By way of IDSA: The American Navy is getting video games in each of their 72 sub-marines. Each of the companies Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony gave away 24 game consoles - respectively Xbox, Gamecube and PlayStation 2. Now, the crew may relax while playing games like ”Madden NFL 2002”, ”Tony Hawk Pro Skater” and ”Grand Theft Auto 3".
IDSA tells the public; the computers are given as a tribute to their fight against terrorism. But I can smell a media stunt. This is just an event to make good publicity. Nothing more, nothing less.

I'm looking forward to this upcoming Semester. Because, I'm going to teach the subject Computer Game Criticism at Multimedia, Aarhus University. Prepared as I must be of course, I've made an interesting schedule - mostly based on the CGDC Proceedings. But they should also read theories by e.g. C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and H. P. Lovecraft. The narratology vs. ludology debate will be present too, but I think it's time to move forward, instead of fighting against one another in the trenches.

Yesterday, I was at a talk by Naser Khader, the culture-political spokesman of the Danish Social Liberalist Party [Radikale Venstre]. The Party is in fact moderate, even though they would be seen as very left wing from a U.S. perspective. Someone in the audience mentioned the possibility of having cultural subsidies to computer games development, like we have in the movie industry. Khader obviously hadn't thought of this beforehand, but he was willing to think about it. I must admit, I got my chance to make some statements. Accordingly, he asked if I could send him some information on this issue, and of course he is going to get his share of information.

This is the summary for my PhD thesis: Edutainment: How to Learn and Play with the Computer Media.

The Commision of the European Union wants to support European computer game develoment. They don't want the European game industry to lack behind USA and Japan. Accordingly, the Council of the European Union are expected to pass a Danish resolution on these matters in November.

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) wants to make common standards for artificial intelligence in computer games.

"The next qualitative jump for artificial intelligence in games will be dependent on appropriate interfaces for in-house and external AI tools and middleware," stated committee chairperson and Carnegie Mellon University scientist Alexander Nareyek. "The Committee’s work will unburden game AI developers from worrying about low-level procedures, and will enable them to focus on higher-level creative AI tasks."

Jill Walker is very proud that "Jill" and "txt" are the top hits at Google. For my part, I must admit "Lars" is just hit #7 on Google, though "Konzack" and "Ludologica" are both top hits.

In order to understand game worlds, we must first comprehend the concept of sub-creation. This concept was developed and expressed in literature by professor J. R. R. Tolkien and professor C. S. Lewis. Otherwise we fall into the trap of the Freudian misconception: Fantasy is only and should only be seen as escapism. This however is a false statement. We discover escapism in both fantasy and realism, and by the way escapist fiction has almost no value at all. When creating valuable fiction, we need to take our creations seriously as works of art. Freudianism prevent us from engaging into fictious worlds and characters worth discovering. Because they are never seen as what they are, but always as a symbol of something else, which by the way is sexuality. Well, there is more to life than sexuality, we've noticed, and we are going to get it - as well.

Today I was lucky to get a pulp novel I for quite a while have been looking for. I've already read it in the early 1990's but suddenly the book was gone. It's a science fiction novel titled "Sølvhjerneskallerne" [The Silver Brain Skulls] by Valdemar Hanøl and dates back to 1930. It's a scary, yet fascinating example of how people were thinking during the 1930's when they actually thought Europeans were a better breed and all the rest of the world was just mumbo jumbo. The setting is a Fascist-Socialist happy society in which prof. Frigon (the villain) wants to make an even better breed of people by changing their skull structure due to his own frenologic research. The center of the world is in fact Copenhagen even though they officially deny nationalism. By the way the Americas went back to the Stone Age because they were carrying a dangerous tongue disease and because they were listening to music of the black race.

This pulp novel is certainly not a master piece, but it sure reminds us how they were thinking about our future and what went wrong back in the twentieth century.

It's been a year since I started out this blog. The blog have given me a great chance to express my considerations regarding computer game research. My aim was to focus on both computer games and non-computer roleplaying games, however it seems most of my concern has been towards computer games. Maybe because the research in computer games is moving forward, while roleplaying game research is lacking behind. No-one really cares about the nerds of the non-computer rpg sub-culture - accordingly computer and multimediaearch gets more funding.