Monthly Archives: December 2008

Working on paper revision today

December 30, 2008
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I’ll post the draft when I get a chance. It was originally a paper on expertise development in WoW, submitted to Transformative Works and Culture, a new online journal. I didn’t have time to get into it as much as I wanted and turned the paper into one that highlighted ethnographic methods and how they were useful. I am now revising it, however, to be re-reframed back to being about expertise development, on the advise of the editors. Makes sense, and there’s plenty material… It’s just sort of haphazard now, though…

But anyway, I ended up cutting this paragraph out and thought it should be saved somewhere:

Part of the meaning players derived from playing World of Warcraft depended heavily on body performance. Playing successfully was not just a cognitive function but required experiential knowledge in a sort of physical sense—both the real aching, tired wrists and back after a long session of playing and the virtual movement and actions on-screen. For example, I experienced finding the “groove” for my character, hitting a particular tempo with the activation of his abilities that everything seemed to “flow” perfectly. While I don’t think “flow theory” (Csíkszentmihályi 1990) applies to most of the game, “flow” is an apt description of the perfect rhythm I was feeling and the muscle memory I was developing.

Visualization paper draft

December 16, 2008
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I’ve gotten a couple of requests for info about how I made those charts I was working on last month. Well, here’s a draft of the paper I am working on, Visualization of expert chat development in WoW (draft PDF). It describes how the charts were made in greater detail.

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: This paper describes the visualization of chat log data in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Charts were created to get a general sense of chat trends in a specific player group engaged in “high-end raiding,” a 40-person collaborative activity. These charts helped identify patterns in the frequency of chat over time during two specific gaming sessions. The sessions represented significant moments in the raid group’s history: the first time a particular monster, Ragnaros, was fought and one of the first times he was defeated. The visualization process, while useful, is only one analysis tool in a fuller ethnographic account of expertise development in World of Warcraft.

If you have specific questions, feel free to ask! And feedback is certainly welcome!

MMOG play as barrier to getting a job (rather than seen as a bonus)

December 15, 2008
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Raph Koster (MMOG developer, author of Theory of Fun for Game Design) is relatively prolific on his blog. Today he has a post about a post from a forum where the poster says a recruiter was told to avoid WoW players:

Raph’s Website » MMOG play as a barrier to getting a job

Interesting.

It’s snowing!… Also, just updated WordPress…

December 13, 2008
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Hopefully nothing breaks outside my home and hopefully nothing breaks on my online home. :)

I also changed themes… will try this one out for a while. I never liked how my old one (Stardust) made the Google Reader widget too small to read. This new theme (Fluid Blue), however, doesn’t support tags (just the old school categories). hrm…

So pretty… maps of networked learning

December 12, 2008
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Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed has a nice summary post about some other people’s posts on the future of classrooms and learning, including highlights from one by Bill Farren: Weblogg-ed » Networked Learning: Why Not?

What caught my eye was the pretty visual representations from Farren. eg:

A bunch of short game reviews

December 7, 2008
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I took a week break after finishing a paper for submission to E-Learning.

(That sounds more impressive than it is, I think… Constance S. is guest editing a games issue to come out next Spring and invited me to submit something, but what I submitted was completely out of left field, focusing on data visualization and going into some detail on how one could do the same–including SQL statements and shit like that–so I have no idea if it’ll get accepted.)

Anyway, for the past week (and honestly, while writing that paper, so more like for the past 3 weeks), I’ve been playing a lot. Actually, I think there might be a relationship to my productivity and how much I play… not inverse as would be assumed… I think when I play a lot, I write a lot… maybe… I would have to start tracking it to see if that is true. Or maybe it’s that I play many games rather than sticking with one game… restlessness or something.

But, again, anyway, for the past bit I’ve played many different games, so thought I’d post real quick impressions for some of them:


  • Fallout 3 – excellent, of course, but it could have been better. As I mentioned a month ago, some of the humor is gone, as are cool random encounters, but the world is amazingly realized and depressing. The ending sucked ass. First, it heavy-handedly forced me to sacrifice myself or another human to save the wasteland, which didn’t make any sense at all given how much Rad-X and Rad-Away I had on me, not to mention that I had a Supermutant buddy with me who is immune to radiation sickness. Then after I died, the game ended with a really lame narration without any nuance (or, actually, way too subtle a nuance) instead of detailed narration of the different factions I impacted (like in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2).
  • Tomb Raider: Underworld – For some reason I liked Legend but not Anniversary. I liked Underworld, too. Maybe too much combat in Anniversary? The Crystal Dynamics version of Lara generally moves and feels spot on.


  • Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir – the second expansion is significantly different. Mask of the Betrayer had some really good writing and dialog/narrative that started to echo Planescape good. Storm of Zehir, on the other hand, is more of an old-school, wander around an overhead map type of game. That part of it was actually pretty cool and it sort of filled my desire for that kind of game that Fallout 3 didn’t have. On top of that, the ending narration and how it dynamically changed based on my impact to the world was exactly what was missing from Fallout 3.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 user modules:
    • Harp & Crysanthemum – Amazing. Just part one is done, unfortunately, but quite well done.
    • Subtlety of Thay – Also amazing, maybe a little less so, but way, way longer, but buggy as hell with the new 1.21 version of NWN2. Wait a bit for the author to fix it. I couldn’t finish chapter 2 due to game stopping bugs. But beforehand, I was imagining this module as a TV series. It’s easily on par with any of the official campaigns.

I also just started playing Tabula Rasa, which will be free to play starting Jan 10 since they are closing the servers in Feb. :( It’s pretty good so far. I like FPS combat in a MMOG. Also, I found a quest that makes you have to decide whether to be greedy/shady or lawful. Nice. A step in the right direction.

I just got Left4Dead and Wrath of the Lich King, too. Xmas break will be fun.

But I also have to finish, finally, my dissertation proposal draft, which I’m hoping will be done by the end of the month.

December 4, 2008
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(via 10 Geekiest Graffiti – Oddee.com)

I bought the WoW expansion

December 4, 2008
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Wrath of the Lich King.

Yes, that means when I quit back in Jan, it didn’t stick. Well, it stuck until Science Magazine held a conference *in* WoW on convergence culture back in May [1, 2, 3]. I resubscribed for that, but then kept the subscription and switched servers to play with some other academics who play.

Still, it’s been very off and on. I raided with them for about two months and then stopped mid-summer. I haven’t really logged in since September.

But now, when Wrath arrives at my door, I suppose I’ll be playing for another month or so. (My current subscription expires in Feb, and I’m guessing I won’t be renewing it then.)

In other words, tearful (almost) departure from WoW was followed by (slight) regret that I deposited all my gold into the guild bank only to switch servers/guilds a few months later. And that the rest of the year has been a slow, fizzling withdrawal rather than a clear-cut quit.

Maybe the unstickyness of the game for me now is in part due to being dirt poor (I *almost* had enough gold for an epic flying mount when I gave it all to my former guild). Or maybe it’s because the game was so different than what I remember… the tokens and daily quests were so demoralizing for me…. in the sense that I was left wondering wtf I had been working for during the previous 3 years of playing.

Interestingly, Nathan Dutton, one of Mia Consalvo’s students at Ohio does research on quitting texts and WoW! I’ll have to read it and see if it’ll help me understand my ambivalence about WoW.

The website for Games Learning Society 5.0 is up

December 4, 2008
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GLS 5.0, the annual conference on games and learning held at Madison, WI, is a fun almost-unconference. Lots of new media, games, anthropology, education, learning sciences, k12 teachers, etc. folk will be there.

This time it looks like it moved up a month: June 10-12 instead of mid-July. Also, they are moving to a bigger venue and expanding it to three days instead of two.

Pre-registration ends April 30, so there’s lots of time to think about it. Submissions aren’t being accepted yet, but they will by mid-Dec, according to their website.

I’ve gone the last two years (2007 and 2008) and always make some really good connections, the highlight being LAN partying with Terra Nova.

Twitter and google reader

December 3, 2008
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I’m finding myself using Twitter more often these days, doing status updates rather than longer blog posts… and since I also just share items I find on the web using google reader, I am not really posting cool web stuff I find, either. Most of the stuff I’ve been posting lately has either been exceptionally cool in some way (completely subjective of course) or stuff that isn’t itself an RSS feed, so I can’t share it with google…

Anyway, if you want to see my status updates, you’ll have to either get a Facebook account and friend me or follow me on Twitter (username: McDanger).

And if you want to see the stuff I’m sharing through google, you’ll either have to visit this site and look at the embedded shared items gadget I have (on the right) or get a google account and start using reader yourself (and add markdangerchen as a contact). The latter method is probably more in line with my personal practices… I mean I don’t really visit other people’s blogs or news sites anymore, I just read their feeds using my preferred app, and you should too!

Long story, short: this is my blog post that semi-apologizes for lack of updates.