I’ve been playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). Very brief impressions:

• Yes, it feels like a single-player RPG. A Bioware RPG. Except that… once in a while some jerkface loots a chest that you’re fighting an elite mob for, and a lot of the quests are impossible to solo unless you come back totally overpowered.
• But surprisingly, that it feels like a single-player RPG is actually very, very engaging. The single-player-ness comes from Bioware injecting narrative decisions that let you *actually* role play if you want to. There’s definitely enough content in SWTOR for someone to write a dissertation analyzing the branching dialog using Jim Gee’s idea of the projective identity. Of course, some of these decisions are tied to light side/dark side points, and if you don’t stick with one side or the other you’re gimping your character since there are vendor rewards for very light or very dark characters.
• But you can also hit escape before a conversation is over, so you can restart the conversation from the beginning to see all the various routes and branches the dialog can take. This is actually a pretty good thing, imho, letting you continue to project an identity for your character whilst also letting you ultimately make the ludic/rational choices.
• Personally, I found myself pausing at these story choices (which basically are the familiar dialog options found in other Bioware games, most recently the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series) and reflecting on each branch as I explored them, eventually picking ones that I thought matched my character most. In many cases–and I’m not saying this is true for other players–I made role play choices that gimped me. These were difficult to make, and I like having to make difficult choices in games.
• It’s almost as if Bioware listened to me when I wished that WoW had dialog and story choices!
• It feels fresh enough to be very fun at times. Spoiler alert: For example, one of the early Flashpoints (ie, instances, where you have to group up with others to go through a scripted, personal mission) included shooting turrets at Starship Trooper-like alien bugs and, later, hitting switches on a set of platforms in a particular order like in a puzzle-based FPS while fighting robots with knockback. And yes, they can knock you off the platforms to your death. For some reason, this was hella fun, figuring out the puzzle with only 3 people instead of 4, and dying over and over. Death was fun! We didn’t read strat guides or watch YouTube videos for how the fights went. We just played… playfully played.

So there you go. A MMOG that emphasizes story and is new enough that it brings out the playfulness in me. Castronova be damned. I like this game. At least for now. Who knows if this will last. I mean, look at my first post about WoW, for christsakes! :)

Anyway, one particular quest line on Taris struck me as interesting in how NPCs could have depth in their own personal morality and value systems. Spoiler alert: Below is the photoset of Cera and Garthe. They were part of a research team that got attacked by rakghouls (think, space zombies). While looking for the team, you find out that Garthe was graverobbing on the side. After that is resolved (here I chose to expose his deeds to his partner–light side choice), you’re asked by Cera to analyze rakghoul DNA and figure out that the rakghouls are hanging around their ancestors’ burial grounds, which gives evidence of their sentience or that at least they still feel familial bonds. Garthe then takes on the moral high ground, arguing that they can’t use this information to kill the rakghouls more effectively. They’re more than just mindless beasts that want to eat your brains!

John Carter McKnight reviewed it already on his blog, btw. It’s glowing! And kind of amazing how he can distill some things that I I should have made more explicit. AND amazing how well he can interleave reflections on his own work into the review.

Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft

and I drew the cover myself! (sketched it from screenshot references with an ipad2 and a stylus, imported into photoshop and colored with a bamboo tablet)

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With the new year, I resolve to be more proactive at work since I’ve been feeling stagnant for a while now. I also plan on looking for grant money to start a lab focused on arts and humanities games. I haven’t decided if this should be with UW or independent or what…

Basically, it’s been tough finding a position that fills my needs, so the only thing left to do is make it myself.

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In other news, I’ve been playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic. What I’m finding interesting is that I actually care about the dialog decisions I’m making in the game, and I really like the companions and main story arcs each character class comes with. More interesting is that these things basically make me feel like I’m playing a solo game with a backdrop of a whole bunch of other people. Bioware always sucked me in with story, and I like it, but I’m not sure this is a proper MMO… Jury’s still out.

Also, even with the built-in light/dark choices, they really only appear through dialog during plot moments that don’t actually affect the gameplay. I still go around killing everything under many suns even while saying that violence isn’t the answer (as a goody-two-shoes trooper). Ah well.

incl. me!

Katie Davis

Andrew Manches

Sean McCarthy

Justin Reich

Lisa Schwartz

A few weeks ago I attended the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA)’s bi-annual meeting. This year it was at Hilversum, The Netherlands!

The last time I went was in 2005 when it was in Vancouver. Since then, I just couldn’t fit it into my graduate student budget, being in Tokyo and London. This year, I am a little more solvent as a postdoc and decided that I really needed to go to catch up on the European games research scene. DiGRA is trying to be relevant and global, but I think it’s traditionally been mostly Europeans. (This topic was discussed at length by TL Taylor, Bart Simon, and Annika Waern during late-night drinking, but I don’t know really what came out of it… tho there *is* a new DiGRA journal now!)

Anyway, I was part of a panel on theorycrafting with Kristine Ask, Chris Paul, Faltin Karlsen, and Torill Mortensen (who unfortunately couldn’t make it). It was great, and many thanks to my co-panelists.

I was also in a supervisor match where I got to be the “senior scholar” to Fatima Jonsson as she talked about research she and two others, Lina Eklund and Magnus Johansson, did to compare guild supports in three MMOGs. Pretty interesting stuff. They should definitely follow up on their studies if they can.

There’s all sorts of weird things about my experiences with life in Hilversum including a hotel manager who smoked inside, leaving doors to rooms open (where my laptop was just right there for the grabbing), and crappy wifi at both the hotel and at the conference. Oh, there was also a really mean Dutch woman who wouldn’t give me an empty cup that I could take to fill up with water when there were plenty of free cups elsewhere in the room. When I grabbed one of those free ones, she challenged me that it was for the free coffee and hot water machine, forcing me to serve myself hot drink before refilling it with cold tap water. Sheesh.

The conference itself was really great, though puzzlingly expensive. Rumors abound regarding mismanagement and stubbornness of the organizers, but I won’t say more since I have no idea what I’m talking about. The format for the talks was innovative, matching people up against each other, but it didn’t work that well. They need to provide more support for matched presenters, probably even make matched sessions one of the categories to be submitted to rather than forcing everyone into a match. (Most of the presenters ditched the match format and just did regular presentations.) There was a board game store providing a library of table-top games to play between sessions (and it was really, really fun playing games with a cool bunch of people on the last day). In a lot of ways, it felt like a European version of the Games Learning Society conference. I think GLS’s Hall of Fail worked out better than the matches though…

I met a ton of people including Melinda Jacobs who I’ve agreed to help on a book project collecting stories of gamers–kind of a coffee table type book. And I mostly hung out with Jennifer Killham, the rogue gnome clone.

Very good croissants. Very tiny cups. On the way home, I took a photo of the in-flight cup of orange juice, marveling at how big it was… :)

It was me, Chris Paul (Seattle U), Roger Altizer (U of Utah), Nathan Dutton (Ohio U), Todd Harper (MIT GAMBIT), and Shawna Kelly (USC/Intel).

While last year we presented a general overview and introduction to games studies/games research in academia to people who may be interested in games as a career but don’t want to go into the games industry, this year we each had five minutes to share where we’re at and what we do and then share the work of someone else in the field that we like.

I talked a bit about the Center for Game Science and the web games that the lab is making that are mostly focused on science and math learning using massive amounts of data to discover: optimal learning pathways, whether achievements help, how to deliver various topics to players, etc.

Then I mentioned briefly my dissertation research (how becoming an expert WoW player was about using the right tools rather than being “expert” in the game mechanics) and that I have a new book coming out titled Leet Noobs that covers the life and death of the raid group. Nathan said he’d buy multiple copies of the book if I get that lolcat in the presentation as the front cover… That’s something to think about…

Finally, I gave a brief summary of the huge, huge potential battle in education coming up around games and learning (which honestly, I hope sort of fizzles) between those (often non gamers) who want to just use games to deliver science and math content and assessments and those (often gamers) who see games as embodied experiences where the learning is emergent and procedural.

The panel went quite well, I thought, though I think we didn’t get a chance to get too deeply into certain topics in the QA and I think at least one person left dissatisfied because of that. We were unfortunately lined up against the keynote, and we were on the first day, Friday, so I think our attendance wasn’t as high as last year’s (where we had a completely filled room).

There were some other fantastic panels at PAX this year (this link will die as soon as they update it for the next convention…), but two of them deserve mention here: one called “BA, MA, PhD in Game Studies, WTFBBQ!” and the other on games and education. They deserve mention because both of them were sort of from left field.

The first featured Avery Alix, a masters graduate from UW’s comm department who now works at PopCap, Morgan Romine, a current PhD student at UC Irvine in anthropology (studying under Tom Boellstorff) who will do an ethnography of a game design studio, and Elisa Melendez, a new PhD student in Florida International University in sociology looking at gender performance in music games. What’s bizarre from looking at the program is in how the two women chose to display their cultural capital. Who the hell gives them the authority to present an overview of game studies? Ubisoft, apparently. They both chose to list the Frag Dolls as their affiliation rather than their universities, and PAX goers basically had to google them to find out which academic institutions they represented. They didn’t seem to understand that their cultural cache within the games industry doesn’t make them authorities on academia. Later, however, it became clear that the *actual* topic of their presentation was an intro to academic games research for industry people (with gamers treated, problematically, as industry people).

I find their research interesting for sure, but Elisa took the lion’s share of the presentation introduction and was very unfocused, very rambly, very arms akimbo, making huge claims about games research, and kept saying, “I’m a sociologist, so…” or “As a sociologist, I…” Apparently, the only difference between sociology and anthropology is that soc does stats. And Avery didn’t seem to know the difference between archeology and anthropology, wondering if Morgan had a whip, etc. In both cases, Nathan’s laughter was quick in coming and to the point.

Once Morgan and Avery started talking in earnest, though, I found them articulate, cogent, and less OMG-this-is-quite-clearly-my-first-presentation-and-I-have-no-clue-that-I-don’t-know-how-it’s-done sort of feel to it. I don’t know if this was true for Elisa, but it sure felt that way. The first half of their time (mostly Elisa) was basically spent pandering to the audience. Yet Avery’s story about how he got into game studies and then his move to PopCap was definitely engaging. And actually the stories from all of them about their trajectories was the gem in their presentation. All of them had interesting stories to tell. And they were all unique. But that’s part of the problem.

I went into the panel wondering how they could possibly give any insights into academic research in games when I’ve never seen them in any academic conference, etc. It’s clear they are all smart people and know quite a bit, but I think their experiences are very much unlike most people’s experiences who enter the games research arena. They seemed to downplay that different people have different experiences and that not everyone can get a job at PopCap or the Frag Dolls or just write a paper as an undergrad-turned-masters student and suddenly find themselves cited, etc. They didn’t do a very good job of mapping out the landscape of academic research in games and how someone who’s interested in academia might get started.

The second panel on games and education included James Portnow, a game designer who seems to get invited by industry conferences to talk about education a lot as he was at the Serious Play conference that was also happening in Seattle earlier in the week, and Lee Sheldon, who has a new book out: The Mulitplayer Classroom. It sounded good, but unfortunately I couldn’t attend. Just wanted to give a shout-out to it…

I went to Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) in early July. Saw a lot of people. Robin joined me for part of it, and we shopped for toys and nail polish together, sometimes with Cynthia D’Angelo. We went to the horse races (which was totally rad). I had some very, very awesome breakfasts (dim sum type buns) from a hole-in-the-wall across the street from my hotel with Ben DeVane and Ben Shapiro.

From CSCL 2011

This was the first time I’ve been to CSCL. It’s the sister conference to the International Conference for the Learning Sciences (ICLS) (which I have been to a couple of times and feel pretty well at home in). They switch off which one happens every year, so next year it’ll be ICLS (in Sydney!), followed by CSCL (in Madison right before GLS) in 2013. I most went because, let’s face it, it’s freaking HONG KONG! But also, I went because I figured it makes sense for me to broaden my network a bit now that I’ve graduated and am semi-looking for a job.

The community around CSCL is very, very compelling. Everyone is so friendly and supportive and open. The organization feels sort of like a start-up of engineers where we all just show up and *do stuff* each day as we talk about the work and think about how it could be better. I sort of volunteered to help out with the website (and maybe luckily they haven’t needed the help yet).

There was a little bit of hypocrisy in the stated desires of the organizers and the actual line up of presentations. I kept hearing that researchers should focus more on informal contexts, acknowledging the everyday learning that occurs in all settings and how it is often disconnected from school life. Yet most of the presentations I saw were squarely rooted in classroom improvement or support with (digital) technology. Maybe in a couple of years a lot more focus will be on informal learning. /shrug

I presented the actor-network theory chapter from my dissertation, detailing how a user-created mod to World of Warcraft was assigned a role/responsibility/task by the group I studied for a specific fight (Ragnaros in Molten Core) in a way that was not intentional by the creator of the mod. (paper) One of the questions I got was, “yes, but, how does this help classrooms?” d’oh!

If you’re interested, the general answer is that I am part of a group that values learning in all settings that matter and have consequential meaning-making to their participants. Yes, of course, classrooms matter, and, yes, of course, learning in certain settings affects learning in others. But my research doesn’t focus on bridging that gap. Instead it’s important because hardly anyone in the learning sciences even understands what goes on in gaming (sub)cultures/settings, so I explain and detail what happens in those settings and show that, yes, people learn in those settings. AND in this description, it is quite easy to start thinking about other settings and see that, wow, the group of gamers I chronicled self-organize and learn and take up certain material resources in a way that sounds awfully familiar in other settings. The real question becomes, “how can we foster people to be critical and agentive in their own learning, like the group I studied, no matter what setting they’re in?”

I just need to reformat, edit it a bit for informal/formal consistency, move footnotes to endnotes, etc. (It comes from my dissertation but is different in some significant ways.)

Working with Colin and Michele has been a total joy. (very smooth and similar experience to publishing something in their journal E-Learning)

After the whole process is over, I’ll do a write-up of it here. Just as with getting a PhD, how to get a book published is completely opaque to people who’ve never done it before, yet everyone who’s done it doesn’t seem to realize that at all…

It was great seeing grandma there (she’s the oldest family member). Also great to see nephew Timo!

I love my family and each reunion reminds me how awesome it is. Next reunion is set to be either in Vancouver or Taipei!

Hawaii Hsu Family Reunion 2011

Anyway, I found this blog post on Progressive Boink about the 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings. It’s from 2007, but it’s new to me! Read this early on and decided to link to it here before reading the rest of the write-up:

The most important thing you need to know before reading about all the terrible things Rob Liefeld has drawn is that he has never seen or talked to a woman in his life and has no idea what they look like or how their bodies operate. If you asked Rob Liefeld to draw a diagram of the uterus he’d put on a pair of gauntlets and punch the shit out of your chalkboard. This is how the man operates, and though I know it sounds like a lot, you have to believe me. I don’t want you looking at the stuff he’s drawing and think he’s a conscious adult male with a creative job who can and has influenced the minds of young artists. The man is a pair of blue jeans with a face. He has on a backwards cap, and when he turns it around, it’s still backwards.