Mark Danger Chen

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.

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 :)

Ok, lessee…

At the end of April I went to Foundations of Digital Games. A lot of the sessions were on AI and procedural programming for computer and video games, which isn’t entirely related to what I study, so I went swimming, hot-tubbing, sailing, etc. instead. But the sessions on game studies (Jose Zagal, Mia Consalvo, Jesper Juul, moderated by TL Taylor) was good.

Jose (who I’ve cited for his, Rick, and Hsi’s look at cooperation in the Lord of the Rings boardgame, and who worked with a couple of other students including Amanda Ladd [careful, my virus protection program claims there's a trojan associated with her site... no idea if that is true] who was also at the conference (as an undergrad!)) did a paper on the current qualities of game reviews, breaking out the moves and arguments they make into 9 or so different categories. The problem is that they only chose IGN and Gamespot to look at, which means they were missing out on a whole slew of alternative review sites such as Adventure Gamers as well as missing print publications. Maybe there’s no difference in terms of what reviews do, but maybe there is.

Mia presented a study on the online community around the hidden object games Mystery Case Files, specifically Return to Ravenhearst, describing how the kinds of talk on their forums is just as rich and varied as the kinds of talk on MMOG forums.

Jesper (along with Marleigh Norton at MIT) took a deeper look at difficulty in games, showing how difficulty can come from both the game and with the game interface and that these are actually very blurred. There’s a difference between bad interface design and an interface that is meant to be difficult to master. In fact, such games as Wario Ware are actually all about figuring out the interface. So, the assumption that good UI is always an intuitive or invisible UI isn’t always a good assumption to make.

There were other sessions on creating a game development department or bridging industry with academia, and those were pretty good. The take away message I got, though it wasn’t necessarily explicit, was from Magy Seif El-Nasr and Kurt Squire who said they’ve been going to GDC for several years, first as a grad student. GDC is expensive, but the point I got was that you have to be visible, that building a relationship with industry folks takes time. That’s pretty much the reason why I’ve been trying to go to as many varied conferences as possible, though I’ve been limiting mine to ones that don’t cost a fortune. I wonder if I should start going to GDC, though…

Constance Steinkuehler and Yasmin Kafai were both at the conference, too, so there definitely was some representation from the Learning Sciences. One grad student I met, Al Yang pointed out, however, that it seemed like the different disciplines and/or schools, despite being stuck on a boat together, were relatively cliquish.

Other notables I met were Chris Lewis (who sneered at my Strongbow), Jack Stockholm and Veronica Zammito, both from Vancouver and guildies from Terror Nova! What sucks is that I didn’t meet them all until the last day, so we hardly talked at all. :( Being stuck on a boat isn’t really as limiting as one would think…

I also met a bunch of people (Bob and his family, Mark, Gene) from Utah who work with Roger Altizer, my cabinmate, who I met at the Internet Researchers conference in Vancouver a couple of years back.

Cy from Microsoft, Brian from EA, Noah from UCSC (who edited First Person and is part of Grand Text Auto)… many more.

All in all, really fun conference. Bolt is a good movie.