Ludology.org

Game Auteurs

Kerem Yavuz Demirbas just defended his Masters dissertation at the IT University of Copenhagen. It's entitled Towards a New Understanding of Games: Game Auteur Criticism and, as the title suggests, deals with game authorship. One of its chapters analyzes my own games. Congrats Kerem!

New Games Journal

By way of Jesper, a link to a new games journal! For some reason I can´t access the articles right now, but I´m sure it´s some kind of bug and it should be fixed soon. The name, Eludamos, is somehow unfortunate in Spanish (it literally means "let´s avoid something" or, maybe "let´s beat around the bush"). In any case, it´s a great thing to find more venues for research in game studies. I'm looking forward to reading them and so should you.

Children as Darwinian toys

Right from the out of the blue department. I'm preparing my PhD defense and, naturally, I wish I was doing something else (I'm in Madrid but jetlagged and with tons of work to do. Still, I'm in Madrid with friends and that's all I should care about).
In any case, I've been playing a lot with my new roommate: a 3 month old cat. And that got me thinking about kids, babies and play. Traditionally, scholars argue that children play in order to either understand the world or to practice skills that will be useful later. But what if children only play because that makes them entertaining for adults who, otherwise, would not pay attention to them. In other words, what if evolution turned babies into desirable toys for adults? If babies didn't play, they would only do all the nasty things that babies do when they're not being cute: and that should be reason enough for parents to toss them away (well, at least during the good ol' Darwinian times). So, playing could be a survival strategy for children. Who knows? Maybe play is one of the things that kept our species alive all this time...
For those who are wondering, the kid in the pic is Maia, my goddaughter, queen of the toyroom.