Mark Danger Chen

(this was my final post for a class I’m taking this quarter called Why So Serious?: Video Games as Persuasion, Politics, and Propaganda)

I’ve been reading a bit from infrastructure studies (Hunsinger, 2009) (which I didn’t know was a discipline until just last week) which posits that various cultural attitudes are normalized and made invisible by how our social world is structured. The basic idea is that we operate a certain way–customs, beliefs, values, etc.–because of how those ideas are supported by the infrastructures in place that let us do what we do. When people do some sort of activity, they operate in a complex system or network that is made up of a whole bunch of different things in relationship to each other (Latour, 2005). These things are invisible to us such that we live in a sort of hyperreality, a condition of modernity (Baudrillard, 1994) (okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but pretend hyperreality is part of modernity for bit).

An example is driving where it isn’t just a person and a car, but also the road, the material of the road, the history of engines, the geopolitical forces that allowed certain people to make those engines, the way we’ve agreed on certain rules that constrain how we drive such as stop signs, how we know that speed limit signs might or might not really be the speed limit, *other* drivers, etc. These activity systems are supported by the material and social infrastructure of that particular setting. By being dependent on the infrastructure of the setting, people who have a say in how those infrastructures are set up have political power and can present outsiders with bridges or barriers to their infrastructures. But they aren’t political in the overt sense. Instead the term I’ve been reading is subpolitical (Hunsinger, 2009). Something is subpolitical when it is subtle and hidden and its power isn’t exercised through normal overt political or governed means.

Anyway, this subpolitics-of-infrastructures angle could be used to describe games and how each game is dependent on certain ways of working (game mechanics that make up the game play) and these ways of working, or infrastructures, are rooted in historical genres of games *and* historical societal norms for how our world works. This relates to Galloway’s allegory of control (2006), to me, in that games operate a certain way and by enacting or making the narratives progress, players are embodying those ideological infrastructures. An easy example is Bioshock where the Randian themes of power and super-individualism are highlighted by the way the game is relatively linear yet feels like it is open-ended (and major spoiler: the way in which it’s discovered at the end that the player really wasn’t in control at all).

When you look at social interaction in multiplayer games, the boundary between game and non-game gets dismantled completely. For example, argumentation by various people who play WoW about how loot should be distributed follows certain patterns of behavior that reinforce structural norms of proper behavior such that certain players just aren’t as able to successfully become expert players. Expertise for WoW is determined by certain groups of players (and the game devs) who value specific ways of playing (and arguing) over others.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that, yes, all games are political, or at least subpolitical, in that they all reflect certain infrastructures that dictate how things work in those settings.

The tricky question, of course, is the one that kept coming up in class. Ok, games are political, but do they successfully convey whatever message was intended? This is kind of blown apart, though, in that many games weren’t intended to be overtly or even subtly political. Yet, the subpolitical nature of game infrastructures (of even overtly political games) means that ultimately they normalize certain ways of being or acting. Game devs operate within the bounds of their infrastructures and produce games reflecting those structures.

What does this mean, though? I mean, many of us came away from the different games having taken different messages from the games. This complicates the idea that a game has *a* message. Subjective interpretation turns the modernity associated with invisible infrastructures into post-modernity.

• Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation.
• Galloway, A. (2006). Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture.
• Hunsinger, J. (2009). Introducing learning infrastructures: Invisibility, context, and governance. Learning Inquiry, 3(3), 111-114. http://www.springerlink.com/content/61uv3175wt2h6574/
• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social.

The Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems is holding their annual summer institute at Skamania Lodge this year. Since I’ve been leaning heavily towards actor-network theory, distributed cognition, and mangle of practice ways of looking at my data, and since it’s so close, I decided to apply. Here’s my research summary I wrote for the application:

Contributions to the Scientific Understandings of Sociotechnical Systems

I research the ecology of gaming and new media (Salen, 2008, Stevens, Satwitcz, & McCarthy, 2008). My dissertation focuses on ethnographic accounts of online gaming practice, documenting expertise development, teamwork, and collaboration in a World of Warcraft player group (Chen, 2009). Using actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), this work treats the group as a learning network that successfully enrolled various human and nonhuman resources to thrive in a high-stakes joint-task environment (Taylor, 2009). I find using an analytical lens that recognizes the mangle of gaming (Steinkuehler, 2006, Pickering, 1993) helps to see that distinctions between subject-object or player-game don’t adequately describe in-action learning across settings and time. Rather, a player group’s expertise trajectory is always collaborative and social, always contentious, and always drawing on both micro- and macro-level sociomaterial (Orlikowski, 2007) resources in complex, messy gaming spaces. Analyses of informal learning arrangements using a socio-technical lens are important for science and technology studies, learning sciences, and new media scholars as specific examples of the distributed nature of learning that may lead to a broader conception of everyday practice and learning with new media.

I combine this object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2009) with other interdisciplinary ways of describing learning arrangements including how people position and are positioned into specific roles and relationships (Holland & Leander, 2004) across timescales (Lemke, 2000) in interdiscursive moments (Silverstein, 2007).

I hope to continue using these ideas to describe learning across all of life’s myriad settings (NRC, 2009). As I am just finishing my dissertation this year, I feel like my options are wide open. Possible future areas of study include continued work in online and offline gaming practices in different player communities to expanded sites of study. For example, one research interest I have is to study software and media piracy networks and the learning and expertise development within those networks.

References

• Bogost, I. (2009). What is object-oriented ontology? Retrieved February 25, 2010, from: http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml
• Chen, M. (2009). Communication, coordination, and camaraderie in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 4(1), 47-73.
• Holland, D., & Leander, K. (2004). Ethnographic studies of positioning and subjectivity: An introduction. Ethos, 32(2), 127–139.
• Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 273-290.
• National Research Council. (2009). Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. Committee on Learning Science in Informal Environments. P. Bell, B. Lewenstein, A. W. Shouse, & M. A. Feder (Eds.). Board on Science Education, Center for Education, Division of Behavior and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
• Orlikowski, W. J. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organization Studies, 28(9), 1435-1448.
• Pickering, A. (1993). The mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science. American Journal of Sociology, 99(3), 559-589.
• Salen, K. (2008). Toward an ecology of gaming. In The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (1–17). USA: The MIT Press.
• Silverstein, M. (2007). Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 6-22.
• Steinkuehler, C. A. (2006). The mangle of play. Games and Culture, 1(3), 199-213.
• Stevens, R., Satwicz, T., & McCarthy, L. (2008). In-game, in-room, in-world: Reconnecting video game play to the rest of kids’ lives. In K. Salen (Ed.), The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (41-66). USA: The MIT Press.
• Taylor, T. L. (2009). The assemblage of play. Games and Culture, 4(4). 331-339.

DML Conference session abstracts and program:
http://dmlcentral.net/conference/conference-program

Twitter hashtag: #dml2010

The conference’s etherpad (collaborative notes that some of us took–thanks Jeremy!) saved as a PDF:
dml2010 etherpad

Jenny Ryan’s ( (g)rad student at UCSD) dml2010 bookmarks: http://delicious.com/tunabananas/dml2010

Kelly Page’s (marketing prof in the UK and really cool person) blog Case Insights:
http://caseinsights.com/

Sheryl Grant’s (Director of Social Networking for the DML Competition) blog posts at HASTAC:
https://www.hastac.org/users/slgrant

Sara Grimes’s (graduating this year from SFU and co-presenter with me!) blog Gamine Expedition:
http://gamineexpedition.blogspot.com/

Kenneth Lim’s (from LSL, NIE, NTU, where I had that interview a couple of weeks ago, and we didn’t meet up! :( ) blog voyeurism:
http://voyager.blogs.com/voyeurism/

Cassidy Cody’s (PhD student at Northwestern) google doc notes:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhs7n727_4cgcpgzfz

We were teh awesome!!!!!1111!!!!

We arranged the chairs haphazardly so that the audience had to sort of figure out where to sit and rearrange their space, but unfortunately, most of them ended up just picking seats that looked the most comfy (since half the seats were plastic fold-ups) and we weren’t smart enough to mix up the location of the types of chairs.

We put up signs demarcating where the magic circle of our presentation began.

The prezi worked pretty well with only a couple of “uh.. how do I get back to that previous bit?” moments, mostly because we forgot to set the pathing right for Moses’s bit. It’s not as pretty as I think it could be but there’s a mangle of collaborative presentation theme to everything we did, so whatever… :)

We each introduced ourselves, then I did a 5 min intro of the mangle, followed by 2 minute fire hose presentations (Ben, Moses, me, Sarah, Sara) (and we went over 2 minutes pretty consistently but that was fine since the constraint made us conscious of it so it worked), then a brief summary of common themes, and finally open room discussion that went really, really well. Forgot to add another audience constraint of having anyone who wanted to ask a question have to go through an intermediary but we didn’t need it since the conversation and participation was good. Hillary said that it was because we set the tone well from the get-go as informal and conversational. Lisa Nakamura said it was the most fun session at the conference! wooooot!

The other sessions I went to today were also great. I’ll write about them if I get a chance, but off to go eat dinner right now! Maybe the zoo or seaworld tomorrow!

I created a proper backchannel for the conference at todaysmeet, but the site went down after a couple of hours or so. (Not sure exactly when it went down, but Debbie Fields and Moses told me it wasn’t working about two hours after I created the channel.) I tweeted about it being down (since I originally also tweeted about it being up) and @buridan replied that I should check out etherpad. Etherpad is great!

Down at the bottom right is an IM client which works like todaysmeet does. But the main portion of etherpad’s real estate is on the left showing a google doc-like collaborative writing space. Some of us have been using it to take notes and write commentary about the conference sessions.

Since we just published the url openly, we got some random person named “badass” who came in and defaced our pad, but Jeremy cleaned it up. (I kinda wonder if badass is Alice Robison who plans on using a backchannel during her session tomorrow and was asking me about etherpad…)

Go check out the pad if you want to read up on the sessions I went to today.

http://etherpad.com/eSPRnZTy9d

Or just check out this dinner:

After dinner, we met up with Sarah Walter who flew in this evening and Sara Grimes via skype, since she was at her sodo hotel, and went over our presentation that we’re giving tomorrow about the mangle of play.

Here’s our original abstract:

The mangle of play: Game challenges and player workarounds
Participants: Mark Chen (University of Washington), Ben DeVane (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Sara M. Grimes (Simon Fraser University), Sarah E. Walter (Stanford University), Moses Wolfenstein (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Diverse forms of participation in gaming often manifest as subversive resistance to prescribed forms of play. Recent research highlighting the variety of in and out-of-game practices players employ in negotiating obstacles includes looking at modding and cheating practices (Postigo, 2008, Consalvo, 2007) to knowledge sharing in online forums (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008). Gaming, as exemplified by these studies, consists of acts of accommodation and resistance in a complex “mangle of play” (Steinkuehler, 2006), where players appropriate and orchestrate distributed networks of resources to accomplish their gaming goals. In this session, we will describe how particular gamers pushed at or circumvented obstacles imposed by different game spaces.  We will discuss how leadership was negotiated in World of Warcraft (WoW), how a particular WoW group enrolled a mod to troubleshoot failures, the experience of newcomers to a stable gaming group in the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), how young children overcame design limitations in Club Penguin and BarbieGirls, and how players resisted the prescribed and normative play-based activity structures in Civilization III. Following our descriptions will be a whole-room discussion on obstacles and their workarounds to gaming.

We had some crazy ideas about how we could involve the audience tomorrow and/or how we could demonstrate the resistance/accommodation dialectic that Pickering was referring to with his original “mangle of practice” idea. I think tomorrow will be great, but charades presentations would have been even awesomer. :)

Also, I’ve been enjoying meeting new people or people I haven’t seen in a while, like Lisa Nakamura who is great, and meeting people who I first met through Facebook and Twitter, such as Hillary @ludditeatheart, Evonne @amoration, Flourish @flourish, and Jenny @tunabananas :)

Met up with Moses Wolfenstein, Ben DeVane, and Sean Duncan and hung out with them in their room overlooking the beach, later at a cafe after walking a bit, then back in their room overlooking the beach. Have I mentioned the beach? Here’s a shot of not the beach but still a nice view from the cafe we went to:

We then caught a shuttle up to the conference registration, opening talk by Craig Watkins, and then after talk reception.

Two most memorable things from the opening were:

1. Henry Jenkins framed participatory culture as different than web 2.0, saying that he sometimes says that participatory culture started as early as web -10 back in the 1860s/70s when youth were creating their own activists news networks and even used the acronym “LOL!”
2. Craig Watkins describing the shift from MySpace to Facebook in just 2 or 3 years among black and latino youth and how many of them engage with the web through their mobile devices. That the digital divide is not about access anymore but more about a participation in different arenas sort of divide.

When Henry was doing his thing he mentioned that he likes to tweet now and is sometimes frustrated with the 155 character limitation, likening it to how the youth back in web -10 had to individually set the type for their newsprints. I immediately tweeted that Henry must be part of some twitter elite and has access to 155 characters since everyone else gets 140. I don’t think anyone got that joke… but then I noticed that starting about 5 minutes in, we had about half a dozen people tweeting the exact same salient points from both Henry and Craig, so I decided to stop tweeting… I think Ian Bogost complained about the #dml2010 spam. :)

Another hella funny thing was hearing about how @dthickey’s cell phone was stolen by a sea gull *while* he was talking with his wife! She heard him screaming profanities, wings flapping, and then a seal bark, so Dan spent 3 hours where the seals were searching for his phone… eventually bought a Droid to replace it…

During the reception, I kept seeing people I know but didn’t get a chance to really talk or say hi, and I also kept seeing people who I swear I’ve seen somewhere else, possibly at IR10. I really ought to introduce myself if we’re gonna keep bumping into each other…

Noted that a lot of LIFE people are here: Roy Pea, Brigid Barron, Reed Stevens, Veronique Mertl, Robb Lindgren, Sarah Walter (though, she’s arriving tomorrow). It feels kind of odd seeing one part of my academic life starting to collide with another.

Also excited that Lisa Nakamura recognized me and said hi. And I love how almost the first thing she said was why isn’t anyone looking at various Asian populations who are just as disproportionately represented socioeconomically as blacks and latinos. (It’s quite true in Seattle…) Every time I see Lisa, I try to namedrop Reed College and Beth Kolko (though I didn’t get a chance to this time) because I wonder if she remembers me, so it’s great to be recognized without prompting. Also, I’ve had dinner with her husband in Denmark, and I could probably namedrop Julian. :)

Anyway, Moses and I ducked out from the reception early to go get sandwiches from Porter’s Pub.

I arrived yesterday at San Diego / La Jolla for MacArthur Foundation’s first annual (Isn’t it dangerous to announce it’s annual when there haven’t been any yet?) Digital Media and Learning Conference.

I’m staying at a pretty swanky place (unexpectedly since I assumed it was just another cookie-cutter hotel), the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club. Yesterday, I walked along a beach, watched some surfboarding, went swimming, did a horrible walk along Torrey Pines, a busy street to Pearl St. (should have taken a side road), met up with George and Jen, ate at Sammy’s, noticed George and I were the only non-white people in the whole place (and upon reflection the only non-whites I’ve seen have been servers or receptionists or whatever, not tourists or residents), went grocery shopping then had hot chocolate and ice cream while watching the Olympics with G and J, and slept really well.

I’ve started following the twitter hashtag for the conf (#dml2010) and am already starting to meet people that way. :)

AAAS is in San Diego right now, too, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to swing by to meet up with people there… I’ve got a golf course and/or an aquarium and/or a beach and/or a massage and/or meet ups to do. :) Oh, and there’s work, too… laptop on a beach isn’t so bad, I suppose.

So, I got an email from the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education in Singapore about a Research Scientist position in New Media that I applied for. They want a Skype interview next week! While that is awesome, it’s also complicated. They want me to prepare a 15 minute presentation to launch the interview (which I’m taking as more a conversation to get to know each other). I hadn’t yet created a job talk, so a couple of days ago I started working on one.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do a powerpoint slideshow. A couple of weeks ago, while brainstorming with ESTG different ways for how a conference session could be more participatory, Phil quickly showed me prezi.com. (The conference session mentioned is the one I’m in with Moses Wolfenstein, Ben DeVane, Sara Grimes, and Sarah Walter at the Digital Media and Learning conf later this month!)

Here’s my prezi so far:

What’s cool about prezi is that it isn’t as linear as powerpoint can be. You can zoom in and out of points of interest, which works really well, since it lets one load a presentation with a ton of info that can be dived into or not, depending on the circumstances of the presenting. I think what I’m going to try to do is fill my prezi in as much as possible but then just cover the high-level stuff in 15 minutes. At the same time, I’ll share the url with the search committee and they can explore different avenues of my research independently of me giving the presentation. What’d be cool is if people could comment with a live twitter feed or somesuch at the same time as a presentation… or maybe non-live comments a la YouTube.

It’s kind of a clusterf*ck isn’t it? A crapshoot, a messy affair, a disorganized, archaic, completely in-line with academic processes affair.

First, there’s the fact that the jobs get posted a year in advance, so PhD students are applying for positions by hyping up their dissertations before the dissertations are actually finished. If this goes well, they may give job talks about aspects of their work, which seems slightly bizarre since, again, the dissertations aren’t quite all done, yet, so preparing and writing about them takes away from actually finishing them.

Second, though I say the jobs are all posted a year in advance, it’s actually much more messy than that. Some places post in August, some in October, job postings just keep trickling in. It’s almost February, and I’m still applying to new postings. This causes all sorts of anxiety. What if a place wants to interview me or, worse, wants me to make a decision before I hear back from another place? The reaction I tend to get is, “eh. That’s how it is.” Why are we settling for this?? We live in an age where simple technological tools could be used to streamline and aggregate large chunks of data. There ought to be a better way for jobs to get announced.

Third, some postings are formalities. The search committee already knows who they’re going to hire. What a waste of time for people thinking they have a chance.

Fourth, some postings are canceled a few weeks or months later. Budget cuts suck.

Fifth, not all the apps want the same things. Well, this is fine since I’m tailoring each letter anyway, but sometimes vague terms are used for what the app materials include. What’s the difference between “evidence of teaching effectiveness” and a “teaching statement?”

Sixth, letters of recommendation are bizarre things, too. Two of my letter writers asked me to write the first draft of the letter. Presumably they go in and add their tweaks, etc. but damn.. it is odd writing about yourself pretending to be your prof, made more complicated when the prof has an existing relationship with whomever is on the search committee. Do I write in a formal voice or be slightly less formal than usual since they know each other?

Seventh, oh my god, I pity anyone who is also applying to non-academic jobs. I recently applied to a job at Google and I *think* my apps were okay, but I’m so embedded in academia, it’s hard for me to judge whether the cover letter or resume was appropriate.

Eighth, though I prob should have made this the first thing, there’s no one place where jobs get posted. I basically have five different sources: The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Higher Ed Jobs, and three mailing lists. Hearing about post-doc positions is even worse.

Ninth, not all places let you know your status in the process. I got a rejection letter from one place, a rejection email from another, a rejection by word of mouth rumor from yet another. I was told I was on the short list at one place months ago and nothing since then. It’s all sort of varied. I assume I was rejected by other places and maybe am in the running for others that I just don’t know about.

Lastly, all this obfuscation is made worse when you consider that many places are still influenced heavily by sponsorship and social networks. Who you know and how well you can get in people’s faces matters a hell of a lot.

As I walk pass the bicycles locked near the law building, I keep a look out for a hybrid with a suspension stem. My old bike before moving up to Seattle for graduate school (back in 2003) had the same suspension stem, and it was of note because they’re pretty rare. The bike I remember was the one I used while bicycling across the country 10 years ago with my brother. (I plan on republishing our blog with commentary over this summer so that each entry from our bike trip is posted exactly 10 years later.) I put it together myself, bought all the components separately, etc. Alas, that bike got stolen about two weeks before we moved up here. :(

When I first started school again, I took a class in museology at the Burke Museum. On the way back from there to Miller Hall, where the college of ed lives, is the then new law building and the then new bike racks. That first year, that bike with the suspension stem was always there. I don’t really expect to see it ever again, but… every time I walk past those racks, I look for that bike and wonder who the owner was.