This is the research diary of Lisbeth
Klastrup. Here I share some of my thoughts on life, universe, virtual
worlds, interactive stories and internet oddities with you.
I'm a ph.d. scholar at DIAC at the IT University
at Copenhagen (ITU). I also host & work in a world called StoryMOO.
At this ITU homepage
you can read more about my research project and miscellaneus activities.
List of publications is here.
Current month
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January
2001
Fellow researchers
-Denmark
Jesper Juul
Susana Tosca
Troels Degn Johansson
Estrid Soerensen
Lars Konzack
Kenneth Hansen
Gabriel Hansen
Joergen Callesen
Soeren Pold
-Norway
Jill Walker's blog
Torill Mortensen's blog
Ragnhild Tronstad
Hilde Corneliussen's blog
Carsten Jopp's blog
Anders Fagerjord's blog
-Sweden
Anna Gunder
Jenny Sunden
Mikael Jacobsson
-Finland
Aki Jarvinen
Markku Eskelinen
Raine Koskimaa
-The World
Gonzalo Frasca's blog (URU, US)
Anja Rau's blog (DE)
Elin Sjursen's blog (NO, US)
Frank Schaap's blog (NL)
Adrian Miles' Vog blog (AUSTR.)
Mark Bernstein's blog (US.)
Related Reads
Dust from a Distant Sun (DK)
Cykelkokken (DK, in Danish)
Two Years in Denmark (DK,US)
Future Dr. Karlsbjerg (DK)
Laurel.blog (US)
Texturl (US)
Textism(FRA,CA)
©Lisbeth Klastrup 2002
Ah! not now, when desire burns, and the wind calls, and
the suns of spring
Light-foot dance in the woods, whisper of life, woo me
to wayfaring;
[read more]
- See also my post about the conference on mobile cultures in Finland.
Statskløgten i de moderne Stater er ikke: hvorledes man skal bære sig ad med at være Minister; men: hvorledes man skal bære sig ad for at blive Minister; mere veed man ikke, saa man egentlig forbruger sin Viisdom i et Slags Indlednings-Videnskab til det at blive Minister. Paa den Maade maa Staterne opløses; thi der bliver egentlig ikke regjeret eller styret. I en ældre Tid, da der var mere Ro i Tilværelsen, vare der kun Faae, som kunde gjøre sig Haab om at blive Ministre, de fik saa Tid til at danne sig til at være det. Nu er Muligheden aabnet for Enhver, Trængselen om at blive det saa stor, at en heel Kunst er fornøden for om muligt at trænge igjennem til at blive det. Hertil danne de sig saa, forbruge deres Tid og Flid i dette Studium - og saa bliver En Minister, men veed ikke mere. Naivt kunde han sige: jeg har ikke dannet mig til at være men til at blive Minister; og i denne Henseende har jeg jo viist, at jeg var ferm.
Well, not that I personally see very much "political humor" in the fact that the Danes has just elected the most conservative government in several decades, forcing the Centrum-Right party to rely entirely on "Dansk Folkeparti" (The Danish Peoples Party) to stay in power. Dansk Folkeparti are known for their belief in that Denmark should be for Danes only and other "enlightened humanistic views" (*shivers*). Well, if they want to be consequent, I wonder whether I in the future will be allowed to organise any international conferences in Denmark. After all, that includes letting "foreigners" into the country too....
Troldkvinden fra MOOs ("The Wizardess from the MOOs", in Danish only).
It has been a very interesting experience working with the journalist, who knew very little about this field of research. This is not meant in any down-putting way, rather it has been a fruitful challenge to try to describe my research ideas and problems to a layman. I think she has done a good job trying to convey her understanding to her readers.
To readers who have landed here by way of the link on the Forum page: velkommen til min blogg :)
Things are happening in Sweden. In connection with the Interactive Institute, they are setting up a game research studio, and Emma Westcott, who was the woman behind Douglas Adam's Starship Titanic is joining them. She is working with Alex Mayhew (who did Ceremony of Innoncence which I "played" recently and really liked, not as a game but for the beautiful interactive graphic postcards and the good voice-acting) on a project called Dreamer, a "serialised interactive fiction" whose premise is that you, in the shape of raw energy try to help a male char who are trapped in his dreams, to get rid of his demons by inhabiting various characters he meets in the dream (including wasps!!!). Sounds as an interesting concept.
Anyway, The Game and game development studio, which also hosts Craig Lindley, opened in Gotborg, Visby on November 7th according to the blurpon the interactive institutes site (in swedish only).
And now back to the reason of the title of this post: all this came by way of a look into the archives of The Woman in Game Development Committee at IGDA - The International Game Developers Association.
By way of IGDA I found a series/site called Chicks who make games at The Gamediva-section at US comp Thrustmaster where they interview woman game developers on their work. First one is Megan Gaiser of Her Interactive which produces Nancy Drew Mystery Games (have to check out those) - she has this interesting answer to one of the questions posed to her:
Q: Do you think the video game industry is directed more at men then women? Do you see that trend continuing or do you see it changing?
A: Most of the games on the shelf are designed by men for men, because of the prevailing industry myth that girls/women don’t play games. I’m not saying that guys like one kind of game, and girls like another, and I don’t advocate the creation of “girl games” in pink boxes.
I do think there can be more types of games to choose from, including games that rely more on storyline and characters and less on action. Our research shows that this type of game appeals to girls more than the shooters do - they’re the chick flicks of the gaming world. Women also make up a big percentage of The Sims installed base.
As more choices appear that appeal to a broader spectrum of women and girls, we believe the girls game market will grow in the same way that girls college sports did after Title IX. There was a time when the standard belief was that "girls don’t like sports." As soon as girls’ sports received equal emphasis and funding, boom-it turns out that girls LOVE sports, and female sports has become a huge industry. This kind of segmentation is part of any maturing industry.
- Is interaction between users and the site stimulated? Are message boards, email forms available?
- Can a user contact the staff of the site directly? Is there a possibility to phone/fax?
- Can users interact with other users? Via message boards and/or mailing lists?
- Does the site provide newsletters? Can users react to these newsletters? Are these reactions published?
Seems to me like they are here rather talking about communication than interaction?
P.S. (for Danes mostly): Check out if your povs actually still fit with the party you are voting for at http://www.jp.dk/valg/2001/kompas.htm
I personally am not quite sure: I do not come to a book expecting it to have the same happy graphic aesthetics or mode of layout as the shop ads which were just delivered to my mailbox. Nor do I expect my book to look like an information leaflet nor my web literature to cater to the latest web design trends. Sometimes it appears to me that people falls in the trap of judging web fiction with the eyes of a Jacob Nielsen or other more recent webdesign critics. They want sites to be easy downloadable and naviagable, user friendly, bugless etc. And sure, I would like to see some consistency of navigation paradigms and correction of easy-correctable bugs like the missing title of the documents in Caitlin Fisher's work too - and definitely she should have fixed the sound-bites which doesn't work and the plug-ins needed should have been stated etc. But - and it is difficult not to - to make another comparison to print fiction, I quite often come across good novels which starts excruciatingly slowly and builds up their characters, the novel world, the plot etc in such a laidback pace that I am constantly on the verge of putting down the book for pure boredom. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't and I am awarded with what in the last end turns out to be a very good read. That is to say the overall experience of it's contents almost obliterates what I find faulty in the parts of its specific form (yes, you may well acuse me of being a good old-fashioned hermeneutic). Obviously the question is whether it is as easy to seperate form and content when you look at a webliterary work. If download is slow and the pages "doesn't look good", does it then disturb and distort my understanding of what the writer is trying to relate? Personally, and here we are perhaps stranded with a judgement based on taste rather than formal critism, minor bugs does not "bug" me, when I read for instance These waves of girls. I have not read that many lesbian biographies before and to me the stories she tells are interesting and seem to fit well with the media, she has chosen. Yes, she is still struggling with the materiality of the medium she has chosen and with trying to make it fit her needs, but I haven't actually seen that many webliteary works with near perfect technial perfection yet. Should they have waited with presenting the ELO award till the flawless work came into being? (yes, they could have chosen other more innovative works like Moultrup's for sure, but that is another issue...). One thing is not to like the subject and the style of presentation of Caitlin Fishers, but I do not think it is fair to attack her for not being a good programmer. What the web writers need are better tools, not necessarily more people to work with them or hard core programming courses. Give them web editing programs which can link text, sound and images together on the writer's behalf without forcing them to learn java programming in order to do anything which looks smooth.
Jonric: Do you believe the audience for online worlds will grow quickly enough to support all the games that are being developed?
Jessica Mulligan: The reason there are only about 700,000 paid subscribers today is the hardcore nature of the games offered. There is already a much larger market for persistent worlds than those subscriber numbers would indicate. Based on my experience over the last 14 years, of the number of people in the total subscriber base who will play a persistent world, there are at least six million potential subscribers worldwide today. Over the next ten years, I suspect the number of potential persistent world gamers will rise to about 60 million; at today's $10 per month pricing, that's a potential of over $7 billion annually in subscriber fees alone.
Jonric: What are the major factors that will drive market expansion to the kinds of numbers you just noted?
Jessica Mulligan: The main factors that will drive more people to trying and sticking with persistent worlds will be ease of use, more persistent worlds actually designed with the player in mind and that don't require a 20 hour a week commitment to play, opening persistent world game design to be more inclusive of the casual and mass market gamer and taking full advantage of emerging technologies in voice communications and the wireless connection. (my emphasis)
From cam on Fløyen, one of the mountains overlooking Bergen city
Bergen Airport at Flesland, not so far from Fyllingsdalen where I live
Gonzalo Frasca is writing about May Payne, the game, these days. It reminds me of the most absurd experience I had while at Finnish conference. They had an computerised practices exhibition, where 2 guys were presenting May Payne - in Finnish. Their presentation was translated on the spot into sign language by a sign language interpreter, and what she did made perfect sense I guess (could I but have understood sign language at least!) until they played the Max Payne game trailer and she apparently started "translating" all the gun noises and explosions accompanying the trailer into sign language too. Wonder if it makes any sense (in the "fun" way) to play a game like this if you are completely deaf? I guess it does in some ways, but the experience made me speculate on exactly how important sound is to the experience of games like that. And how completely unable you are to make sense of the world, if you do not understand any of the languages that surround you, be it verbal or visual.
OK, finally back from Finland and the conference Interactive Man and His Future. And it's snowing in Bergen - the scenery is breathtaking beautiful and clean and stands out even more intruiging to my Danish city-scape accustomed eyes. I never get to watch this pure white landscape in traffic-infected Copenhagen....
I had expected to be able to blogg from the conference, but it turned out that they had only one computer onsite with a functioning internet connection - somewhere in a corner of a cafe in the same building as the conference. And I did not find it before late on the day the conference ended. - Obviously one asks oneself why an conference like this does not provide it's users with internet access? Well, in this case, the answer is simple: it is not because of bad planning, but because almost all attendees were Finnish and hence had a Nokia Communicator ;). They simply dont need clumsy, old, stationary computers to access the internet anymore...and it was striking to take a look over the conference audience: there were dozens of PDAs, mobile phones and Communicator owners amongst them and people had no qualms as to use them to communicate with people outside the conference, if the paper presented was boring.
Also the conference itself turned out to be very much themed around mobile phones and devices. Mobile phone use, mobile phone culture (example: "Mobile phone in social urban life"), mobile phones and children, and not the least, the latest buzzwood (e- is soo dead!) : mobile learning (soon to be known as m-learning?). So I now know that more than 80% of the Finnish population owns a mobile phone and that children down to the age of 4-5 years are given one, too - though they hardly know how to use it and are known to mistake if for a toy:). Teenage girls from Germany send 7 sms's a day, but boys only 5, etc etc.-
A presenter from Sonera, the national tele communications compagny, had one very interesting point on the Finnish "mobile culture": he thought that this widespread use of mobile phones were actually supporting the Finnish culture of silence! For instance, people dont have to talk to each other on the phone, they can just sms and they can see who is calling and just refuse to talk to them by pretending they cannot get to the mobile phone. And of course, mobile phones are switched to the silent mode most of the time, so you wont disturb any other people with the noise from the phones. Instead you will just see the odd Finn pulling out his mobile phone from his jacket ever so often to see if he got any messages...(last thing my own observation, I have been spending the last 5 days with an addict like that!). Furthermore, I personally think that this widespread use of mobile phones is also creating a somewhat anti-social culture: being in the physical compagny of some Finns, you will often find that they spend time sms'ing with friends or reading messages on their phone, disregarding the on-site social situation they are in fact part of in that very moment. I dont think this "anti-social" behaviour is restricted to Finns only (Im guilty of it myself sometimes, I admit), but it seems to me that "communicating out-of-social-context" is more socially acceptable than in other more "talkative" countries, where not taking part in the current communication is seen as a social flaw. While is my impression, it need not necessarily be so in Finland.
In general, it will be interesting to see how our mobile culture further develops. Will all the mobile phone using countries end up being inhabited by people who never concentrate on the people they are with in the now, but rather focus on the communication with people (and information) "elsewhere"? Will we actually be speaking less with each other "on site" and more with each other from a long distance? Will this mobile culture, as one speaker hinted, in the end render os more im-mobile due to the constant presents of gadgets, which makes us always be "at home", available to everybody and with the "homely" information always present at the tips of your fingers? What will happen if we can always find precise information about the place we are at? Will that mean that all the world becomes "familiar" to us and the use of imagination simply disappears?
Well, most Animal Planet documentaries often tell a story about a certain animal or a certain environment in which various animals live. So rather than having the traditional protagonist - antagonist story (if, it is a subnarrative), these stories are themed around the happenings in a micro-world or a certain species or member of this species. In this sense, they are not that different from "stories" about virtual environments, focusing either on the environment as such or certain "races" (monsters, humans, elves) or types of gamers within them...
But how do you tell an interesting story about a world, where in fact, nothing much, happens? Or at least, dramatic things, happen infrequently (most people just get a pet, live happily ever after, and then it dies). What strikes me as one solution, is the abundant use of the "parallel narratives" editing. You will start one small story (eagle is ill but of what), cut to another small story (whale is being saved), a third (horse in operating theatre) and then back and forth, so suspension last all way through, and all the endings comes in "part 2" of the programme. Another trick is the stricking visuals. You will have a programme on for instance the coral reef and it will be filled with very small stories about amazingly patterned fish and other weird-looking creatures that lives in on the reef - all in breathtaking under-water technicolor. A third device is the antropomorphic framing. The narrator will cue you into imaging that animal z (the wolf) has emotions like a human and you will interpret the pictures you see in this framework (wolf is happy, wolf is scared, wolf cunningly avoids capture by smart thinking etc) and therefore be more engaged in the story, because you project human feelings onto the "human-like" antagonist. A fourth device is the "The passage of time" itself; it seems to be an narrative overlay in several stories. Life at a creek from spring till spring, the coming of age of the lion cubs etc.
I wonder if you can use the Animal Planet techniques as a "story technique" in a virtual world or if some are already using them? Would one be able to construct something akin to a "scenes on a turning wheel" so you as a visitor would be transported back and forth between, say, 4-5 places in the world where micro-events took place. And then (unlike tv) at some point you could decide to take part in one of them and the cycle would stop? Obviously, game world designers already makes stories about races and makes that the part of the overall "world legend" and perhaps enforcing people to explore their own "race" history and to develop it could engage them even more sometimes? Could you imagine a world in which time was designed so as to pass so fast that in one visit you would be able to live a life from beginning to death - or at least, youth, adulthood, old age in big leaps? Could you design a world experience which was not as much about causal chains of events but more about experiencing the world as a "stunning visual", with you being prompted to follow the movements of one of the creatures inhabiting it - or becoming one yourself and communicating with others through shifts in shapes and colours? Or could you imagine, giving people "interpretative glasses" which would make them see all events in a world as being supernatural? evil? wolfish?? Sometime there are lots of inspiration to get from "old media" when thinking about "new world" design - perhaps even more, if we look other places than the traditional. Forget about Hamlet, go watch some documentaries ;)
Lionhead have created a maddeningly obsessive experience which achieves intellectual and emotional immersion by seamlessly entwining sophisticated gameplay with a narrative laced with a characteristically wicked sense of humour.
- which as far as I can see, comes no way near actually defining what good interactivity is. Is it that is enables immersion? Or combines gameplay and narrative? How exactly does the specific "interactivity" of B&W do that? Could have been interesting with a longer explanation.
May Payne was elected as the best PC game. The Finns beat the Danes in the end! (i.e.Max Payne vs Hitman) perhaps because Hitman had no Hong-Kong movie slow-mo features.