Alkuperäinen artikkelini käsitteli Modern Warfare 3 ja Battlefield 3 -pelien kilvoittelua. Se julkaistiin 15.12.2011, ja Kuusimäen kommentti 18.12.2011.

Tunnen oloni… imarrelluksi.

Non-fiction: Liv Arnesen, Ann Bancroft & Cheryl Dahle: No Horizon Is So Far (Penguin, 2004)

No Horizon Is So Far is the account of the Norwegian Liv Arnesen and American Ann Bancroft’s expedition to cross the Antarctic continent unsupported. Books about modern Antarctic expeditions like this one are more like sports narratives than exploration, stories about human endurance and willpower. The story is the usual one: first it’s about getting the money, then about walking in snow and ice.

The distinguishing feature of this particular book is the pedagogical program attached to the expedition and the fact that both explorers are women. Its also a part of the mini-genre of lesbian Antarctic books. (I have yet to see a single gay Antarctic book.)

Perhaps the most memorable parts of the book are Arnesen and Bancroft’s stories of some of the truly idiotic reactions they encountered as women undertaking an expedition in a traditionally male environment.

Novel: Crawford Kilian: Icequake (toExcel, 1998)

What if there was an earthquake on Antarctica? That’s the premise of Crawford Kilian’s disaster novel Icequake, a novel that’s at its best when describing tons of ice moving in chaos. Following all the traditions of genre literature, its at its worst when it has to deal with people.

The premise is actually more interesting than it seems. An earthquake could make the glaciers covering the continent collapse into the sea, causing a lot of trouble to research stations built on those glaciers. It would make sea levels rise and change global weather patterns.

There’s a strange vibe going through the book that’s hard to describe, as if it had been written in the Seventies and not ten years ago.

Film: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.: The Thing (U.S.A., 2011)

The movie The Thing is a remake/prequel of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing, which is a remake of a 1951 movie called The Thing From Another World, which is based on the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. I doubt Campbell could have guessed his story had such lasting resonance.

The new The Thing movie tells the story of the Norwegian Antarctic base referenced in the opening to Carpenter’s movie, but in terms of story it’s much the same as what we’ve seen before. Same alien monster, same body horror.

Some of the depictions of normal Antarctic life are interesting, but once the horror movie stuff starts, the film turns boring. It has the anonymous aesthetic of too many recent low-budget American genre movies.

The Nordic tradition of publishing collections of larp and roleplaying game theory and design articles together with the Knudepunkt conventions has inspired similar books in other parts of the world. One of these is the Italian Larp Frescos, published in two volumes and edited by the Italian Andrea Castellani and the Finnish J. Tuomas Harviainen.

Part I consists of Nordic essays translated into Italian, and part II has original articles, most in Italian but some in English. One of my articles is featured in the first book. I’ll comment on the English articles in the second book here.

Like with all collections of articles, this is a mixed bag. It’s wonderful to see new writing on larp, especially from a number of different larp cultures. This present’s its own challenges. The editors made the decision to keep the terminology of each article faithful to its own cultural context. I understand the decision, but it makes the book hard to read. For example, the German substitution of time-in for the more generally accepted in-game makes for some confusion.

Unfortunately, the variety in terminology combined with the florid style of so many articles of roleplaying theory means that the book has its share of disappointments. Often it seems that once I finally understand what’s being said, it’s something fairly obvious and commonplace. A particular offender is Rafael Bienia’s article “Writing Plot: Suggestions from Narratology”. Once you get through tortured sentences such as: “Looking at the chronological space between acting players and the occurring incident, one may use three different moments: past, present or future,” it becomes apparent that the article’s design ideas are mostly pedestrian stuff about using old storytelling techniques in larp. There are some interesting ideas about using exposition to control the content of diegetic space, but they’re quickly glossed over or buried under unnecessary references to Roland Barthes.

Another bizarre article is Raffaele Manzo’s “There is No Such Thing as a ‘Game Master’”. It seems to argue that the term “game master” must never be used because a friend of his had to talk about bathroom sex with his players. Manzo assumes that the players informed their game master about the sex because they thought that the game master’s role required that he should know about it.

Manzo concludes that: “‘Sex in the lavatory’-type situations are awkward at so many levels that, in my opinion, we’d rather take all necessary steps to prevent them.”

In short, we must never use the term “game master”, because if someone is a game master, he runs the risk of being subjected to stories of bathroom sex.

One of the things that Larp Frescos really shines in is the use of references. Most of the articles seem well informed of what’s come before. A particularly interesting example is Eleni Timplalexi’s article “Towards a Discourse Between the Performative and the Iconic”, which delves into some of the core concepts of Nordic larp theory, and where they come from.

Another fine article is Mikko Meriläinen’s “It’s Not Just Fun and Games”. Meriläinen says that it’s unbecoming of the proponents of modern larp to claim that larp can lead to transcendent experiences, but also that larp is completely harmless. If larp can change the world, it means that it can also be dangerous. He calls for larp ethics and a greater understanding of what larp can do, both good and bad.

The book concludes with Lorenzo Trenti’s article “Boxing a Larp”, about writing down a game so others can run it too. Trenti goes through a number of examples of games that have been published and designed to be re-used, and talks about his own choices when publishing a book of larps. It’s an interesting, journalistic look into what’s been done, and I’m sure many will use it as a reference list to look up some of the more interesting publications he writes about.

(Kuvassa Tiltin juontaja Anni Uusivirta, paita Genrewear)

Maanantaina tuli tuottamani videopeliohjelma Tiltin eka jakso, ja ensimaanantaista jouluun sitten loput yhdeksän jaksoa. Ensinäytös on aina maanantaina 19:00 Jimillä, uusinnat lauantaina 17:30 ja sunnuntaina 10:00.

(Kuvassa Anni Uusivirta, Tiltin juontaja.)

Mä olen Tilt-videopeliohjelman tuottaja. Tilt on ollut jonkin aikaa tauolla, mutta palaa nyt ruutuun ensi maanantaina eli 17.10.2011 klo 19:00 Jimillä.

Non-fiction: Alexa Thomson: Antarctica on a Plate (Random House Australia, 2003)

Many different kinds of people go to Antarctica. Scientists, adventurers and the people who keep the infrastructure running. Often, this last category produces the best books. Alexa Thomson writes about her experiences as a cook at an Antarctic tent camp providing support for a semi-improvised airfield.

It’s a fun, fluffy book about Thomson’s subjective experience of Antarctica. Some of the best stuff involves her experiences at the neighboring Russian and Indian bases. She writes about being a woman in the macho Antarctic environment very well. The stuff about disrupting Indian porn routines is especially telling.

Art book: Paul D. Miller: The Book of Ice (Mark Batty Publisher, 2011)

Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, created a multimedia performance piece called Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica in 2009. This book is a part of that project. It’s kind of a documentation book or an artbook, a scrapbook of graphics and images.

The meat of the book is a selection of propaganda posters and stickers for Miller’s proposed revolutionary People’s Republic of Antarctica (the concept itself lifted from John Calvin Batchelor’s novel of the same name). The posters are fun, but treated in isolation, the book is a slight collection of Antarctic geekery. There’s a couple of graphs about climate change, some notes and interviews from the artist, and a bunch of old photos, but the main thesis is probably best explored in the actual Terra Nova artwork.