This weekend I was at the KRIKKIT Con, a little role-playing game convention in Århus, Denmark. On friday we played Star Wars live role-playing and people dressed up fantasticly. It was superb space opera and the rebel alliance terrorist faction (which I was leading) won in the end. The next day I played ordinary pen-and-paper RPG. First we played a musceteer pastiche scenario with lots of intertextual references and later on a really really bad dungeoneering in which we had to prevent the evil wizard from sending his flying balloons into the Twin Magic Towers. We didn't care about the towers and ended up waiting for the evil wizard to come and make his move, so we would have a chance to loot the city in the confusion. Finally on sunday, I was gamemastering my own improvised scenario based on youth detectives.

Lisbeth is wondering about the movie A.I. I haven't seen it yet, and I'm not sure if I'm going to at all. But for all I've heard it has a very behavioristic psychologic view on humans. Feelings are indeed your behavior, not what you actually feel inside yourself. Weird!

Jill Walker is asking why she likes the game New York Defender in which you have to shoot down aeroplanes before they crash into WTC. Whether I think deeply and wisely about computer games I must say I found it quite amusing too. As Jill suggest this may be due to catharsis, release or good old sense of humour saving us from tension and terror. In Denmark we have a word called galgenhumor which directly translated means gallows humour, a very grim sardonic kind of irony. Release or even katharsis are what can only be hoped for but at least we are having fun in the mean time(s).

Btw, my score was 1512!

Netværk for Dansk Computerspislforskning - DACFO [Network of Danish Computer Game Research] sent an answer to the white paper Kunst i Netværkssamfundet [Art in the Network Society] by the danish ministry of culture. In here we emphasize the importance of supporting computer game research as well as computer game productions.