Finnish chapter of Digra was established recently. New mailing list has been filled with people interested in local game research all around Finland. Our first physical meeting took place at the Assembly Winter 2007 event at Tampere couple of weeks ago. Finnish game reserachers from Tampere, Oulu, Rovaniemi, Turku, Jyväskylä and Helsinki (at least) were present. Koopee Hiltunen from Neogames gave us a presentation about the Finnish game-related organisations and Olli Sotamaa some words about Digras Finnish chapter. Other presentations were held by Frans Mäyrä, Jussi Holopainen and Jaakko Suominen to get some overview on Finnish game research. Discussion of different forms of co-operation between Finnish researchers catalysed a development blog at http://pelitutkimusfi.wordpress.com/. Let’s see how far we can get!
At the end of our meeting we had a public panel discussion for the Assembly audience with a topic of “How did I became a game researcher”. Olli posed questions to Elina, Aki and Tony and some interesting questions arised also from the audience. There seems to be need for more game research popularization in the Finnish media, which was also stated by the editor-in-chief Tuija Lindén from Finnish game magazine Pelit. She stated that “Our editorial staff gets still regularly questions of games and violence like there is nothing more to it” and asked for us to take more active role towards media.
Here is some pictures from the event:
AaKoo's Game Lab 