Mark Danger Chen

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In the UK, at least.  That happened to me when I downloaded Oblivion last year.  I thought it would be the same game as the screenshots (it wasn’t) and what I got could barely run.

Values At Play » Blog Archive » 2008 Grassroots Media Conference

Hmmm….

my blog post about Lee-hom being in Lust, Caution is getting more comments than any other post? :)

I’m reading George Lipsitz’s book The possessive investment of whiteness right now.  Basically, institutionalized public policy and individual prejudices create a system or societal norm that privileges whites in the U.S. Here’s a quote:

The belief among young whites that racist things happened in the distant past and that it is unfair to hold contemporary whites accountable for them illuminates broader currents in our culture. These young people associate black grievances solely with slavery, and they express irritation at what they perceive as efforts to make them feel guilty or unduly privileged because of things that they did not do personally. They feel innocent individually and cannot conceive of a collective responsibility for collective wrongs. The claim that one’s own family did not own any slaves is intended to end the discussion. It is almost never followed by proposals to find the white families whose ancestors did own slaves, to track them down and make them pay reparations. The disavowal of responsibility for slavery never acknowledges how the existence of slavery and the exploitation of black labor after emancipation created opportunities which penalized blacks and benefited whites who did not own slaves. Rather, it seems to hold that, because not all white people owned slaves, no white people can be held accountable or inconvenienced by the legacy of slavery. This argument does not address the long histories and contemporary realities of segregation, racialized social policies, urban renewal, or the revived racism of contemporary neoconservatism. On the contrary, as Christopher Fisher recognized in his remarks, articulation of one’s own imagined discomfort with being “picked on” and “blamed” for slavery is the real injury, one that in his mind gave him good reason to bomb homes, deface synagogues, and plot to kill black people.

Unfortunately for our society, these young whites accurately reflect the logic of the language of liberal individualism and its ideological predispositions in discussions of race. In their apparent ignorance of the disciplined, systemic, and collective group activity that has structured white identities in U.S. history, they reflect the dominant views in their society… (21)

Group interests are not monolithic, and aggregate figures can obscure serious differences within racial groups. All whites do not benefit from the possessive investment in whiteness in precisely the same ways; the experiences of members of minority groups are not interchangeable. But the possessive investment in whiteness always affects individual and collective life chances and opportunities. Even in cases where minority groups secure political and economic power through collective mobilization, the terms and conditions of their collectivity and the logic of group solidarity are always influenced and intensified by the absolute value of whiteness in U.S. politics, economics, and culture. (22)

I have to think about this more.

Phil Bell’s crew, the Everyday Science and Technology Group (a research group at UW composed of Phil’s PhD students and a post-doc), and some other people also associated with the LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) submitted a poster session idea about everyday expertise to the International Conference of the Learning Sciences 2008 (Netherlands, June 24-28).

One of the posters features my work with World of Warcraft raid groups. Anyway, the session was accepted and a final version of the session description, including abstracts for the various posters, is being edited right now. The updated abstract I turned in to the group for editing is below:

Leet noobs: Expert World of Warcraft players relearning and adapting expertise in new contexts

World of Warcraft (WoW), like many other massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), can actually be seen as two different games. The first is the journey of exploring the game world and advancing the abilities of one’s character or avatar either through solo play or in groups of up to five players. This acts as a proving grounds or gateway for the second stage of WoW—joining a raid group of up to 40 players to kill all the monsters in “high-end” or “endgame” dungeons for the treasures they guard. Within a larger online games ethnography (Chen, in review) similar to others that describe player practice and learning (Steinkuehler, 2007, and Taylor, 2006), I have found that invitation to join an end-game group is contingent on a player’s reputation as an expert of WoW’s underlying mechanics and rules. It is also necessary, however, to have proven oneself as someone who works well with others and understands his or her particular role in a team. Upon joining a raid group, players soon find that the conditions that determine expertise have changed because the activities and player practices have changed to fit the local context, which includes raid-specific tactics and new communication norms. It becomes clear that expertise is specialized for individual roles, depending on character type, and that to succeed as a raid group, players need to draw on their distributed expertise and knowledge (Hutchins, 1995), each doing their part while trusting others to do the same, so that collectively they act as a coordinated whole. Yet the actual skills and abilities an individual player uses are reassessed for how well they complement other players’ resources. Thus, once-expert players become novices or “noobs” to relearn expert or “leet” gameplay, yet they are not true novices because they already have a good understanding of the game system. Rather, they are leet noobs who must realign and adapt their expertise for new social structures and norms that emerge above the underlying game through joint venture. This poster highlights examples of learning individual expertise as well as new distributed expertise needed for raid group success.

Chen, M. (in review). Communication, coordination, and camaraderie in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Steinkuehler, C. (2007). Massively multiplayer online gaming as a constellation of literacy practices. eLearning, 4(3), 297-318.
Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. The MIT Press.

That’s 2AM, thank you very much. :P

Sometimes I get insomnia and can’t fall back asleep. Usually, I can get some work done, but last night all I did was play a PC version of HeroQuest and then some Peggle that came with The Orange Box.

I found HeroQuest through a geeklist on BoardGameGeek.com that features computer versions of boardgames. HeroQuest is an old Games Workshop/Milton Bradley game. The PC port is still in beta and is made by a guy named Gerwin Broers, who’s really good at illustration, too. :)

There certainly are a lot of games on the geeklist that deserve some trial. Space Hulk is there in a couple of different ports. This is nice because a friend and I were just talking about Space Hulk recently. Other gems include Puerto Rico, San Juan, and Ra. Man, the list just goes on!

Peggle, by PopCap, the same people who made Bejeweled, is very addicting. I wanted to try it out because it received best puzzle game of 2007 from Games for Windows magazine.

On Feb 6 and 13, I guest presented/led Dixie Massey’s literacy materials for teachers class. She’s covering a different medium each week including comic books, anime, blogs, etc. and GAMES!

Anyway, I was invited to lead the games bit. I took the opportunity to push a specific agenda (of course, don’t we all push specific agendas, whether implicit or explicit?) and that was of highlighting “new literacy studies” or “multiliteracies” approach to games culture (see the New London Group). This was instead of just presenting academic stuff about how games can be used in literacy instruction.

Multiliteracies basically is a particular kind of stance about what it means to be literate, that being literate means being literate in *something*, whether it’s traditional textbooks or basketball or whatever, and that means being a partcipant in a particular sociocultural domain with its own practices and ways of being/social norms.

The emphasis is that meaning is derived through the cultural life of the community. This means that issues brought up about games (violence, addiction, etc.) really depends on the localized social situation. Those terms are socially defined. Whether a game is harmful or helpful depends.

One example is Barry Joseph’s anecdote about Grand Theft Auto in the classroom. The student in question recognizes GTA as a game system and figured out how to work the system. It wasn’t “violence” that he was doing… or not real meaningful violence, anyway.

So anyway, I tried to present this idea of games-as-culture to Dixie’s class but I think maybe it was a hard sell to a class full of teachers who probably were interested in specific games they could use for literacy instruction. I wanted to emphasize that to be critically literate requires one to be literate first. You can’t use or criticize a movie without seeing it first (no matter how much people try), and you can’t criticize games without playing some and understanding gaming culture first.

It *was* fun, though! And we ended up playing a lot of games. The first week we read a chapter from Gee’s What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy book, the one about identity play in the game Arcanum. Then we played Arcanum and some web games or other games during the week and reflected during the second session.  Time for reflection is necessary for critical literacy, but it’s a skill that doesn’t just happen…

If interested, here’s the handout on games literacy I used the first week and the slideshow, also on games literacy, I used the following week.

I hadn’t realized they had gone away until just now while I was editing the page about my WoW paper…  Stupid upgrading templates breaking comments…

Here’s an update on some of what I’m thinking in addition to my general ethnography/description of distributed cognition and teamwork. Part of this post is tweaked from some correspondence I’m having with Michele Knobel on Facebook. :p Most of this is a jumble of ideas, but I figure it would help if I wrote it down. And why not share it?

Last year I was reading a lot more philosophy and history of education than I usually do, esp. with regards to social justice, dominant culture, inequalities of access and participation, etc. So, when I read Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations, that stuff was on my mind. I was also thinking about Raph Koster (A Theory of Fun) and Stephen Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You) and how their whole point is about pattern recognition. Part of learning is recognizing patterns. For Koster, gamers begin to see the underlying mechanics of games. For Johnson, current media genres and conventions are making us smarter than old forms. As in, shows like CSI make us guess what is going on with the detectives rather than explicitly state what’s going on for the benefit of the audience, so we have to work our brains and figure out the patterns.

So, anyway, I was thinking about systems thinking, which essentially necessitates a form of pattern recognition. To think about a system, you have to recognize the system. Specifically, with regards to social contexts, people can learn to see the larger system that they are in (“sense of self” I think it’s called) and see that their actions have consequences and that other actors in the network (I guess this relates to actor-network theory and activity theory, too) affect them.

So, Bogost writes about unit operations, that what’s important for a literary form and for games are the parts of the system that operate on each other. His emphasis is on the interaction between the parts. These parts can be thought of as genre conventions… kinda. And I was thinking that games don’t exist without a player and players don’t exist without a social context. Players must enact the game actions and assume the identity or point of view of the game actions. And they do this as part of a larger cultural practice. Thus the player-game cyborg could be thought of as a unit in a larger social system.

Personally, at least, I can use the idea of unit operations or the idea of me being an actor in a network or whatever to evaluate my actions and its affects on others. Think of The Sims‘ Needs meters maybe, except extend the meters to social things instead of just individual things. In other words, the framework might enable me and others to metacognate about our roles in society.

Games serve two purposes here. On the one hand, specifically designed games could help people learn ethics through role-playing specific actor roles or unit operations. On the other hand, games in general can help train people to see patterns of a system and possibly transfer that skill to everyday life and impose that way of seeing things to themselves within a system. To scaffold this, I wish RPGs would better emphasize consequences to player actions. Also, RPGs use XP bars and such; we could try considering social skills and actions/motives as something you could measure and gain experience in.

I also read a paper by Knobel and Lankshear’s about Internet memes and thought that maybe it would be possible to relate memes to genre conventions/units. Maybe they don’t relate, but maybe the idea of memes can be used to promote students critical thinking and consumption/production within a larger system. Or maybe all that is really needed for all of these things is some level of reflection.

Does that make sense?

Some friends of mine from high school and I (and now some more friends from college, work, etc.) play a game called The Informer. Basically, it’s like the Dictionary game except that instead of writing fake definitions for words we write fake continuations of prose. We call it The Informer because it was originally played using the book by that same title by Liam O’Flaherty featuring the craziest non-sequiter, detective noir crap ever. Anyway, I ran a round of The Informer recently and used the Sam & Max games as the text. You can see the round and results on the Sam & Max Informer round page I created.

Incidentally, the compiled volume of Steve Purcell’s Sam & Max comic books is finally in reprint, called Surfin’ the Highway. The last time I read any of them was back in high school, about 18 years ago! I think my brother might still have some original issues lying around. He should sell em! Our comic book obsession finally worth something!