Academia

My talks/chats at Games Learning Society 7

June 12, 2011
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I’ll be in three sessions next week at Games Learning Society conference next week.

Two of them are fireside chats with others:

The third is a Hall of Fail presentation about a research project I was part of 7 years ago! When I first started graduate school, I was learning tons about games and learning, games studies, and games research. One of the best things the group I was with was trying to do was create a model of engagement in games. We came up with a great model, informed by many disciplines, but we got hung up on validating the model. So the presentation is basically about the methodological failure my group encountered while attempting to validate the model.

Full DRAFT paper here. Abstract below the break. Slides below:

Modeling NOT measuring engagement

View more presentations from Mark Chen.

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Presenting at Keywords for Video Game Studies Colloquium run by the Critical Gaming Project!

May 21, 2011
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A really, really short talk:

The Mangle of Gaming to Socially Create Meaningful Experiences

I’ll fill in the details later today tomorrow (which at the time of this edit is today). :)

My talk started a session on gamification during the Keywords for Video Game Studies year-end colloquium.

That turned out to be good, since I got a chance to start with a super quick definition of gamification before moving into what worries me about it. Here’s the bullet list of what I talked about (with more detail added here than what I could cover in 5 minutes):

  • Gamification is basically a way of providing incentives for people to engage in some sort of designed activity.
    • Most ways of gamifying something does so by giving people rewards, achievements, badges, etc. for particular events in that activity.
    • This provides a quantifiable way of rating progress with that activity.
  • Big question I have is: Are these rewards meaningful? How are they meaningful or not?
  • My general view of a play space (or activity space) — as in a space where meaning making occurs – is that it’s a mangle.
    • By using the word “mangle” I’m invoking Andrew Pickering’s Mangle of Practice and Constance Steinkuehler’s “Mangle of Play.”
    • ie. the actual activity occurs in an arena with multiple contentious motives from different parties or actors.
    • Their tension, work-arounds, pushes, pulls, and constant renegotiation of positions, roles, and responsibilities make the landscape of activity dynamic, sometimes unpredictable, emergent, and messy. Latour (actor-network theory) would probably call it a constant motion of destabilization and restabilization.
  • Case in point: playing World of Warcraft is a matter of socialization into a particular culture or community.
    • Becoming a good player means being able to navigate and participate in this contentious landscape – being able to assemble and arrange various resources, both social (ie other people) and material (ie add-ons, websites, etc.).
    • Could think of New Literacy Studies and/or Lave & Wenger’s “community of practice” stuff here pretty easily.
  • These game spaces (cultures) hold/build/replicate certain values, including values about legitimate ways of being.
    • By participating in these communities, people are building up social capital and cultural capital.
    • These forms of capital are emergent from the mangle.
    • Not always quantifiable… not predictable.
  • By quantifying achievements, game designers normalize (think of gear score, eg) how cultural capital (gaming capital) is accrued, possibly marginalizing other forms of play.

Follow me at @mcdanger

NARST and AERA

May 4, 2011
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I went to the annual conference for the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) for the first time last month and then to the annual conference for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) right afterwards. In fact, I flew directly from one conference (Orlando) to the other (New Orleans). The short story is that AERA is much bigger than NARST, that Orlando surprisingly kind of sucks for a conference due to horrible food choices and no public transportation or sidewalks, and that New Orleans during the French Quarter music festival is amazingly awesome.

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Need feedback on poster about expertise in WoW as sociomaterial practice

March 16, 2011
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Check it out. Too busy? Does it even say anything?

[Edit: the latest version can be seen below the first image. Thanks for the feedback!]

 

Digital Media and Learning conference 2011

March 9, 2011
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Last week I went to Long Beach, CA for the Digital Media and Learning conference. It was great meeting a ton of people (too many to list, sorry), sharing a room with Moses Wolfenstein and Sean Duncan, having breakfast with fellow DML Summer Institute people, getting dinner with fellow Terror Novans, and seeing demos of really cool projects (cf below). The highlight of the presentations was definitely the ignite talks–quick 5 minute talks with an auto-advancing slidedeck. One presenter couldn’t make the second ignite session, so Alex Halavais took to the stage and did an improv talk with slides he had never seen before! And it was it was hilarious, on-point, and relevant!

Fiona Barnett's photo of Fab@Home

Last year, Jeremy Hunsinger and I set up an etherpad for the conference where anyone attending could collaboratively take notes and chat about the sessions. This year, I set up the same thing with a Google doc and blasted the url to Twitter periodically. I’m disappointed in the turn-out of the gdoc use, especially given that the theme of many of the talks was about collective and collaborative/participatory production and understanding of cultural artifacts, curricula, etc. I saw many people using laptops and iPads to take notes, but those notes will forever be sequestered, not shared. :(

My reasoning is that together we can attend everything. There were 7 concurrent tracks. Together we could have let everyone learn about each one.

As it is, I think the few of us who used the gdoc hit about a quarter of the sessions. I think for next year I’ll suggest an official gdoc or other collaborative note-taking tool be used.

There was also some backchannel activity in an IRC which got pretty snarky. I think that’s fine and quite entertaining but I wish naysayers in that backchannel would ask questions during the sessions they had particular problems with.

Overall, the type of talk around digital media literacies and games took a step backwards, I think… or maybe just treaded water from last year. There’s two things that contributed to this I think. It seemed like this year there were many more people coming from non-profits and non-academic places, so they had to be caught up with new-to-them ideas. Additionally, there was a confluence of people from different disciplinary backgrounds, so they too needed to step back a bit to lay some foundational common language down. One example was the IRC discussion about the label “gamer” and whether someone is a “hardcore” vs. “casual” gamer. I think it was a useful discussion, and, yes, it did help me better articulate things in my head. Yet games people such as the scholars who regularly attend GLS had already covered that ground a year or two ago.

Two highlights of the talks, besides the ignite talks, for me were both in a constructive/destructive technologies panel. Dan Perkel gave a fascinating study of deviantART community-based discussion regarding the sharing of work, ownership, privacy, “safe” space, and the nature of the interwebs. Stuart Geiger gave a very entertaining and eye-opening talk about Wikipedia bots and collective response to automated procedures, touching on guidelines and policies and how they affect user behavior and participation.

Next year, DML (March 1-3) will be in San Francisco right before GDC (March 5-9), so I won’t have to choose between the two again!

Resources:

 

Announcing AGILE

February 20, 2011
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[Edit April 21, 2011:] We’ve changed the name to Advancing Gaming in Innovative Learning Ecologies :) [/Edit]

Advancing Games as Innovative Learning Environments (AGILE) is a group that includes LIFE Center and UWISME scholars in the College of Education at the University of Washington, most notably Theresa Horstman and myself. :)

What does this mean? Well, not much right now actually. We needed to brand ourselves, which will help with attracting attention and monies.

Conferences this year

February 20, 2011
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I guess a bullet list is easiest. Conferences for this year:

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Testing out live blogging with a NookColor

February 11, 2011
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I’m at the iConference this week. Also in meetings at work this week. It’s sort of worked.

Anyway, my netbook died last year so I decided to try a tablet for a while to see if it would meet my conference needs. (Rooted NookColor with a custom Android OS = cheap tablet)

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Posted on Terra Nova!

November 1, 2010
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I guest-posted a summary of my dissertation on Terra Nova! TN is a blog on virtual worlds research that was started by a bunch of luminaries in the field. Go take part in the conversation!

Dr. Video Games: Reflections of a PhD Graduate

October 3, 2010
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[cross-posted to CGP and markdangerchen.net]

After I defended (YouTube) and submitted (PDF) my dissertation, for a few weeks I’d been meaning to write some reflections on the whole PhD process. The problem is that I’m not sure where to start. The image I have in my mind when I think of the process or journey or whatever you want to call it is that of slow extrusion, like being dumped into a meat grinder by the giant named Academia who revels in slowly cranking away at your bones until you plop into a mixer bowl piled with the chunky grounds of previous scholars. But I figured that wasn’t necessarily a useful image for other students to have while they are trying to successfully navigate academic life.

So, instead, I thought maybe it’d be useful to just create a list of things you should know if you are interested or are now attempting to get a PhD related to games (lots of Wikipedia refs incoming!):

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