Learning and Narrativity: in digital media, Danielsen & Sørensen (eds.) just came out and I've got my copy being one of the contributors to the anthology. I must admit it has been quite a while since I wrote the article: Game, Play and Learning. But then again better late than never... For my part it is somewhat interesting to see what I was thinking when i started out my Ph. D. scholarship.

In the right column you will find an earlier version of the article.

Bryan-Mitchell Young aka jccalhoun wrote in his paper First-Person Shooters Are Not Like Movies and That is a Good Thing:

"The fact that the similarities are only skin deep does not stop most critics from attempting to apply the standards of one medium to the other. Since computer games are much more recent developments it is almost always the standards of movies that are applied to games. This has been done to such a large extent that a formalized school of computer game criticism that does not apply the standards of motion pictures to games has yet to develop. It is not surprising, when seen in this light, that when computer games are evaluated using the tools of the film scholar, computer games almost always come up lacking. A Car does not do a very good job of being a tree, and if you insist on comparing it to a tree, then you will never be happy with your car."

I must agree to this statement! We are going to build a computer game criticism on its own premises. This does not mean we are not prepared to learn from other fields. However computer games are not almost literature, almost dramaturgy, almost film, or almost television. The computer game is a field of study in its own right.

Spilforskning.dk (DACFO) The Danish Network for Computer Game Research just got 400.000 DKR (approximately 50.000 €) from Statens Humanistiske Forskningsråd (Danish Research Council for the Humanities). This is a great step for danish computer game research for now - and hopefully in the future too. We are now officially recognised as a field of research.

Back from CGDC conference in Tampere, Finland. It was an excellent conference with lots of different perspectives on computer games. Hopefully, there will be a future follow up. All the keynote speakers (Greg Costikyan, Eric Zimmerman, and Warren Spector) had very interesting and thought-provoking things to say about computer games. Get your own copy of CGDC Conference Proceedings, Frans Mäyrä (ed.). It's the best anthology on computer games I've seen to this date. Here you will find contributions by Mark Finn and Julian Holland Oliver (Australia), Georg Lauteren, Peter Judmaier, Günter Piringer, and Jörg Piringer (Austria), Helene Madsen, Troels Degn Johansson, Lars Konzack, Jesper Juul, and Lisbeth Klastrup (Denmark), Oli Sotamaa, Aki Järvinen, Tony Manninen, Riku Suomela, Jouka Mattila, Eero Räsänen, Timo Koskiner, Petri Lankoski, and Satu Heliö (Finland), Julian Kücklich (Germany), Aphra Kerr (Ireland), Rune Klevjer (Norway), Susana Tosca (Spain), Craig A. Lindley (Sweden), Stuart Nolan, Geoff King, Tanya Krzywinska, Joanne Bryce, and Jason Rutter (UK), and Greg Costikyan, Tiffany Holmes, T. L. Taylor and Eddo Stern (USA). Foreword by Frans Mäyrä (Finland).

I'm looking forward to attend the CGDC conference in Tampere. This is my power point presentation. I'm going to speak about Computer Game Criticism: A Method for Computer Game Analysis. It is an analysis method developed especially with computer games in mind. The method is not just a transfer from another field, and accordingly does not lack the translation problems we often find in such an approach.