For the CV, I’ve been told that search committees are interested in productivity over time, so I thought that a nice timeline would clearly show my rate of producing academic writing. Initially, I played around with an actual timeline with boxes highlighting different works. Here’s a first draft:

A couple of my twitter and Facebook friends (thanks esp. to Miriam Rigby, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Aaron Hertzmann) expressed concern over the colors since people may be printing the CV out and/or may be color blind. It was also a pain to refer back to the key a couple of pages in.

So, I rethought it, dividing publications and presentations into their own columns and moving job experience back outside of the timeline:

This was better, but many twitter and Facebook friends thought that it had the opposite of it’s intended effect: to make it easily scannable and understood quickly. The main reason being that the tradition of CVs has been around so long and is such a strong genre that academics can already scan them quickly so long as they appear in a familiar format. Yet, I felt like my old CV was too much a “wall of text.” Observe my old CV:

But okay.. I can still play around with this, break it up a bit, maybe with images. Also, another healthy discussion on Facebook led me to The Professor Is In’s rules for CVs (thanks Marcella Szablewicz), which led me to re-sort the parts by peer-review order. IE. put the stuff that took the most to accomplish first. Academic appointments are highly sought after and should go first, followed by books, journal articles, presentations, etc. The items in each subsequent section are easier to do; put the hardest stuff first. Made sense:

But this didn’t solve the very first concern that instigated this whole process: How to display dates quickly? TL Taylor suggested I finally ditch APA format for the references and just put dates first:

I like it. But I concede that the images don’t add *that* much to it. TL also pointed out that the links show up in weird boxes on her Mac, which is a huge cause for concern. Let’s assume people will be printing the CV out. The standard CV for them should have no issues with images nor weird boxes showing up around hyperlinks that don’t work on paper anyway:

And for people who are online as they read the CV, they can either use this one with links or just go to my CV and Writings pages on this website…

Funny how, after all that, I almost made it full circle back to the original CV! All that’s different is a change in font, smaller margins, ditch APA format to put dates first, and reordering to put what’s important first.

Here’re the final PDFs:

• Mark Chen CV
• Mark Chen CV with working hyperlinks
• Mark Chen CV with images
• Mark Chen CV with images and working hyperlinks

Finished replaying Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: How Many Subtitles Can We Add. I played TSL with the Restored Content Mod (1.7), and, because of it, the game was amazingly good–better than the first one, even. I played these to remind myself of the references that I’d been seeing in Star Wars: The Old Republic back in Dec/Jan, but since finishing those two games, I haven’t really had much time to hop back into SWtOR.

Instead, I went to the Digital Media and Learning conference, March 1-3 in San Francisco. It was good, but the most progressive and interesting stuff came from panel talks and hallway conversations, imho, not the keynote or plenary sessions. I think this has to do with who I am, as the main events were a lot of proselytizing to teachers and policy makers. While the conference was happening, I started a Google doc to take DML 2012 collaborative notes (like the previous two years and at other conferences I attend). This year, we got some pretty good coverage (thanks to Cathy Tran and Kat Schenke).

Hung out in San Francisco *during* Game Developers Conference, March 5-9, and, as luck would have it, someone gave me their pass on Wednesday since they were leaving early. I totally squandered it and mainly went to the expo, but I did see a really great talk by Rich Lemarchand. The energy at GDC put DML to shame, and surprisingly, the innovative game play and talks that I did go to I felt were better and more substantial than those at DML. Too bad, it costs 17 times more to go to GDC than DML.

Was introduced to Draw Something, the mobile game where you and a friend guess what each other are drawing, kind of like Pictionary. I love how it’s encouraging a lot of people who don’t normally “do art” draw and be creative. It’s pretty much taken over as my idle activity of choice, leaving my twitter feed languishing.

Played Mass Effect 3, March 11-18. (Massive) spoiler warning!!!

Spoilerz aheadz!

There’s a bit of controversy over the ending. I thought the ending took away player agency in a way that was dissatisfactory, not letting me make choices that I thought Commander Shepard would make. (The most awesome rewrite of the ending is, by contrast, very satisfactory, and I’ll pretend that’s how it ended.) The synthesis ending is completely bizarrely space magic. And when I think about the whole game, I am a little disappointed that so much of if felt like I was just hitting a button to continue to watch the cutscenes play out. In many cases, there wasn’t really a choice to make, and most of the cutscenes felt like Bioware was just dotting Is and crossing Ts, methodically tying up loose ends from the previous two games.

These activities and events have basically prevented me from attending to my inbox, and it will take me a while to go through everything I marked with a star to check out later.

Plus, during it, the crazy wookiee, Zaalbar, swears a life oath to you because you unlocked a door. And it wasn’t even your character who unlocked it; it was his bff, Mission Vao. But noooo… he sees you like he swallowed some Love Potion #9 and swears to stay by your side forever. That must have been some door.

Zaalbar: Oh, yes, I had a life, full of hopes and dreams, but then that door came along and I fell into deep despair. I was just about to kill myself by repeatedly Ram Manning that door. Then you came along. Then you came along, and I will never leave your side. I hereby swear a life oath to you, having no idea if you’re an upstanding guy or not, knowing NOTHING about you, I swear a life oath to you.

Zaalbar (4 seconds later): Wait a sec, Mission. Where did you come from? Oh, you’re the one who unlocked that door? DAMMIT!!!

Actually, this reminds me about something in SWTOR. During certain cutscenes in the trooper storyline, various NPCs say, “you did it all by yourself!” and you reply “I’m a one-woman army!” all the while… hello? your companion is standing *right* *there*!

Anyway, KotOR. There’s also a man-the-turrets mini-game when you first get on the Millenium Ebon Hawk. Clearly Bioware was taking iconic scenes from the movies and threw them in the game with podracing and the turrets and the fastest ship in the galaxy knock off. No idea where Pazaak came from, but that’s really the only mini-game I like.

So, this game was a great game. It got about 94% on gamerankings. It had a lot of stuff in it that was amazing. Yet I’m encountering stuff I think is crazy ridiculous. Maybe if it didn’t have these inclusions, it would have been closer to 98%. Or maybe back then these things didn’t irk like they do now. Or maybe the main story (despite the Taris beginnings) is just as awesome as I remember. And maybe I’ll actually finish this play through, so I can answer that question!

From Games

Some of you may know that KotOR was an influential game in steering me to become a PhD student looking at cooperation collaboration and teamwork in (online) games. Anyway, I decided to reinstall it, throw in some mods, and check it out, now that I’ve played SWTOR for a while. Here’s some really brief notes:

• Low poly count and textures. The extent of this surprised me. I remembered it being much more detailed, but that was back then… It’s not as bad as playing Deus Ex these days, at least.
• Sparsely populated, so… no change, really.
• You can actually talk to everyone and get a line of banter, it seems. There’s even just people who’ll engage in a one-line dialog with you. Nice flavor.
• I like that it isn’t clear who are quest givers.
• I love how NPCs appear as recurring characters who you just sort of chance upon at first, like Cordo, the bountyhunter, or Mission Vao. You see them in a scene but then have hardly any interaction with them until later in the game. Lots of foreshadowing or “here’s some info and set-ups, which we won’t tell you when they come together for something bigger or if they’re just flavor.” I like the unpredictable nature of it… uncertain nature of it.

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)

–

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.

–

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…