We are having a random improvisation course on Tue 29th Sep.

Many of you aieseccers have become familiar faces at the impros
held during the last year or so. Now we’re trying to set it up
again, depending on how popular this first time will be.

Whether or not you have done improvisation before (or whether you
even know what it is), you are most welcome to join us! At the
impro we will get to know to each other and ourselves, push our
comfort zones a bit further and most improtantly we will have fun
playing games of different kind! You will discover what it is like
to act in random and strange situation unprepared and will learn to
find things to say more easily. We use different tools of drama,
with physical and vocal exercises. Of course, you will get to know
more aieseccers, because hopefully lots of new members will join us
too!

The improvisation course will be held by Mia O’Neill
Tue 29th Sep at 16.15-17.45
Tampere University library building LINNA room K113

Its been almost a month since i wrote my last blog, in between that blog and to these line so much has happened. With ususal hammering of studies to the special events of AIESEC, it was a busy time. To top it all Arsenal is not performing well at all.

So what i was doing in the whole last month, I’ll try to summarize all those events. Its difficult to remember all those past events but thanks to my Tekkari Kalenteri (Technical Student Calendar) i’ll try to put all those eggs(events) in this blog.

29th Oct 08: There was a club at TAMK and being in the ER of AIESEC, LATE asked some of us to be present there in order to promote AIESEC, Tampere. It was kind of marketing stuff meeting with new people and promoting AIESEC. I didnt know that TAMK is so near to Hervanta, it takes just 12 mins from my place to TAMK. Being a polytechnic TAMK is a small school as compared to TUT, but with some strict rules.

31st Oct-2nd Nov: AIESEC is celebrating its 60th anniversary world-wide and as a part of this celebration there was a national seminar ACCESS 2008 in Helsinki where all the delegates from Finland were present. It was a great event, lots of learning and great fun. It was a pleasure to meet so many AIESEC-ers all over from Finland and even from Sweden, there was some nice discussion session about promoting the talent, promoting the brand etc. All and all it was a priceless expeirence of 2 days. Here are some snaps from ACCESS 2008, this is me as wizard part of the Halloween theme on the first night during that event.

On our way to Helsinki

Our Room.

Sustainaibitly Discussion for Valio

There are tons of other snaps, which are worth uploading. I’ll probbaly make a seperate blog for ACCESSS 2008.

4th Nov 08: We have to submit a report on how to design a common emitter amplifier along with passive low pass and high pass filters, it was an easy task but report writing was a bit tricky because of some special requirments neverthless it was alwyas fun to play around electronics and doing the soldering stuff. Here is my design. Picture is blurry, my bad.

10th Nov 08: Along with Jacub, i have to give a short lecture/presentation on EM specturm. It is always a nice practice to increase your presentation skills in front of your mates, we didnt prepare well for the lecture, but surprisingly it comes out to be very good. We are finding it hard to complet our 30mins but in the end, 30 mins was too short for us. A good job done. Working with Jakub is always fun, he is from Czech but only from his look the rest attributes he posses are typicaly like south asian, always worried, always tensed, roaming here and there in the campus looking for something. Late sitiings in the libaray. He is really putting some effort and we really appreciate it his work.

15th Nov 08: I have invited Juhanni a fellow AIESECer to my place on an informal dinner. A guitarist, gymanist and apperantely a great debater, he lives in Hervanta too, just next to my building. I have made some Chapli Kebabs that day, Salman also joined us druing the dinner and yeah VESA my flatmate made some delicious Dallas Cookies much better than my Kebabs. It was a nice gathering, we discussed about so many thing about cultural differences between Pakistan and Finland. A lot of religious discussion in between them and whats not, it was a great gathering. We talked about the existence of GOD and Juhanni opposed it with his views, at the end he summed up the day by saying “DO WHAT-EVER YOU WANNA DO IN WHICH YOY FEEL GOOD” this phrase sums up the day. We have almost eaten all of VESA’s delcious Dallas cookies . There were really good.

17th Nov 08: There was an Impro+Kapula evening arranged by a fellow Aiesec-er in University of Tampere. The main purpose of this event is how to improvise your personality, how to carry on with your ideas and how to adjust yourself in differenct condtions. Since it was the introductory evening so there were small themes just to see how it works and it works brilliantly. I like the Question against Question session, plus the continuation of one scene to another different scene was definitely very exciting. Its worth an experince and i am looking forward for more impros.

19th Nov 08:There was a diversity measurement exercise in one of the course here, the purpose of this exercise is to measure transmitted and received signal power in different locations in the Tietotalo building in TUT with the help of indoor and outdoor antennas. It was one of the highlights of my studies here, putting Radio Frequency theory into practice is something very new for me. Learn a lot about different issues in diversity measurement and small thing that we normally ignore while considering these sceanrios in theory.

In between all this, i have witnessed the first snow in my life. Yeah the first snow fall in Tampere for this year happened on the night of 18th and 19th November. The city is white, roads are white, cars are frozen and the walkways are extremely slippery, but this is all part of this beautiful weather. Finally the long awaited winter has arrived and i am looking forward for more snow.

Next week is the exam week, i have 3 exam during this week and than the 2nd period will be over. Its been 3months and a week since i am in Tampere, Finland. So far so good.

ich habe im wintersemester 07/08 ein semester an der tampereen yliopisto in finnland studiert.

das knapp halbe jahr in finnlad war das beeindruckendste und nachhaltigste erlebnis für mich bisher!!

studieren und leben im norden europas ist einzigartig!

wenn du auch ein semester in finnland studieren möchtest und noch ein paar fragen hast helf ich dir gern weiter!!!

Dani

hier schon mal ein paar links:

http://www.uta.fi/english/

http://www.yo-talo.com/ohjelma.php

http://www.tampere.fi/

http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/aktk/english/index.html (hier gehts zum forschungszentrum für berufliche bildung)

Lots of CFPs with the start of the new year. Here is a prior (although brief) discussion of the Magic Circle idea on this blog. Wayne Porter and Dusan Writer discussed Edward Castronova’s contentions regarding the Magic Circle here and here. So, the concept is alive and well and discussed frequently in the serious gaming community. There has been a lot of solid gaming research emerging from Finland, and this conference looks very interesting. The deadline for abstracts is Jan. 15.

———

Call for Papers: Game Studies Seminar, Tampere 10-11 April, 2008

New: the seminar web site: http://breakingmagiccircle.wordpress.com

One of the classic theories of games and play was presented by Johan Huizinga in his work Homo Ludens (orig. from 1938). Huizinga wrote about the free and voluntary nature of play, how it is “an activity connected with no material interest” and how it “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space”, involving and absorbing players utterly into a separate world set off from the “ordinary” life, while being created and maintained by communities of players.

Huizinga’s view has become widely known within contemporary game studies, and it is often referred as the ‘Magic Circle’ view on games and play. This concept has also been widely criticised, as it has become increasingly obvious how various “games external” areas play an important role in digital play, and also because digital games have become more widely enmeshed with and applied into various economical, educational and other social and cultural processes and uses.

“Breaking the Magic Circle” seminar invites presentations from multiple points of view, including theoretical as well as empirically based studies into that question or expand existing conceptions regarding digital games and play. Particular fields of study might include, but are not limited to:

- pervasive, mobile or location based gaming,

- alternate reality gaming

- casual, non-immersive or coincidental forms of play,

- professional gaming,

- money gaming, betting and gambling within digital games and play.

The seminar is fourth in the annual series of game studies working paper seminars organised by the Games Research Lab in the University of Tampere. Due to the work-in-progress emphasis, we strongly encourage submitting late breaking results, working papers and/or submissions from graduate students. Early considerations from projects currently in progress are most welcome, as the purpose of the seminar is to have peer-to-peer discussions and thereby provide support in refining and improving research work in this area. After the seminar, separate consideration will be given to various options of publishing the seminar papers.

The papers to be presented will be chosen based on abstract review. Full papers are distributed prior the event to all participants, in order to facilitate discussion.

The two-day event consists of themed sessions that aim to introduce current research projects and discuss ongoing work in studies of games, play and their relation to surrounding phenomena. The seminar will be chaired by professor Frans Mäyrä (Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere). Paper commentators include researchers Markus Montola (University of Tampere), Aki Järvinen (Veikkaus) and Simon Niedenthal, Associate Professor of interaction design (Malmö University).

The seminar will be held in Tampere, Finland and will be free of charge; the number of participants will be restricted.

Important Dates

- Abstract Deadline: January 15, 2008

- Notification of Acceptance: January 30, 2008

- Full Paper deadline: March 27, 2007

- Seminar dates: April 10-11, 2007

Submission Guidelines

Abstract submissions should include maximum of 1.000 words (excluding references). Abstracts should be send to info-gamestudies{at}uta.fi as plain text only (no attachments). Guidelines for submitting a full seminar paper will be provided with the notification of acceptance.

Our aim is that everyone participating has been able to read materials submitted to the seminar, therefore the maximum length for a full paper is set to 6.000 words (excluding references). Note also that the presentations held at the seminar should also encourage discussion, instead of only repeating the information presented in the papers. Tentatively, every paper will be presented for 10 minutes and discussed for 20 minutes.

Seminar web site: http://breakingmagiccircle.wordpress.com/

Organised by: http://gamelab.uta.fi

University of Tampere / Hypermedia Laboratory / Games Research Lab