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.
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.
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.
