Tracy Harwood

24 March 2009

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I’ve been hassling IT-journalists about getting involved with Ada Lovelace Day and now I’m sitting here on the day – completely rushed on my own contribution! Just goes to show – hassling people is a tricky thing to pull off respectfully
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So, in the spirit of Ada Lovelace Day, I would like to focus on Tracy Harwood.

We were so lucky this fall to have her visit Landmark in our humble city of Bergen, Norway for a lecture on Machinima. It was a pleasure to have her here and she inspired me (and dare I say, my mom) to keep living my life as colourful as possible.

Tracy Harwood is today a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University. She’s a professional marketer and has a PhD in negotion of buyer-seller relationships.

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My women’s day thank you

8 March 2009

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It’s International Women’s Day again and time to do my annual thank you! Ada Lovelace Day is taking care of my greatfulness for women and technology – so this year I’m going to keep it on a very personal level.

In November 2006, Maren Agdestein organised a lunch where she gathered three women she had met that were writing or considering to write about computer games for their master’s thesis. Seen here on the right from the left: Marianne, Me, Maren and Hedvig. At that time we called ourselves The cHixOrs, not really thinking that we’d do anything more than just meet up every now and then for a chat about games and our academic interests. But I think all of us really enjoyed geekspeaking with other women. There was just something really uplifting, fun and liberating about it.

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Games seminar

22 February 2009

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Or symposium (do I need a phd-degree to understand the differences between them?).

Floating Points 6. Games of Culture | Art of Games

Is a symposium, film screening and workshop in Boston, Massachusetts on the 20th and 21st of March.

They’re livestreaming the event and I hope that will include the workshop because Friedrich Kirschner is having a workshop entitle “Introduction to Machinima” – which I would love to witness.

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Machinima – fan art?

20 February 2009

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I’ve often thought about machinima as fan art – but I’ve never felt completely comfortable with it. I’ve always felt like machinima in itself – was an artform in it’s own right. But then there are such lucious films like this. Which clearly is fan based, but a voyeuristic delight none the less!

Speaking of fan art – I’ve started a little theory about why we’re not talking enough about this in Norway. We have no word for “fan” – seriously – if you can think of something do tell me – but I don’t think we have a word for ‘fan’. We have supporter – which is generally considered to be football fans. But it’s not even that – a football fan is a supporter, although I’m not sure that a WoW machinimator is a supporter of Blizzard. It’s baffled me for a while now and there’s definitely a cultural significance in being wordless on the subject. It’s interesting – and just a thought to share.

My thesis

17 January 2009

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So I finally registrered my masters thesis in the University of Bergen’s archives. I’ve spent the last two years meaning to dig it up and edit and tripple check references, but the will-power just was not there.

As for this blog? It’s not dead just yet – I’ve got several posts just waiting for a read-through to be posted – so I’m not ready to cut it off just yet. But no new posts since november? That’s tragic!

My enthusiasm is very focused on my glorious new job at the moment – but I’m noticing that there’s a lot of what I’m doing which can be combined with what this blog is about, I’m just not on certain enough ground to write about it yet. I will, though! ;)

Roo Reynolds – a must!

23 November 2008

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I’ve just watched Roo Reynold’s closing keynote at the ReLIVE08 (Researching Learning in Virtual Environments) conference and I’m just so smitten!

Firstly – you just have to be impressed that he came with nothing and worked through the entire conference by taking notes so he could sum up the whole conference as a closing keynote. That’s ballsy! What a gift for a conference!

Roo Reynolds is in charge of social media at the BBC (I think that’s a good way to sum it up), but he himself says: “I look after social media for BBC Vision, which is the TV bit (e.g. there are people with similar roles to mine in news, radio and the central ‘future media & technology’ teams, and I work closely with them)”. If you’re working with social media in any shape or form you have to follow Roo Reynold’s blog. He’s smart, reflective and a whole lot of fun!

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Life is beautiful

23 November 2008

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I’m just running through my feeds before I start cracking on some more “serious” blogsposts and I’ve caught myself muttering “How adorable – beautiful – incredible!” on several of the articles I’m reading – so thought I’d just share some of them here. I don’t know – perhaps its the beautiful weather that’s put me in the lovey dovey mood – either way – I’m having an incredibly lucious Sunday!

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3D thoughts on Machinima

15 November 2008

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For this years Bergen Machinima Night we were honoured by a visit from Dr. Tracy Harwood who had a fascinating presentation about what machinima is, where it is going and why.

Morten Kvamme (curator at Landmark) and I had dinner with Tracy before the event and I think we were both charmed , inspired and bedazzled. Midway through the dinner Morten observed that the three of us had different angles of interest with Machinima, hence our collective intelligence makes up a 3D perspective.

I’m focused on gameplay functioning as narrative, Tracy on the tribe culture and Morten’s interested in Game Art.

Needless to say, I was elevated to some cloud up up up – way beyond consciousness.

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