more efficiently...and of course you can try and make it to the high score list. A interesting game design feature for this kind of thing is also that you have to pick up survivors who will follow you around, so you have to take not only of your own character but also theirs (basically you get blown up pretty quickly if you don't watch out). The War of the Worlds marketing people are also the first (that I know of) to specifically launch a "game teaser", solely advertising the game and using mostly graphics from the game itself, not film footage.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 07:53 (0) comments

For the Danish Reboot conference currently taking place, Loic LeMeur has initiatied a very interesting project: a wiki on the Europoan blogosphere. The wiki includes a subpage on the Danish blogosphere, where so far Stephen Bøgh-Andersen has contributed.

I'll try to add something too, as soon as I have time. Could be really nice to have somewhere where we kept joint track of the number of Danish weblogs. However, listing "A-List" bloggers (such a list included in LeMeur's suggestion for what a national entry should include) might be a risky project, seeing that it is difficult to prevent it from being a somewhat subjective and varying list of "cool blogs" as seen by various individual contributors. Unless one decides to go for quantitative A-blogs and decide to rank them solely according to the number of times, they are linked from other blogs and the number of daily hits they have. Would people be willing to share this info - and would we really like to have it?
- On the other hand, if all contributors agree that the people currently listed _are_ the Danish A-List bloggers, then we have an interesting example of social consensus. Hmmh.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 00:09 (1) comments

I have to admit that I have become a semi-dedicated fan of the Lost tv-series. I could argue it is because it is interesting from a narrative point of view (it is a "group narrative", jumping between past and present of various main characters), but honestly it is in part also because it features quite a few good-looking youngish men, who frequently appear without a shirt on ;). // And btw, with this last comment, I admit to being sexist, and I'd probably be enraged in an unfair feminist way, if a man posted the same thing about a show featuring a lot of women in tight-fitting t-shirts. So I hereby declare, that if a man does post something similar, I will not to blame him... As it happens, the bare-chested men in Lost are just such an obvious part of this show's conscious attempt to appeal to a female audience - and there are a lot of goodlooking young women featured too, if you are wondering... //

Aside, it turns out the series have an online game sidekick (following the series in terms of revealing more sections to explore in the game, as islanders explore the island in the show, if I got it right).
Now, in addition, as a way to warm up US audiences before the next season starts, the producers have also launched a fake website for the airline compagny who owned the plane who crashes in episode 1. Apparently with hidden teasers etc - however I haven't been able to find much on it.
- But interesting that "working with the web" seems to be an intrinsic part of the series marketing, and that with the new website they are tagging along the "alternate reality gaming" wave.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:24 (2) comments

In the latest issue of the Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society, there is an interesting article "Gaming Goes Mobile: Issues and Implications".

Previous issues include articles such as: "Preference for SMS versus Telephone Calls in Initiating Romantic Relationships" and "Trust and New Technologies in Australia" - sounds as some potentially fruitful reads, as I find myself becoming increasingly more interested in "local cultures" implementation and use of new technologies.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:36 (0) comments

It's great to live in a country where you have free public access to reports such as the Culture and Leisure Habits of Danes 2004 [DANSKERNES KULTUR- OG FRITIDSAKTIVITETER 2004 - in Danish only].

This report includes a section analysing the use of computer games and the internet - and it also tries to correlate the uses of culture with the (in Denmark) very famous "Gallup Compas", which divides the Danes into four different groups with different lifestyle practices.
- So for instance, the report shows that it is the modern-individual-oriented segment who play computer games.

Another interesting fact from the report is that 59% of Danish children now have their own mobile phone. In 1998, only 3% of the children had a mobile phone.

[All this via an article in the online mag Søndag Aften]

Another interesting report out on the habits of the Danes is the IFKA report: The Danes 2005 (Danskerne 2005 - in Danish only). It is based on 4400 interviews examining what the Danes think of and do in their life - including an analysis of their media habits. Unfortunately, this reports costs DKK 225. One of the things you can learn from this report (fact from IFKA's homepage) is that 66% of the population living in Copenhagen use the internet on a daily basis - in Northern Jutland it is only 50% of the population who use the internet on a daily basis.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:39 (0) comments

..the Second Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment 2005. I know a Danish Ph.D. student involved in the organisation of the event and he knows a lot about games. I'm sure it's going to be quite interesting. From what I hear and see, the Australians are really moving into the game research field. Just wish the continent wasn't so damn far away.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:05 (0) comments