Physical playspace

Today, at State of Play at the New York Law School, I am presenting over the work from my gamer's space project for the first time. I am however not using the quantitative data, which I haven't had a chance to look through yet. I am using pictures from The Gathering, both mine and those belonging to Luca Rossi and a couple of the pictures that my wonderful respondents sent me.

I am contrasting these with pictures of "rånere" - a very loosely organised subculture which is centered around tinkering with, using and playing with cars. There's an interesting article (in Norwegian) on "rånere" in the journal Samtiden, written by an ex-råner now academic. This inspired me to (loosely) compare these groups, showing how there are certain practices of technology use which are fairly independent of technology.

For those who might be particularly interested, comparing these two groups might fit in very interesting ways with Jessica Enevold's argument about mobility in games.

I don't know if my quick 10 minutes presentation will be available online, but State of Play have been publishing video streams in earlier years,and may still do so. If you're really curious, check the website in a few weeks - if it is to appear it should be up by then.

Gamers' Space - the researcher

My name is Torill Elvira Mortensen, and I am a gamer. I mostly play multi-user online role-playing games, and the last four years my main kick has been World of Warcraft. I play around with most things I get my hands on, but the last years I have tended to return to WoW. When I don't play games I teach Public Information at Volda University College, or work on research projects such as this.

I published my first work on digital games in 1997, and since then I have published several articles and written a book about games. Some examples are:

"WoW is the new MUD, Social Gaming from Text to Video", Mortensen, Torill Elvira, in Douglas Thomas (ed): Games and Culture, a Journal of Interactive Media, Volume 1, Number 4, Sage Publications October 2006.

“Humans Playing World of Warcraft: or Deviant Strategies?” Mortensen, Torill Elvira, in Hilde Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (eds), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity, MIT Press 2008

Perceiving Play: The Art and Study of Computer Games, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Peter Lang Publishers, 2009.

If you need to contact me with questions or comments, use research dot game at gmail dot com, or use the comments field on this weblog. I also maintain a weblog named thinking with my fingers. When I am done working on this project that is where my I will keep blogging about my research, teaching and life in general.