Since January 2024, I have been operating as the principal investigator (PI) of the Jyväskylä University package of a mysterious project called Synthetica. In this consortium funded by the Research Council of Finland, we try to tease out a variety of so-called ripple effects of artificial intelligence in contemporary societies. The work is just beginning, but we have already had some really interesting experiments, such as releasing AI bot versions of Finnish presidential candidates for a short testing period.
A couple of days ago, we published a blog post about this topic with my two colleagues Mitra Raappana and Riikka Nissi (in Finnish): Tekoäly heijastuu luottamukseen, vuorovaikutukseen – ja käsitykseen ihmisen toimijuudesta. This was a fun piece to write, and just the kind of free thinking that is required when setting up a new project. Later on, when we have more data from our collaborating companies as well as other societal contexts, it is time for more serious academic pondering. While we are working towards that, it is important to keep eyes and ears open and be as flexible as possible when it comes to trying out new technology – as well as imagining where it may lead us!
After circa four years, the long project of writing a comprehensive basic reader of game studies in Finnish language has finally reached its goal. The title of the book is Pelit kulttuurina, Games as Culture.
Pelit kulttuurina -kirja
My contribution to the book is a chapter on social interaction in player communities. In the chapter, I explore the meaning of community-building on games, play and players from a variety of viewpoints. Since it is meant as an educational resource, I do not present any new empirical study. However, due to the fact that Finnish as a language of academic knowledge production is definitely endangered, the whole book serves as quite an important landmark for game studies in Finland.
Universities Finland (UNIFI) recently published a blog post written by me on the topic of so-called hybrid/blended/HyFlex teaching. In the blog, I go through some of my own experiences on organising hybrid teaching in the past two years. I also draw on what I have seen, for example through the education of my children during the COVID pandemic in Finland.
Overall, my feeling is that while it certainly is possible to design different types of hybrid or flexible courses and content, it requires much more resources and care than one would think. What makes things complicated is that most of the work required to make things run smoothly happens completely out of sight, behind the curtains, and is therefore invisible to the participants. This, in turn, brings up the possibility of a large gap between participant expectations and teacher realities. For example, I have received numerous requests from students to open a “hybrid window” into my teaching, since “it is so easy”. What is not visible to the participant is how destructive such windows can be for the teacher’s concentration and other face-to-face participants’ experience, and the many, many things related to technology that need to go just right in order for the window to work. On top of this, hybrid or blended teaching also requires careful re-thinking of the pedagogical approach – again something which seems to be largely invisible to the participants.
I don’t know how higher education will solve these gaps between expectations and realities, but I do know that we will see a lot more discussion surrounding the topic in the coming years.
I recently tried the new automated speech-to-text function of our university’s video streaming service. This is the one we are supposed to use when making our lecture videos comply with the new EU accessibility requirements. It did not go well. I estimate about 75% of the sub-titles were wrong. I don’t know how much work it would require to actually re-write the sub-titles for an entire lecture series, nor do I want to. Let’s hope it develops quickly into something better.
A detail from a poster promoting the importance of learning languages, and not trusting automation too much.
Well, what to do? I (or rather, me and the algorithm) made a poem. Words by the algorithm, and rhythm, punctuation, certain little stylistic omissions by yours truly. Enjoy!
“A short lived man” (M. Siitonen & an anonymous algorithm)
My name’s Monocacy. Talk and think about them, and damn! Due to the fact that this desert session is also reported (every once in wild horse) But enough of languishing communication studies.
I am so very short lived man to-day’s topic on my hand. Off that and borrow meant in which you are in (hum), given and garment and that Sam. Peace is introductory peace.
And death, it has to do with the fact that we martin away frostily unnoticed and many more. Was the university of you rascal, or of some of you? Or perhaps you study to Bob – he didn’t have break. And death, and of course the first months always.
I’m spent in trying to understand what is going on. On hearing what is even possible in this new and barman. Em, and sir, it is told that we too often forget that thou foreign sissy around us they are somehow. What is this system around us in the first place? What fools and systems doesn’t consist of a lamp not thinking of technology, so you are in technology.
I’m fool. Orthodox, I’m the written document.
I’m becoming aware of the height of Navajo, listed picture of the communication, and barman, the yacht. That’s the new normal, old normal, whatever.
And to and so forth million friends we always part. But the people we (ah) collaborating with have their own realities, ate their own background. Dad, and/or soul, asking sort of stupid questions that bade the yacht, bear communicate their presence in some way.
So, the final viewpoint I want to shame is simply. It’s like holmwood task for you, i’m dead and none knew. Could use another metaphor, but let’s say now no winter is coming in here, and during the winter time kitchen is wholesome, eyes and soaps. What happens in the kitchen, something granite gettin unite, forget mine old lives that sharpened. That’s what you need to ask.
To celebrate the beginning of 2021, the special issue I edited with Teresa de la Hera (Erasmus university Rotterdam, The Netherlands) and Felix Reer (University of Münster, Germany) came out in the journal Media and Communication (open access). Titled Games and Communication – Quo Vadis? it includes a selection of articles that show a variety of approaches game scholars take to studying games and play.
In our introductory text, we go through the included articles, and also briefly discuss what it means to be involved in a broad, pragmatically oriented field. As I see it, game studies has been, and continues to exist, as a loose umbrella under which scholars coming from different fields come together to study emerging phenomena. And this is good so. It is refreshing to go to any conference in the field, and listen to the wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches scholars employ – it really challenges the mind. At the same time this means that in order to participate in the scholarly discussion surrounding game studies, one sometimes feels the need to be a jack of all trades just to be able to follow it, let alone understand and contribute to it. Challenging, but fun!
This year, I will try to lift up academic publications by writing short posts concerning them here. The idea behind this endeavour is both to increase the publications’ visibility, as well as to lower the threshold of reading them. At the same time this activity will serve as an exercise in simplifying or popularising academic thinking:)
The first of these is the dichotomy between face-to-face and technology-mediated communication. Even if scholars and many practicioners nowadays understand, that technology does not exist in a vacuum, and that our everyday life is a muddled mixture of different communication affordances and the way we use them, in practice this division still comes up almost automatically. Sometimes it is quite subtle, such as when a new research project aims at understanding some newly found facet of communication technology, but as long as the study emphasises the new technology instead of trying to form a holistic picture, it ends up reinforcing the age-old dichotomy.
The other bias is our fascination with new technology at the expense of older and more established solutions. This one is also understandable, as we already know something of the old, and nothing of the new (not to mention that it is easier to get funding when you study something new). However, this has led, time and time again, to a situation where we think we understand technology-mediated communication, but actually just understand how its early versions have been used by early adopters in a time when the whole thing was new and exciting to them. How people actually use technology in their everyday life, as a “boring” part of very normal social interaction, is something we can only see once at least – I don’t know – ten years have passed since the introduction and popularization of said technology.
I know these biases are nothing new. They are also not going to disappear any time soon, if ever. Still, I feel like we ought to be aware of them every now and then, both when planning research projects, deciding on what technological solutions to introduce to our organization, thinking about needs and solutions that could lead to new directions for technological development… the lot. Understanding their power and prevalence might at the very least help us take them into account, even if we cannot truly escape them.
Pidin hiljattain Vuorovaikutuksen tutkimuksen päivillä esitelmän otsikolla Vuorovaikutuskumppanina autonominen algoritmi. Myönnän, AI on aiheena pelottavan trendikäs, mutta mielestäni viimeistään nyt ihmistieteiden edustajien on kiinnostuttava tästä kehityksestä joka tulee vaikuttamaan lähestulkoon kaikkiin elämämme osa-alueisiin.
Olen taustaltani ns. viestintätieteilijä, eli minua kiinnostaa pääasiassa ihmiseksi kutsumamme eläimen käyttäytymisen ja sielunelämän ymmärtäminen. Periaatteessa voisi siis luulla, että ihmisen ja koneen välinen vuorovaikutus, niin kutsuttu human-computer interaction (HCI) ei “kuuluisi” minulle pätkääkään. Väitän kuitenkin, että tämä asia tulee muuttumaan hyvin pian – jos ei ole jo muuttunut. Olemme esimerkiksi jo nyt tilanteessa, jossa ihmiset eivät aina tajua keskustelukumppaninsa olevan kone, ja jossa algoritmeja tietoisesti kehitetään huijaamaan inhimillistä vuorovaikutuskumppaniaan pitämään niitä yhtenä “meistä” (vrt. keskustelu Twitter-boteista erinäisten vaalien yhteydessä). Uskon, että muutaman vuoden sisään nämä tilanteet yleistyvät sellaiselle tasolle, jossa tietoisuutemme vuorovaikutuskumppanimme mahdollisesta ei-ihmisyydestä pakottaa meidät kehittämään yhä uusia keinoja varmistua hänen/sen ihmisyydestä. Samalla kaikki ihmiset eivät tule näitä testejä läpäisemään. Aihepiiriä ennakoidaan jo – on esimerkiksi pohdittu, pitäisikö niin kutsuttujen bottien kertoa vuorovaikutustilanteen aluksi että kyseessä ei ole ihminen (kiinnostavaa mietintää aiheesta täällä: Lamo & Calo, 2018).
Jako elolliseen ja elottomaan sekä ihmisiin ja muihin elollisiin on yksi perustavanlaatuisimmista sisä- ja ulkoryhmien jakoa koskevista rajalinjoista mielessämme. Ja kuten olemme nähneet, koneet (esim. robotit) jotka lähestyvät tätä rajaa koetaan lähtökohtaisesti uhkaavina tai epämiellyttävinä. Vain aika näyttää, miten valmiita olemme laajentamaan ihmisyyden kategoriaa meitä simuloivien algoritmien suuntaan, vai päätyvätkö yhteiskunnat vetämään ihmisyyden rajat (ja täten myös oikeudet ja velvollisuudet) entistä tiukemmalle.
Haastankin sinut, vuorovaikutuksen tutkija, ottamaan algoritmeista kopin! Mietitään yhdessä, miten meille tutut menetelmät ja teoriat soveltuvat uljaan uuden maailman tutkimiseen;)
In the spring of 2018 the multidisciplinary Center of Excellence in Game Culture Studies organised a series of public lectures on various aspects of contemporary game studies. Since Jyväskylä is one part of the Centre, and I am affiliated with it, I also got to be a part of this initiative. The aim was to collect viewpoints from a large number of researchers in order to form a kind of introductory course that students could utilise in the coming years.
My topic on this course was Vuorovaikutus pelaajayhteisöissä, or Social Interaction in Online Game Communities. In this 1,5 hour lecture I speak about some basic issues in understanding social interaction in online game communities, such as Internet language, memes, functions of interaction in (voluntary) communities, the principles of communities of practice, and many, many more. Unfortunately our recording technology broke down towards the end, so you will not be able to see the slides anymore at that point).
All of the public lectures have been collected into the Youtube-channel of the Centre. Our hope is that we can use these videos at least for a year or two. The most important thing is that we did this in the first place, as there was not a similar repository in Finnish before. Our hope is to continue this effort in the form of a book later on, perhaps in 2019 or so.
I recently wrote a blog post to my university’s education blog titled “Perfectly normal teaching” (Aivan tavallista opetusta). The main point was to remind teachers of the need to value established and “normal” teaching practices, and to share them with others as well. In my eyes, there is a tendency to highlight the “new” and “innovative”, and to focus on various types of development initiatives, while established best practices are often bypassed or taken for granted. Especially in situations or organisational change, such as when departments are joined together, or new personnel are recruited, it would be important to remember to share existing practices no matter how self-evident they may feel. In short, it is important to make structures visible.
No, not this traditional teaching…
In this spirit, I want to collect here some highlights from the teaching I participated in the spring of 2017:
On the Newsgames -course, organised jointly between our dept. and the Faculty of Information Technology, student teams worked on three different game projects, including: A game on the life stories of Finns born in 1917, illustrating the drastic way our life has changed in the 100 years of Finnish independence; a game on cybercrime, illustrating the ease of making simple attacks, and how unlikely it is to get caught; a game on the every day decisions a medical doctor has to make, illustrating the difficulty of doing medical work ethically while not being overworked in the process.
On the Communication in Global Virtual Teams -course, student teams worked on a variety of wonderful topics, producing presentations and final reports on topics such as: Perspectives on Team Development in Virtual Setting; Social Tolerance in Global Virtual Teams; and Diversity Management in Global Virtual Teams
On the Media and Online Cultures -course, we used a very traditional lecture format (with visitors!) to take a look at themes such as social media and participatory culture, communication in online communities, theories of technology-mediated communication, new and emerging trends in journalism, contemporary media landscape as a (contested) site for bringing about change in the world, and many others.
And of course many others as well, including MA theses on too many topics to discuss here. There is always a lot happening within the hallowed walls of the university institute! As always, it has been an honour to work with talented and motivated students and to witness the way their thinking and understanding evolves.
Last autumn and during the winter I participated in many a seminar where I was asked to hold speeches. This is nothing out of the ordinary – normally, in an academic conference, we are expected to be able to verbalise our research processes and results to the audience. The cases I am talking about, however, were more along the lines of popularising “science” (I write that in quotation marks since I do not see myself as a scientist. A researcher, yes, and academic, definitely, but not a scientist.). Since these occasions can never really be put to use in a CV, and they are not really appreciated in the academic world, I thought it might be interesting to save them here for posterity.
The first two were in Finnish, and took place in the autumn of 2014. The first of these was in a closing seminar of the Pelaten terveeks? -project I wrote earlier about. The next one was during the concluding seminar of the Pelitaito -project in Helsinki. My topic there was communality and communities in games, with a special focus on emergent player behaviour. The whole event was streamed online, with around 100 people in the audience, and some hundreds more online.
The last speech was done in English, and was delivered during the TEDx-event here in Jyväskylä. The organisers did a really nice job putting together an interesting ensemble. The space was nice, and the atmosphere was cozy. In this speech I talked about the power of games and a gameful attitude in opening people up for learning about computers. What I see so often when talking to students is the attitude that technology is not for them. What I also see is that the few courses they take are not nearly enough to provide them with the necessary know-how required in today’s technology-driven media landscape. A video of the talk can be found here. Unfortunately, while the video quality is good, they did not have microphones for the audience. This is a shame since I managed to get the audience going a couple of times, and the feel of the situation suffers from the lack of murmur on the background. Well, anyway it was a nice occasion!
Situations like these provide wonderful opportunities for honing one’s public speaking skills, and I am quite happy to take on challenges like the TEDx-talk. Scary they may be, but one always ends up learning a lot from them.
Digital Wilderness 