{"id":310,"date":"2012-10-30T09:49:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T09:49:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/?p=310"},"modified":"2012-10-30T09:49:32","modified_gmt":"2012-10-30T09:49:32","slug":"finland-has-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/finland-has-it-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Finland has it all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to Tampere to act as an opponent in a doctoral defence. Coming from the UK, where a PhD viva involves being asked difficult questions for a hour (if you&#8217;re lucky) followed by a quick pint (if you&#8217;re very lucky) the formality of a public viva, followed by a cake ceremony, followed by an evening banquet, was a bit intimidating, but not unwelcome. I shall certainly be trying to initiate the post-viva cake ceremony here.<\/p>\n<p>I was invited to oppose the <a href=\"http:\/\/acta.uta.fi\/english\/teos.php?id=1000162\" target=\"_blank\">doctoral thesis<\/a> of <a href=\"http:\/\/jiituomas.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">J. Tuomas Harviainen<\/a>, which was based around an hermeneutic analysis of live action role play (LARP) from an information systems perspective. I was also pleased to meet <a href=\"http:\/\/pervasivegames.wordpress.com\/authors\/\" target=\"_blank\">Markus Montola<\/a>, who successfully defended his <a href=\"http:\/\/acta.uta.fi\/english\/teos.php?id=1000162\" target=\"_blank\">doctoral thesis<\/a> a few weeks before, in the area of role-play and pervasive gaming (Markus is also an author of <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.co.uk\/books\/about\/Pervasive_Games.html?id=Yk4CCx6UyIIC&amp;redir_esc=y\" target=\"_blank\">Pervasive Games: Theory and Design<\/a>, which &#8211; to my shame &#8211; has sat, unread, on my bookshelf for the last year).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s good to see some really sound and robust research and analysis in a neglected area of gaming, and both of these theses are well worth a read. I think that Finland is definitely somewhere to watch for interesting further developments in this area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to Tampere to act as an opponent in a doctoral defence. Coming from the UK, where a PhD viva involves being asked difficult questions for a hour (if&#8230;<br \/><a class=\"read-more-button\" href=\"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/finland-has-it-all\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources","category-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p71sY0-50","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}