getting things done

I've managed to cover about half of the to do list below. My apologies for not putting the Copenhagen lecture online, that is due to difficulties in making a pdf out of it - powerpoint/distiller crashes in the process. I guess I should reformat the figures somehow, or something.

Anyway, the genre paper is under scrutiny at my post-grad seminar on Thursday. I hesitate to put the mechanics paper up, as I haven't had time to revise the draft from last August...oh well. Asap.

P.S. Congrats to Dr. Juul for a successful defense! :D

possible soccer worlds

I've been finishing another Master League season in WE7, with four star difficulty. It came to a bitter end, my Juve losing the division 1 championship to Roma on even points, due to one less win, or one goal less in goal difference...I don't know which of those actually decided it, but bitter it was, I can tell you, dear gaming diary.

But I did not end without titles! A comeback victory, 3-1, against Lazio in the cup final was something to saviour. I did not have champagne, but congratulated myself with opening a bottle of red wine.

Yes, as you can probably gather, this game has some personal significance for me ;)

I - the omnipotent player manager puppet master, that is - am confident that my off-season purchases, Pavel Nedved, Gianluigi Buffon, and, most of all, return of the prodigal son, Christian Vieri, will make the next season glorious in all competitions!

Satu just wrote an article about 'narrative mindset' that is characteristic to playing role-playing games. However, one of the points of the article is that one is able to adapt the mindset to other forms of gaming as well so that the game experience gets a different flavour.

I believe the above is me adapting it to my soccer gaming experience: when I purchase Christian Vieri in the game, I construct, with the help of the game, a possible world where Vieri returns to Juve, the club where he in real life made his breakthrough, and this fictional element adds to the experience. For the same reason, I will not purchase Roma icon Francesco Totti, or someone like Raul or Paolo Maldini. It just would not be feel right in my we7-enabled-possible-fictional-soccer-world. I guess this is also an instance of the 'half-real' that Jesper, or Dr. Juul, talks about in his thesis.

Any other gaming? Yes, Deus Ex: Invisible War finally arrived for my Xbox - and I'm quite impressed. Today, as its off-season, I'll have time for that :)

To Do

Damn, it's hard to get back to work after the holiday period. Besides plenty of project-related work stuff, my thesis-related 'to do' goes as follows:

- an English translation of a 'Online games 101' article I wrote last spring

- a revised version of the Vice City article due to Matteo Bittanti for translation into Italian (cool!)

- a review of Salen's & Zimmerman's Rules of Play for Game Studies

- post game mechanics paper online

- post Copenhagen lecture material online

- finish first draft of game genre paper (due 19th Jan)

*phew* Let's get to it, then.

Our days in Oxford

A fine New Year it was that we spent in Oxford! Our hosts had a fine collection of board and card games, so, between shopping and sight-seeing, we had a chance to play some.

Honor of the Samurai is a card game with a theme that most certainly fascinates myself. And the game was pretty good, also. Nice cards with some great touches of detail re: the Japanese warrior culture. We played this one twice - I didn't quite yet figure how the game operates, but this goes on my wish/shopping list!

Munchkin was a card game that parodies RPGs. It was ok, although some of the humor was lost on me. Probably also due to the fact that I was pretty tired when we played it.

With Satu, we played a couple of two-player games: Lost Cities, which I liked a lot, and Hellas, which was ok, but a bit boring with too many rules, I think. Lost Cities was very symphatetic and although Satu did not like the way you had to count stuff in order to choose your strategy, we're deifinitely getting this one. I found it especially fascinating that the cards describing the success of one's expeditions were arranged into a sequence that actually makes up a story. Non-electronic cut-scenes!

Then there was Risk. *sigh* I have to confess that I've never played any edition of the game. This was the one with Lord of the Rings theme. I feel bad for probably ruining the others' game, but I just felt it was awful. Fight, fight, fight - fight more or fight less, there's a flexible and diverse set of game mechanics for you. Satu liked it, so I guess I'll have to give it another chance...which I won't to the final, rather tedious part of the movie trilogy.

That's a brief summary of our Oxford gaming days :) Tomorrow is another holiday - I plan to return to the digital front, and especially Prince of Persia!