Mark Danger Chen

Malone on Curiosity

Nice write-up on academic Thomas Malone from Only a Game

The Bowery Boys | New York City History: The history of New York City in video games

One day back from New York and I see this post.  :)

The Grumpy Gamer posted that a fan-made sequel to Zak McKracken is out!

Grumpy Gamer Kracken

I am way more excited about this than GTAIV. :p

[Edit May 2: Oh, boo... it's not in English yet.  Damn my lack of multilingualism.]

We were in New York over the weekend for a wedding ceremony for my brother Max and new sis-in-law Nancy (and Nancy’s sister Nora and her new husband Brice)! Song Gong joined us there and it was fun as hell. Photos soon.

Impossibly tiny hotel room, especially the bathroom, at the Hudson Hotel which seemed to be more of a dance club for locals than peaceful rest for guests. Crazy taxis putting those found in Crazy Taxi to shame. (Lanes have no meaning.) A subway where half the stops seemed to be under construction making for lots of walking. Really good pastrami at Katz’s Deli (better than Carnegie Deli). A really nice day of walking around Central Park. Some slices of pizza at Sacco (near our hotel recommended by our concierge and good). Good museum going at the Whitney‘s biennial. An amazing lunch at Crema, a restaurant owned by Julieta, chef and wife of a high school friend, Jafe. (BTW, this was our best meal in NYC. Go eat there!) Incredibly good scallops and honey walnut prawn at the wedding banquet (Chatham Square Restaurant) where these three French girls at our table (cousins of Brice) didn’t eat anything!. Completely soaking rain one night after visiting Jafe and Julieta the night after the wedding banquet after they couldn’t make it because Jafe sprained his ankle while trying to catch an express subway to meet up with us (ouch!). Really nice pastries at Veniero’s. Two great grocery and dry goods stores: Zabar’s and Kalustyan’s. And a whole lot more! At one point we even had a cannoli in our pocket. But we didn’t have enough time to go everywhere we wanted. Next time it’ll have to be a week… or longer.

And the week before Scott was in town, up from Portland. He, Brian, Erik, Ari, and I played lots of games: Pandemic, Zombietown, Clans, Family Business, and Race for the Galaxy. We also watched The Forbidden Kingdom, the Jackie Chan, Jet Li movie out now. Fun

86 35: manga report

A brief overview of some good manga out there.  I haven’t read any of them but now plan to!

Researchers Discover Massive Asshole In Blogosphere

from The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

1. expertise in World of Warcraft poster and paper – I’m presenting a poster at this year’s International Conference for the Learning Sciences as part of a bigger poster session on expertise. Basically, trying to argue that experts who get into the end-game of WoW have to relearn and adapt their expertise for the new endeavor of raiding. Must read more distributed cognition and adaptive expertise literature… After ICLS, which is in The Netherlands late June, I go to Madison, Wisconsin again for Games Learning Society and hopefully present the paper that the poster is based on. er… will be based on. the supposed paper that the supposed poster will be based on… Anyway, I posted the abstract for “Leet Noobs” a while back, so you can read that at least. :p
2. game review of either The Witcher or the Ace Attorney series of games – Michele Knobel mailed me via Facebook if I would be interested in submitting a game review to eLearning! She and co-conspirator Colin Lankshear are bigwigs in the new literacies line of research. Check out a book they edited called A New Literacies Sampler (the full text is available for download free!) featuring a chapter by my former advisor Jen Stone! I’m either going to do a review of The Witcher and how morally ambiguous most of the situations in the game are, which is great and what I think games need more, and contrast that with other RPGs and link it to Gee’s projected identities idea from What Video Games Have to Teach Us… OR I could write about the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney line of games (which now includes Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney) and link it to literacy and narrative. My plan is to write an outline for each of these and compare the two… maybe write and submit both eventually. The reason why this’ll take a while, I think, is that I want to link it to academic literature.. not just a game review, in other words. Aaron Chia-Yuan Hung sent me one of his that he did on Bully, and I was floored by how he linked Rockstar’s game with academic stuff on bullying and school cliques. So now I have to step it up, too…
3. some papers for a class I’m taking called Poetics of Play in Digital Role-Playing Games – This includes a summary/presentation on a book outside of the readings. Since most of the readings cover games theory from a textual or player-game perspective, I’ll either highlight TL Taylor’s Play Between Worlds or one of the case studies in Gaming Lives in the 21st Century.
4. and uh.. my dissertation proposal
5. oh and I need to finish up that engagement paper finally.
   

Charlton Heston’s Gun Taken From His Cold, Dead Hands

from The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Ah, so they were just saving it for a headline…

Seven Habits of Highly Connected People

by Stephen Downes, Guest Contributor on Lisa Neal’s blog

The points below.  Read the full entry on Lisa’s blog for descriptions.

1. Be Reactive

2. Go With The Flow

3. Connection Comes First

4. Share

5. RTFM

6. Cooperate

7. Be Yourself

An issue on education cfp late this year!

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research