Here is the CFP:

Conference Call for Papers
Keynote Speech: Dr. Graeme Kirkpatrick
Conveners : Elizabeth Aucott & Gareth Crabtree (PhD. Candidates)

Play Things - November 4th 2009 - School of Arts, Histories & Cultures (University of Manchester)

Games and play are an intrinsic element of culture and society, yet both remain under theorised in academic literature. Play Things is a one day academic conference which aims to bring together a range of the most current and exciting research. The definition of play is broadly positioned to encourage an interdisciplinary approach, though we intend papers to have a specific focus on digital cultures.

Indications of areas of particular interest are:
. The shaping of identity through play (in either real or virtual selves).
. Play in relation to the body, sexuality and gender.
. Play in relation to practices of education.
. How play relates to performance (dramatic, everyday or otherwise).
. The role of technology in play (incorporating the Internet, playing by yourself and playing with others).
. The notion of the game in literature.
. The role of play in everyday life.
. Historical representations through play.
. Theoretical aspects of play.
. Methodological issues in research into play.

Please submit 200 word abstracts for consideration by Friday 14th August to:

gareth.j.crabtree@student.manchester.ac.uk

Should be good and not to expensive to attend, given that it is only a day long.

I sit down to work and say to myself "I will write a page, just one page at least". Then I pick up a book, fliip through pages, read passages, take notes, and time passes then interest wanes and I move on to doing something else. Sadly, that something else often ends up being non-academic. A friend calls me out for coffee. My dog drops a toy at my feet.  A store sends me an email advertizing a special offer and I grab my bag and go out.

The end result is the same. The blinking cursor stays firmly embedded on a white page.

While I could definitely claim a lot of distractions in my life these days, the primary distraction is an emotional one. And it is, I claim, a big part of my white space syndrome. I am missing someone, huge and hardcore. And that emotional rift is leaving a big hole in my days that I try to pretend isn't there.

At the same time, I need to formulate some discipline and direction. without it, I won't get anything done at all in the upcoming few months and I do indeed have deadlines looming large. Time to suck it up.

Stay tuned.

Originally they were calling for a 2nd quarter 2009 release. But according to a Bioware press release, they are now saying "last half of 2009" and they mean the very last half. The GameSpot pre-orders page for the game is showing the release date as November 3.

While bad news for anyone who was hoping to while away their summer playing it, this is actually good news in disguise. At least for me. Now I can get my thesis done quietly and without temptation, and I will be able to play it upon release, unencumbered by program deadlines or requirements. Plus my man will be back home so it's all rosy news for me.

I'm particularly looking forward to Andrea Doucet and Natasha Mauthner's talk on emotions in knowing.

I might try to experiment with twittering or blogging the conference.

I had a blog once, for quite a while back when blogs were new enough that they were never commercial. That first one started as an undergraduate project.At the time I contributed to it often, on all kinds of topics related to thinking through theory and student life and the challenges of working while studying. Eventually, as things happen, my life changed in big and small ways and blogging wasn't part of it anymore. Consequently, my little blog lay fallow and was left to become yet another piece of digital litter.

But I never stopped thinking about the idea of blogging. I watched friends start their own blogs. I saw facebook incorporating blog feeds. I heard about how blogs had helped this academic's career or that student's thought processes. And friends pushed me to start a blog again, so they'd have a place to link to when they referred to me here and there in their own digital ramblings.

Then people started googling me. Not sure why, but recently I've been getting emails from a few different places that track such things (like Academia.edu) letting me know that people were looking for me. Thing is, anyone looking for me was getting very little back for their search terms.

I'm going to try to change that. The timing seems right. I'm just starting to write my MA thesis, and so I'm working through a lot of things related to the business of academic life and to the process of writing an MA project. I'm a theory geek, so I'm reading a lot too and things are starting to percolate up and out of those readings. I've also started trying to get myself out into the local academic community. Various presentaitons I've attended recently got my brain all fired up. With no one locally (yet) to talk this stuff over with, it seems that the need for a blog is mounting.

So here I am. Here it is. I'm hoping that on these digital pages, I can explore and think through what is it to be who I am.

Who am I? I am Tamara Paradis. In shorthand cliches, I'm an academic, a gamer, a Masters student, a theory geek, a sociologist, a digital person.

What am I? What I am mostly these days is lost in thought, trying to think through a myriad of clashing concepts and ideas and possibilities.

So this blog will be my way of trying to find myself through my thinking and let others find me too.

The hope is that rather than being lost in my thoughts, I can be found in thought.

I'm curious to see how their promises and claims pan out, particularly the one about having the narrative and story path be quite different for each of your characters, based on the morality of the choices you make. The origin stories as it were. The idea is supposed to be to make the game play quite different as the player makes different "moral" choices.

Trailers and walkthroughs are intriguing and this is definitely shaping up to be my kind of game, albeit single player, rather than MMO. I only hope it doesn't disappoint, the way Fable did.