10 years sounds like a long time, but the blog also feels like it has been operating on its own separate time scale all along. I started blogging while I was working on my PhD, but now I have been a full-time academic for almost 9 years. I am also married and a father now (but I could never get myself to blog about personal things).

• I started blogging when “video games” almost exclusively meant AAA games sold in boxes.
• I started blogging before cell phone games had taken off.
• I started blogging before casual games took off.
• I started blogging before art games, indie games, and personal games.
• When I started blogging, experimental game (or interactive art) creators used to emphasize that they were not making games in any way. Now they emphasize that they are.
• Book published since I started blogging: 3.
• Blog posts: 635.
• Blog comments: 2142.
• Best hosting service used: Hostgator. Worst: Dreamhost.
• When I started blogging, there were few books on video games. We were still going over Huizinga, Caillois, and Sutton-Smith, looking for secret knowledge from the past.
• I recently made a list of must-have video game books … got to 100. (I may post the list later.)
• I started blogging before game jams were a thing, and when experimental video games were still considered weird and exceptional.
• Twitter and social media are poor replacements for blog posts and discussion. Because: Twitter comments invariably become snarky and/or misunderstood. Facebook comments disappear in the stream of time.
• Game studies is a big field now. I think we managed to construct the field, and to launch game educations (vocational or otherwise) at a surprising speed. I think that some of the better work and discussion show that we really are getting smarter.
• Though there can also be a sense of history repeating at times. And yet, many of the basic questions (i.e. games and narrative, games and players, design and industry, what is a “good game”) are different questions now than they were 10 years ago. They appear against a different background.
• Becoming smarter seems to entail that many of the discussions that were assumed to be resolvable on a high level … turn out to contain smaller discussions and questions inside.
• Knowledge accumulates, but not in the way you thought it would.
• Blogging and game research remain fun (in a much more pure and unambiguous sense than games are fun, strangely).

Thanks for reading!

This image shows the dialog box that a user received when trying to install Molleindustria’s already-censored game Phone Story. Turns out this is a lauded “anti-malware” feature called Gatekeeper in OS X Mountain Lion.

Users can change the settings, but many people experience the misleading dialog above, not telling the user the truth – that they cannot install the program because they have to enable non-certified apps/developers in system settings. But rather telling the user that the file is “damaged”.

Paolo has a longer discussion of it here, but it does seem like that Apple has made it possible for the dialog to mislead in order to dissuade users from installing software not sold through the Mac App store and/or made by a licensed developer.

[Note: It is unclear whether this dialog is intentional. Some people claim that it is not the default dialog, but some developers experience it nonetheless.]

I wrote about this scenario some time ago as “Fear of an App Planet“: that our ability to easily and transparently develop and distribute games for PCs and Macs is gradually eroding. Worrying.

Here is another way in which things can become considered to be true: the always observant XKCD shows how the citation policies of Wikipedia (always refer to external source) quickly go wrong when Wikipedia is used for writing those external sources in the first place:

This paper (from 2000) was the first time I made a position statement about the need for video game theory, for a ludology.

Many of the things the paper asks for seem to have come true, but we are not exactly done (and it probably not technically possible to be done, we can just get further).

I think many more fields believe themselves to be on top than what is implied here. But that’s the fun of it, isn’t it?

As a philosophy discussion grows longer, the probability of someone asking, “but what is reality?” approaches one.

My talk is Who Made the Magic Circle? Seeking the Solvable Part of the Game-Player Problem.

If the early days of game studies concerned the issue of games and stories, recent discussions appear to be focused on the issue of games and players. This is a discussion of methods and of the object of study: Should we discuss players or should we discuss games? There are two possible perspectives on this: The common “segregationist” perspective implies that games are structures separate from players, structures that players can subsequently subvert. In this talk, I will make the case for an alternative “integrationist” perspective wherein games are chosen and upheld by players, and where players will happily create formal rule systems and boundaries around the playing activity.
I will argue that the question of games and players must therefore be decomposed into a set of smaller problems, each of which must be answered with different methods.

It’s a meta-talk! Looking forwards to the conference.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

Lots of good stuff.

Me, I changed my mind about fiction in games – I used to discount it, but then realized my error.
[Clarification: This change of mind happened between 1998 and 2003. Half-Real was written after I changed my mind.]

I find it pretty fascinating to change my mind – suddenly you are in a slightly different world from before and everything has to be reevaluated.

On the other hand, I did change my mind about changing my mind as being always-good. It can also be overdone with a certain self-indulgent gesture as in “5 minutes ago I thought X, but now I realize it’s Y, and I am never afraid to admit mistakes – that’s how great I am!”

And you don’t want to go there either. This is one of the things that makes life (and research) so amazingly interesting.

Happy 2008!

It’s a Firefox plugin that allows you to capture not only bibliographical information from Amazon, but also web pages, blog posts, etc… and store them in a subject hierarchy. And export them for bibliographes later. And take snapshots of web pages. And add notes.

Here’s why it works well:

• Entries can be several places in  the subject hierarchy. Let’s face it, the hierarchical bookmark structure of current browsers is completely broken since 1/3 of all entries belong several places in the hierarchy (i.e. video game theory/players and video game design / playtesting). (I actually wrote my own program for this a few years ago, but it was nowhere near the usefulness of Zotero.)
• It is integrated into your browser where you do your work anyway.
• It takes snapshots of web pages, so you can reference them even when they’re gone.
• Notes, web pages, books, etc. are treated on the same level.
• It understands that research work is managing and navigating resources. (As opposed to something like EndNote that seems to assume that the core of research is writing bibliographies in MLA or Chicago style.)

What is missing?

• So far, the main lack is that video games are not included as a reference type. (It could even have integration with MobyGames.)
• Mass import of existing Firefox bookmarks.

Workshop: For a Theory of the Novel of the 21st Century

Here, I will be participating in a two-day workshop of a more literary nature:

Please join us for our last event of the CSN 2006-2007 season. This two-day workshop gathers together a younger generation of novel scholars now emerging to national and international prominence to discuss future directions in the field.

More here.