From Machinima to Norway in a Single Post

I was cruising around the net for something to cheer me up after hours of hammering out a paper when I stumbled on this machinima clip. I've seen some of these before, but this one really cracked me up and reminded me of our brief discussion of machinima earlier this semester. I did a couple searches and realized that the machinima world, like so much else we've looked at this semester, is much bigger than I had ever imagined. Complete with film festivals, contests, and even machinima stars such as Leeroy Jenkins--a character described as the "one icon of the WoW player, one movie from the game that most people have seen" at a conference at the University of Bergen.

This University of Bergen has come across my radar before. Jill Walker and Scott Rettberg both work there and it seems to consistenly be the site of cutting-edge conferences on gaming and theory of the kind we've been looking at. Why Bergen? It's in Norway. I prefer to think of all the really high-tech up-to-the-minute stuff going on in America: Silicon Valley, Stanford, places like that. Not Norway. But it seems we've been eclipsed and many of our most talented internet artists/theorists are going abroad. I wasn't able to find out too much about the Universit of Bergen since their site tends to slip into Norwegian whenever you get too deep into it, and the Wikipedia entry is startlingly brief for such a technologically advanced place. Do any of you know anything about it, does it have a specific deparment focused totally on game theory, or new media theory? Is it a mecca for the internet theorists pushed out of the halls of academia in America? Are Norwegians more cutting-edge than us?