All posts by markdangerchen

Mark Chen is an independent researcher of gaming culture and spare-time game designer. He is the author of Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. Currently, he is looking into experimental and artistic games to promote exploration of moral dilemmas and human nature, researching DIY subcultures of Board Game Geek users, and generally investigating esoteric gaming practices. Mark also holds appointments at Pepperdine University, University of Washington, and University of Ontario Institute of Technology, teaching a variety of online and offline courses on game studies, game design, and games for learning. He earned a PhD in Learning Sciences/Educational Technology from the University of Washington and a BA in Studio Art from Reed College.

Gaming group at Indiana starting a Silver Hand guild

Check out the announcement.

Synthetic World News

As some of you may know, Silver Hand is the server I play on. I have three questions for these guys:

1. Why did you choose an RP server? Arguably the behavior and how people communicate in an RP server is different than the stuff you would see in a PvE or PvP server…
2. Why did you choose Alliance? Horrible decision, imho, because you’ve basically sided with the dominant culture and fed more fire into the faction imbalance. There’s more to see on the Horde side simply because we’ve had to form a tighter knit network and we lament our oppression all the time. Well… at least that’s the conventional wisdom of Horde players. We’ll see if it lives up, I suppose.

3. Why did you choose Silver Hand? One of the most crowded, lag-ridden servers available… odd choice.

new .sig

Lots of stuff happening in guild and real-life right now… How much do I post on this blog? What is the purpose of this blog? Academia or the other stuff in my life? whatever.
In other news, I finally created a new .sig! Email me if you want to see it. 😛

Met with Lisa today.

I had an awesome meeting with Lisa Galarneau today. She is working on her PhD, works for Microsoft games research, and runs socialstudiesgames.com. Really cool person.

We traded info about research and people. It would be great to make stronger connections between MS and UW. She also gave me feedback on my recent paper on coop and camaraderie in WoW. Really useful, Lisa…thanks!

It seems like everytime I feel like shit about academia and games research and my place in it, I meet someone like Lisa and come away reenergized. 🙂 But I forgot to show off my DS Lite…

Shaman and paladins are friends now.

Crap.

Rather than linking to a news site, I’ll link to the thread on my guild’s forum about Paladins and Shammies being available to both factions because I’m self-serving like that…

Nice way for Blizzard to solve the problem about certain raid bosses being easy-mode for the Alliance.  Not.

One week with the DS Lite and…

I am totally convinced this is the best gaming related thing I’ve ever bought.

The reason is the same reason why I am scared to hell about it. I can game anywhere. (well, except when it is too bright outside)

Yesterday, I played at a local park. Holy shit; I got some sun.

Got a DS Lite

Aaron is in town and wanted to get a portable gaming device for his plane trips… He decided on a DS Lite and since Ari has a DS also, I decided to get one, too.

We found out that a lot of games have a downloadable component which other DS owners can get to play certain game modes without owning the game cart. So we played a little Mario Kart, Metroid, FIFA, and Advance Wars. The Advance Wars Combat mode is fine but some sort of turn-based mode for download would have been great. The FIFA game advertises on the box that the download mode is from 2-4 players but they lie; it’s only for 2 players. Totally lame.

My first ever portable… can I afford it? We’ll see…

Zidane = stupid

I learned the word for stupid in French on Sunday! Hooray!

Zidane, the guy who made me secretly root for France in a predominantly Italian backing room by showing some crazy-ass fancy stuff in the previous games up to the final of the World Cup 2006, is stupid for doing that headbutt and getting a red card in the last game he’ll ever play (he announced his retirement before the match). What a way to end a career… and he ended up making me root for Italy, just like this woman named Lindsay.

So, maaybe what was said to him by that Italian player really, really sucked. But these guys are professional football players. Don’t they shit-talk to each other all the time?

Max was here for a week

My brother stayed with us for a week while attending a blacksmithing conference, ABANA. Some of them are more blacksmith craftsmen while others are more blacksmith artists with varying degrees of skill in each category. It was cool having him around and explaining some of the blacksmithing culture to us. Check out Max’s work!

Academics do a horrible job of supporting each other

Well, that’s a generalization, but it seems pretty clear that words of encouragement from our peers in the academe doesn’t happen often enough. I mean, there’s a dichotomy between wanting to make a name for ourselves and at the same time being really, really happy and proud of other people when they succeed. When we are really, really happy for others, we aren’t letting them know well enough, which translates to when it is our turn to be proud of our achievements, we don’t get enough encouragement from our peers.

Kurt Squire, professor at UWisc Madison, and a driving force in the new wave of video game studies, recently posted a comment about how Bill had a positive influence on his life when he was going through graduate studies and again as a new professional. I wonder if he ever told Bill that, and it makes me have to relook at myself and wonder if I’ve been letting others know how much influence they have on me. Come to think of it… Kurt, we hardly know each other but you’ve always been very helpful whenever I sought advice. Thank you.

The former dean of engineering at UW and more recently the chancellor at UCSC, Denise Denton , recently committed suicide. No one has formally said this, but it is generally understood that Bill also committed suicide. What is it about this profession? I think part of it is that we aren’t letting each other know we appreciate each other as people and as academics.

It also has been a minor shock to my world view. For some reason I had always assumed acts of suicide were typical of angsty teens or 20-somethings going through deep depression. To see two people who were nearing the end of their successful careers… I dunno… shock. Makes me wonder about what success means.

You CAN teach an old dog new tricks!

This past weekend I started playing Beyond Good and Evil on the PC. The developers did something I’ve never seen before which was to allow inverted mouse movement that forced one to have the X-axis inverted with the Y-axis. WTF?

I tried to use both ways and neither made much sense to me. I’m used to flight sims and treating the mouse like I would a joystick for camera/POV movement.

Then I looked it up on the BGaE forums and found that other people were having the same problem as me. I found someone’s blog post (snarfed.org) about it which referred to his journey for a way to invert only the Y-axis through a third-party solution. His write-up led me to email a guy named Moritz who wrote a custom mouse driver which would let a user toggle Y-axis orientation. It worked okay… sometimes didn’t seem to work… anyway, when I started playing the game again, the menus and such (especially the code entering screen for locked terminals and doors) were too hard to navigate.

That night, I was thinking about it and visualizing why I am so used to the flight-sim method of input. I pictured my head and my right hand on the back of my skull pivoting my head up and down. But that analogy doesn’t hold true for right and left because if I move my hand right, my face should point left as a result… which isn’t how I was used to moving and isn’t how joysticks work for flight sims.

This made me frown. In other words, I introduced a cognative dissonant thing into my thinking… and when I went back into the game the next morning, I was able to think of using the mouse on a 2D plane instead of embodied in my head. My task was to point the center of the screen (or the mouse cursor) up or down, left or right. (Insert philosophical questions about whether 3D game interfaces should be embodied in a 3D environment or on a 2D screen here…)

And it worked! When I went into World of Warcraft later, I found that the inverted Y-axis that I set up in that game was no longer working for me. In three days I retrained myself through mental visualization how to use a mouse to navigate a 3D environment and unlearned what I had been using (A LOT) for the past 20 years! Wow.