No implementation, things are just nice. (iiiiik!)

In principle we should be all set for the summer course in game analysis and design that starts tomorrow. We had it last year too, and this year it’s my turn to sacrifice the summer. But it’s a fun course and I have four help teachers, the top students from last years course who also have finished the whole sim-education so I can’t really complain. Who knows, I might even have time to play some world of warcraft. As it is now I have only browsed it. Made a few different characters and tried both allegiance and horde, and even became a guild officer, but have put in far to too little playing time to get a real sense of the game world, and the inhabitation.
It has been a nice week. Started off with looking at the exam work of the 3rd year students, followed by a seminar organized by GIP. Tom, who just quit at Daydream and started at another company, was out first, but I missed his speech since we were trying to finish the feedback to the 3rd year students. We will really miss Tom in the MMRO project. I got to the seminar in time to listen to the presentation of Gizmondo, and I’m really glad I caught it. The client has a lot of features that can be used for making more pervasive games, and it was nice to try it out a little. There was also a bunch of people from different Swedish game companies invited to give feedback to the exhibited work of the 1st and 2nd year students and after a delicious dinner at GIP the evening turned into a really nice party evening. I didn’t get munch implementation time this week, on the other hand… oh well. I didn’t. And it was nice. And it’s not like the code is going to run away from me.
On Tuesday I leave for Stockholm, then Vancouver, to the Digra conference. It will be fun to meet everyone again, and there are a few sessions that I wouldn’t want to miss for anything in the world.

Limestone

Lately I’ve spent most of my energy on implementing, finally! And some supervision of our 3rd year students who are doing their exam works. That’s fun though. I was lucky to get Fredrik Mattson to supervise, who writes about characterization in games, focusing on the visual aspects, so that was useful to me. Otherwise normal weeks have been spiced up by first a trip to Holmhällar for the whole institution. Two days of intense planning. Fun part was of course the SIM education, and then some mandatory university reorganization issues. These tend to be cyclic.



A real highlight was the LARP “Limestonen Roll” organized by, among other’s, Alex Erics. An excellent production, an absolute master piece. I got to play a secret agent (think Scully in ArciveX). We were five persons in the agent team, communicating with the “central”. The gameplay was paced in a way that allowed more laid-back periods as well as really intense ones. Even though the events was planned and staged we as players got a feeling of an open universe. We played until dawn when we saved the northern part of the world by disarming a nuclear bomb.