MindTrek Post-pondering

Thanks to our great faculty, we (hypermedia master students) were able to participate in MindTrek 2009 -conference. The conference was held in Hotel Rosendahl in Tampere during the past three days.

Since games are my intrest and academic is my way of looking at them, I decided to take part in the games track on wednesdays’ Academic MindTrek. Due to starting a new hobby, yoga, I missed the first part of it, so I might’ve missed something worthwhile. Unfortunately the part I did get to hear didn’t really have anything to offer to me. “Social aspects of gaming” and “”Games with an agenda” did originally sound like they might have some interesting views and theories presented, but turned out to be wasted potential from my perspective. Online-gaming, social networking and using games for serious purposes just don’t interest me, especially not from the point of view they seem to be perceived everywhere right now. MORPGs, online gaming and online socializing seem to be The Thing right now, and no matter where I go, researchers seem ridiculously thrilled about them. Ridiculously because I haven’t managed to grasp any other reason for the excitement except them being fresh, hip and new in the research world. Sigh. Trends and me just don’t go together.  Serious games, on the other hand, are definitely interesting, but there are some buts that I will discuss later on.

After such an uninspiring start, I started to get anxious about the rest of the conference. Will there be any lectures or people with interesting theories, or am I just going to stroll around the hallways, not knowing where to go and feeling very out of place? Well. The thursday lectures before lunch seemed to affirm my concerns, even if Chris Messinas’ lecture on OpenID titled “Identity is the Platform” was a very interesting one. Luckily, thursdays’ academic session started with an excellent keynote by Miguel Sicart, titled “Not to Choose – Designing Ethical Gameplay”. Damned was I thrilled! First of all, it was an excellent presentation, but it also happened to strike right at the core of my research interests. Unfortunately, that’s as far as my luck carried on thursday, because right after the presentation it turned out Sicart was heading back to Denmark in a blink of an eye.

In the end, friday turned out to be the most fruitful one, even though I arrived at the hotel very late, missing all the morning sessions. The first lecture I got to hear completely was Adam Greenfield on “Elements of a Networked Urbanism”, and boy it was definitely something. I have no idea why, but I never even thought about actually doing research on urbanism. One very thought provoking thought was the concept of ownership. According to Greenfield, owning things (ie. a car) is inefficient and unecological. What a brilliant realisation! As an (good) example he used was Spotify.

I also liked Greenfields’ realistic and anti-hype approach to technology and applications. He posed a very good question that reveals, on my opinion, his attitude quite nicely. I didn’t manage to write it down word to word, so I’ll just try to jot down the point: assuming that applications become so easy to use and comprehensive that no-one has to, say, actually find their way to meeting point X. In stead, they can just follow their navigator and find the place without using their own navigation skills. People begin to live in a kind of a fog, dulling their natural skills and senses. Well then, imagine a generation that has grown up with using such applications. What happens when (notice, not “if”) the network collapses?

On top of those, some quotes that I found interesting: 

“Nothing is more interesting than information about the place you are in or are going to be in a moment.”

“The city is for having the biggest possible number of different interfaces.”

“It’s not the advertising that’s the problem per se, the problem is the way it’s done.”

“If we’re not careful, we will end up being treated like objects”

The point of the lecture was that devices and applications should not be taken too far, because that would result in changing the urban life in a huge city completely, by destroying the element of surprise, chance and having to challenge yourself every now and then.

Well, it’s getting late and I’m feeling drained, so I’ll save the post-MindTrek fruitfulness for another time. Coming soon though, so remember to check my blog every now and then.