A professor who slays orcs for a living

Frans Mäyrä is about to take up a hypermedia chair at Tampere University

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By Eeva Eronen
     
      On the window-sill in the professor's office there is a metre-long sword. "It's made of latex and it is a dragon-sword", explains the weapon's owner, Frans Mäyrä.
      The sword is a reminder of the live role-playing games hobby enjoyed by this academic specialising in digital media, games, and fantasy worlds, though it is a hobby he has little time to indulge these days.
      "And it might be all for the best that I have something here by way of protection", grins Mäyrä, who has recently been appointed the new Professor of Hypermedia at Tampere University, specialising in digital culture and game studies.
     
The post was formally created last spring, but the title itself is familiar to Mäyrä, since he has held down the positions of research director and professor at the university's Hypermedia Laboratory since 2002.
      The new position is nevertheless symbolically significant as a mark of the establishment of digital culture and game studies in the university world.
     
What all this means is that Mäyrä studies - and plays - computer games for a living.
      The road to what must sound like every little boy's dream occupation began with - you guessed it - adventures on that old desktop warhorse, the Commodore 64.
      This legendary machine from 1982, with its mighty 64kB of RAM, was used by Mäyrä for quite some time, since the young undergraduate student also employed it to write his essays after he enrolled at the University of Tampere in 1985, reading cultural and literary studies.
      Mäyrä developed an enthusiasm for the fledgling Internet at the end of that decade, and this sparked off an accelerating cycle of testing and purchase of new and faster modems, browsers, and operating systems that gradually caused his interests to slip more and more towards gaming and digital culture.
     
The actual change of discipline came in 2001, by which time Mäyrä had already collected his Ph.D doctorate. In that year he moved over to the Hypermedia Laboratory, exploring interactive media. The first game studies at the unit had been carried out in the previous year.
      Since that time, Nordic game research has come quite a long way. Some evidence of this can be had from the fact that when the international Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) was founded in 2002, it was on Mäyrä's initiative. He has also served as the DiGRA President since its foundation.
     
The professor himself is most attracted to expansive adventure games played as role-playing exercises, though he complains that these days he seldom has time for much more than playing as part of his work.
      Last year, when he began to play the world's most popular multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (more commonly known among devotees as WoW), Mäyrä says that quite often he would spend a further eight hours at the computer at home in addition to his working day.
      WoW is a real-time strategy wargame, in which the millions of online players control characters of the fantasy world - orcs, elves, dwarves, humans, trolls, and others too numerous to mention - that fight against one another.
      Mäyrä's avatars were a paladin (or warrior-priest) and a dwarf, who learnt the skills of a blacksmith during the game.
      Now the poor dwarf has been almost completely neglected. "But I still try to do a bit of playing every week", says Mäyrä.
     
Game studies can be divided into three separate strains: the games themselves, the way they are designed, and the players who play them. Research in this last category has sought to ascertain what sort of dimensions are involved in playing games.
      Mäyrä is interested, for example, in the ways in which players use their creativity and imagination. A player can for a start make completely different interpretations and choose quite different solutions from those the game's compiler had in mind.
     
Digital games blur the roles of producer and consumer, Mäyrä asserts.
      He takes a simple example from the familiar world of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Frodo and his companions always take a specific turning at the crossroads on a certain page as the reader reads the novels.
      "But in the gaming world the player can naturally turn in a quite different direction and explore what there is to be found there."
     
In his view, games offer an excellent escape from the everyday. And they do not need to serve any other useful purpose than that.
      "After satisfying the basic needs, humans start to do something that is ultimately of no use to them. Games are just that, and what people get out of them are experiences that are not possible in the world around them."
      In addition, role-playing games are pronouncedly social affairs, argues Mäyrä. The people who play them often have to struggle together in order to achieve shared goals.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 31.10.2006


Links:
  Frans Mäyrä´s homepage
  University of Tampere Hypermedia Laboratory

EEVA ERONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
eeva.eronen@hs.fi