Mark Danger Chen

Networked Student

Lunch Bag Art

It’s a social condition that stems from the contexts of the gamer’s life rather than a technology problem. Well… duh.

Terra Nova: It’s Not an Addiction

Also, see Rob Cover’s article on game addiction in Game Studies.

Check out Wordle, a cool website that lets create a word cloud of urls or documents!

(via Lucas)

Here’s my blog’s cloud:

So, I uploaded the graphs I’m currently messing around with, created with amCharts (using data from a MySQL database) and added to in Photoshop. Check out my graphs!

WoW Data Visualization

I finished the revision of one paper on Monday.

Now I’m working on another paper on expertise development, but for it I want to display some graphs of participation turns over time from two different nights in Molten Core. The thing is that I found a couple of cool free web apps (amCharts and TimePlot) that do pretty graphs and such so long as the data is in the right format.

So, yesterday I spent the day converting those two nights (the first time we encountered Ragnaros and the first time we killed Ragnaros three months later) to a delimited text file so that I could import them into a sql database. I created an additional table that has attributes of the participants, such as alias, gender, class, and whether that person was an official leader.

Now I want to display a graph of activity during the fight and pre-fight times. I also want to break it down by the character attributes I listed. I want to confirm whether women participate far less than men do, etc. Or maybe it is confounded by character class or whatever.

My curent problem is that I have to relearn PHP and SQL today so that the data is formatted for the graphing software. :p

Meanwhile, my updates to this site are very irregular. Read my Twitter feed for slightly more regular updates if you so care…

Well, actually, I worked for most of Wednesday, but this week has seen my work… my very pressing, time-sensitive work… put on hold while I play Fallout 3.I told Gray I wouldn’t play until the end of the month, too.. but, no, the wasteland called.

It’s a highly engrossing game. Feels a lot like Oblivion meets Half-Life meets.. well, meets Fallout, minus some of the campy humor. I miss that campy humor, though.

Replacing the humor is lots of emergent (in other words: spontaneous, unplanned, somewhat different every time you play) behavior and events in the game. It makes for a very dynamic world. But a lot of what you see is out in the big open world map. This replaced Fallout 1/2′s random encounters while traveling from poi to poi. Maybe I didn’t travel enough in this new game to find the funny easter eggs…

Anyway, I finished my first play-through about 2 hours ago. I’ll write up more in a week or so after some of my friends have had a chance to finish.

Meanwhile.. I guess I should restart my writing.  Oh, and Obama won! :)

Check out this projection map…  AOL users polled. :)

from Silicon Alley Insider:

Why Are AOL Users So Overwhelmingly Republican?

or maybe I should say that my emotions over elections are getting in the way…

Apparently, the governor’s race in WA might be going to the republican Rossi instead of dem Gregoire (even though she’s just barely ahead in polls) due to good early voting turnout in rural areas. I think the fear is that people in Seattle and other cities won’t bother voting since the country will go for Obama with or without us, not realizing that their state’s governor is at risk, too.

[Edit] What the ? Check out this completely different account saying that Gregoire leads by a wider margin than polls indicated among early voters.

In California, prop 8 looks scary as hell, too. :(

Makes it rather hard to concentrate on work and these two papers I have due later this month.

Fallout 3 gets delivered to my door this afternoon, which surely can’t be good either…