jill/txt

The next iteration of the Digital Arts and Culture conference series is in Perth!! My family’s from Perth - it’s got to be one of the most beautiful and friendly cities on Earth, and of course I can say that with absolute objectivity. Sure, it’s kind of a long way from anywhere (4000 km from Sydney and Melbourne, 5-6 hours flight to Singapore, 28 hours from Bergen, even more hours from New York) but when you get there, oh. The weather is welcoming, there are beaches all along the coast, accessible from any suburb, there are hills and vinyards and bus drivers crack jokes and call you love and the food is fresh, the cuisine delicious (imagine a country with vegetables, meat and seafood always in season, have Italians and Greeks move there in droves then realise it’s close to Asia and you can see how the food might go) and the wine plentiful.

The Digital Arts and Culture conferences are another kind of home to me.

So yes, obviously I’m going to DAC 2007 in Perth. The CFP is out: abstracts are due by August 14.

Oy. Now *I’m* top hit on google for “macbook noise”. See, I blogged having googled that when I first got my (somewhat noisy) macbook and finding a blogpost about how many people had got to that blog through searching for “macbook noise”. Sigh.

And yes, my macbook’s still kind of noisy, and no, I never found a fix, but usually it doesn’t annoy me much. And I love everything else about it.

Hey, Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, is in Bergen Monday May 29th. He’s giving a talk at the University of Bergen (Auditorium 1, Realfagbygget) at 18:00-20:00. There’s a wikimeetup afterwards, too.

My colleague Hilde Corneliussen is involved in organising the Gender, Images and Global Contexts conference to be held in Helsinki next March - the CFP’s out, so now’s the time to start working if you’d like to present something there!

Puzzling over how to explain students who’ve never tried it how to write a textual analysis I remembered how they loved the quizzes we did earlier this semester. So here’s a worksheet (rtf) I made for Hanne-Lovise Skartveit’s Take the F train, which is one of the works they can choose to analyse. (more…)

The only reason I have a landline phone connection is so that my daughter’s friends can ring her easily and cheaply. Mobile and skype would be more than enough for me, but while MSN chat’s certainly gaining ground in the local 9-10 year old cohort, phones are still essential. A couple more years and I suppose they’ll all have their own mobiles, but let’s hold off on that while we can.

I happily use Skype for many things, and so I’ve often grumbled when finding that Norway still isn’t on the list of countries where SkypeIn is available. So while I could buy a phone number that lets offline, old-fashioned phone-based people phone my computer in the US, Sweden, Denmark and a number of other countries, I can’t get a local Norwegian number for Skype.

The reason? Skype’s own FAQ is pretty useless, but according to digi.no, Norway has chosen to interpret EU legislation about IP telephony more strictly than other European countries. Or (not sure if I understood the article correctly) perhaps it’s just that the EU legislation includes a bit about “must follow national legislation” and the Norwegian national legislation is stricter than other nations’. Apparently the legislation requires any service offering actual traditional phone numbers to follow national rules:

• Norwegian numbers must only be used in Norway (not sure how roaming mobile phone services deal with this?)
• You have to be able to keep the number if you switch to another provider
• Stationary phones must be able to provide emergency services with precise locations to ease rescue operations. (But surely Skype wouldn’t count as stationary?)

It’s interesting to see the numerous ways in which we strive to maintain nations and clear boundaries even as technology and migration make nations less and less significant in everyday life and culture.

I’m going to Umeå in Northern Sweden for a couple of days in August to do one of the keynotes at a workshop for PhD students organised by HUMlab. The topic is Interaction In Digital Environments. I visited HUMlab a few years ago, and really enjoyed the people there, and the feel of the lab - though it was a bit dark and cold, I have to admit. This time I’ve been promised northern summer light, and I get to finally meet Stephanie Hendrick, who does really interesting work on blogs, like her work with Lilia Efimova on weblog conversations and communities.

The workshop, btw, is a good deal - interesting people, an interesting place, and while participation is limited, those accepted will have their travel and accomodation paid for. You might want to check it out.

Jason Kottke notes the difference between the New York Times most blogged and most emailed articles - the most blogged is far more political than the most emailed.

Interesting, the top searches readers have done at the New York times are closer to the blogged stories. And Colbert’s up near the top - just as he was on Technorati after his speech to Bush that was all but ignored in mainstream media - at first.

Honestly, if The Colbert Report and The Daily Show were broadcast here, instead of just soap operas and harmlessly funny talkshows like Letterman, Norwegians rather un-nuanced and media-driven view of the USA couldn’t help but change radically. Whoever’s in charge of the US’s image abroad should get on to it.

What do you think game designers can be thinking?

Let’s design our games assuming no women will play. Let’s market games by using booth babes at conventions or employing girl gamers as “totty with trigger” (you’d think it was a parody but it ain’t) and oh, we’ll run ads showing dead, naked women even when the games themselves have no naked women in them. A focus group? Oh great, but remember to ban women from the focus group, because they’re women and therefore not interesting. (Fortunately, several of the men in that particular focus group spoke on behalf of their girlfriends who are also gamers.) And how about the media? When Wired does a special issue on gaming, they leave out the women - oh, except for that risqué sex game with the dildos. We’ll include that. (I hadn’t realised Wired was a men’s magazine. It’s my favourite to buy on flights and so on - far more interesting than Cosmopolitan or something, and more, um, relaxing than the more intellectual alternatives.)

Let’s look at the facts. Apparently 24-35 year olds are the heaviest gamers. According to a recent survey, 65% of women in this age bracket play games. Only 35% of men in the age bracket do. The survey found that women play “slightly less” console games than men and that many more women play casual games, like flash games in web browsers, solitaire or online Scrabble. They didn’t think to ask the women why they liked casual games, but assume that it’s because they’re non-violent and non-cometitive (they can’t have played many games at games.com). Great. Let’s just assume gender stereotypes instead of asking.

Interestingly, Nick Yee’s statistics from MMOGs show the same trend: while boys are clearly dominant among teenaged players, women players outnumber men for players above 23 years of age:

[edit 22/5: see Torill’s comment below, this stat doesn’t quite prove that]

So let’s see: despite the game industry marketing games almost exclusively for young men, almost twice as many women as men play games in the biggest market segment, based on age. Many of these games are casual, but even for console games, only “slightly less” women than men play. More women than men over 23 play MMOGs.

And yet the game industry continues to market and design games almost exclusively to that slim market of teenaged horny boys.

And I continue to get stupid comments from male players in WoW - “wow, I didn’t think women played games!” (Doubly idiotic since they can only see my female character and not me.)

Filched from Esther because that’s how I think of those distances too - and because I can’t actually go visit these places tonight but have to read about reorganisation and read student work and comment both and have ideas instead.

Ruther’an Village - Darkshire = one cup of tea
Ruther’an - Astrannaar = time it takes to go to the shop for teabags and back (I liked the distance vs distance of this one)
Sun Rock Retreat - Thunder Bluff = sort and load washing machine
Menthil - Stormwind = four pages of lit crit, approx 12 of fiction book, pause to look at the crashed biplane again.
Crossroads - Ogrimmar = put out clothes and teaching for work in the morning.

Esther photographed last week’s story-telling contest and compiled a lovely tale of it all. I’m not going to tell you whether I won or not because that would compromise my character’s anonymity, but it sure was a lot of fun! And I’m so happy I’ve now tried story-telling in WoW. Now maybe I’ll find the courage to sign up for one of the story-telling events with people I don’t already know…

Liz Lawley’s latest post on Terra Nova mentioned her consternation when a professional connection contacted her to tell her her teenaged son was ninja-looting an instance and would she please log on to tell him to stop.

Actually, this has to be an ideal situation, for the kids at anyrate. At school meetings we parents have been told repeatedly that problems like bullying and even drugs, violence and drunkenness with older kids are best combatted by families knowing each other. Kids are safer when the people around them know them and know their parents.

Most of the parents who are scared about what their kids might get up to online probably don’t even know to worry that their kid will be ninja-looting - but of course learning not to ninja-loot is as important as learning RL social conduct. What an ideal situation, having ones kids explore online in an environment where people who know them are around and able to ring or IM a parent.

World of Warcraft surprisingly enough can actually provide that sort of small-enough neighbourhood world - there are never more than 1000 or so people Horde-side online on my server, and that may be a small enough community to actually keep track of.

I’m telling a story in Thunder Bluff in 45 minutes. See, some non-warriors in my guild had a very glorious shield drop that can only be used by warriors. They decided to run a competition to see which of us warriors should win the shield. So a couple of nights ago we played hide and seek in Undercity. Each of the three guild members we found told us one item we would have to find and incorporate into a story we would be required to tell in public in Thunder Bluff.

The items were linen, darkhound blood and battleboar flank. The latter two were a little tricky, because you can’t actually get them without doing very low level quests - for the battleboar flank you actually have to do a whole series of very low level tauren quests.

My story will be very sad, I think. My poor warrior. OK, gotta go rehearse… Eeek!

Actually posting just the last word of your dissertation is exactly the same kind of hide-and-seek now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t game that pseudonymous bloggers get to indulge in all the time. Look, here’s a photo of all of me except my face. Look, now I’m mentioning enough about the town I’m visiting that you could almost guess where I am. Look, here’s a photo of my eyes and nothing else. I wrote about that in my Mirrors and Shadows paper, and it really fascinates me. Viviane Serfaty talks about it too in her aptly titled study of weblogs and diaries, The Mirror and the Veil.

I think what fascinates me about the hide-and-seek of pseudonymous blogging is that that is what we all do when we blog. In psuedonymous blogs the blogger gets to play with that. Real-name bloggers like me - well, we may only blog 1% of our lives, but people still seem to think they’re getting the whole picture - I’ve been asked at many a late party or conference how I can stand that people know me so intimately. I laugh. Most of the time.

Maybe you actually can tell that each blog post is a game of hide-and-seek, dangling out just too little information for you to figure out who I really am?

I don’t usually like memes, you know, those things where someone in a blog answers sixty questions and tags other people to answer the same questions. I quite enjoyed the pseudonymous bloggers post photos of their eyes meme the other day though, and here’s a meme I just have to copy: Post the last word of your dissertation.

Three years after finishing it I still get random jolts of amazement and joy that I actually finished my PhD dissertation. The last word of it? Well, I had no idea - but most fittingly, it was the plural form of the first word of the title:

How fitting, given that’s what the dissertation was actually about (though I couldn’t have told you that until a few months before the end…)

[Other last words: over the top, environment, requests…]