On wednesday a fellow student and I went to Mainz to listen to a talk by Jesper Juul titled “Stories that Games Tell: The Future of Time and Narratives in Video Games”. It was quite a lengthy – almost three hours each way – although free trip but it was worth it. Not so much for the content of the talk itself but rather for seeing Jesper Juul in real. In case you don’t know, he’s one of the leading figures in the research field called “game studies” which is basically the equivalent of film studies for video games. He’s written two books, the first one, “Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds“, being one of the standard publications in the field. The second one, “A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and their Players“, was published just this year and analyzes the current trend of so-called casual games like Wii Sports, Bejeweled or Guitar Hero. It was very interesting to hear him speak, especially as this was my first games studies event ever. The majority of the audience certainly wasn’t primarily active in game studies though but rather in film theory which resulted in some curious questions to which even Juul didn’t always have a satisfying answer. Overall though it was quite interesting to see how he tried to bridge the gap between his two books by focusing on the influence casual games have on the rules of time and narratives in games explained in his earlier work. I’ll certainly try to attend another event like this if I ever get the chance.

Quite a while ago I stumbled upon social networks for books or rather their readers. I quite liked the idea because they trive to understand what kind of books you like and find books that you might be interested in using that information. Yeah, it’s similar to what Amazon does but with the advantage of not being limited to a certain site or rather retailer. Another nice feature are virtual bookshelves which display all of your books or your wishlist if you want to. You can also track books you read but don’t own. Obviously, you can explore other users shelves, find people with similar tastes and discover books they liked that might interest you too. All in all, it sounds quite absorbing.

There’s one problem though. There are, like for any other modern web service, dozens of sites out there basically offering the same. Which one should I go for? Well, I just looked up which ones are most popular right now, which turned out to be Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing. The look of LibraryThing didn’t appeal to me at all so I ended up signing up to Goodreads and Shelfari. I’ll give them both a thorough try for a couple of weeks and decide on one (or none if I find them to be less useful than I thought) then. You will be able to read up on my experiences with both services right here.

Looks like Google is gathering Street View data in Marburg right now. I’m not sure though why they think our district (which is located a few km outside the actual city and has less than 3.000 citizens) is worth filming.

Yes, they very likely filmed me which means I’m going to end up in Street View. I’ll probably ask them to remove my face though!

Just a short post about the new Star Trek. Our local cinema showed the English version today, just came back home from there. I was a little worried J.J. Abrams might ruin the Star Trek franchise with it (not that I’m a fan or anything) but was still hoping for a good sci-fi action flick in the worst case. Well let me say he did a better job than I expected and it turns out to be a pretty decent homage to the original series and a modern action movie at the same time. It has its flaws like using a very cheap trick to allow the story but overall it’s a respectable effort. Abrams managed to make fun (in a good sense) of some of the cheasier aspects of the series while still maintaining a high level of appreciation for its qualities. So, if you like sci-fi movies and/or Star Trek, go watch it.

well, not quite

Sea Monster

Yesterday, on the spur of the moment we decided to go to the Spiegelslustturm to eat some ice cream. The weather was so beautiful and it’s the closest thing we could think of that could possibly cary ice cream. As we’d never been there before and there were no signs leading towards the tower it was quite an adventure to even find it by foot! After a rather long walk we finally found it and it was worth the hassle. There’s actually a small café and a beer garden at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Turm. Because it was so hot outside and I was a little jaded from the search I actually didn’t order an ice but a wheat beer instead. Very refreshing indeed! Here are some pics (nice view, isn’t it?)

At least two readers of this blog should recognize this mill

Snowy windmill

I can’t even find the words to describe this site, just look at it… and as if the design wasn’t funny enough, try actually reading some of the content!

Peter Pan’s Home Page!

Even if you’re not interested in video games these two articles will be fun reading through. It’s incredible what kind of crappy games publishers are putting out these days, but some of the box art is even worse…

The Worst Box Art of 2008

The Worst Box Art of 2007