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 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!

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 :)

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.

Stayed with cousin Lee-kai on the west side. It was brilliant except that our busy schedules meant that we only actually hung out for like 3 hours total: a game of Race for the Galaxy when I arrived on Tuesday and lunch at Crema with Jafe (friend from high school and husband of Crema owner, Julieta) the next day. Lee-kai and his friends know RftG really, really well and basically kicked my ass even though just the week before I won a game at home. In my defense, I guess, I had some really crappy cards throughout the game and waffled on which specialization I should take. I don’t think that game is about diversifying at all, and I paid for it.

Crema was as fantastic as the last time I was in New York back in April 2008. Mmmmm. Other restaurants I got to try out were Big Nick’s (got a guacamole burger), Penang (got sizzling tofu which was good but had that weird slimy coating that I sometimes see on tofu; what is that stuff? Also, Krista-Lee thinks she got sick on the curry chicken… :( ), Buona Notte (“the best” claimed the street hawkers), the cafe above Fairway on Broadway, Golden Unicorn (full on Chinese banquet, ftw!), and Katz’s (hot pastrami sandwich, yum). Pretty much great food all around.

Katz's pastrami sandwich

Since I think the conference sessions were summarized pretty well by others (Raph, Tim, Bart, Sara, Greg L at Terra Nova, twitter hashtag #sop09), I’ll stick to the people I met. Anyway, I place more importance on the connections made and individual and collective collisions of people and ideas than I do on the sessions, so it’s pretty appropriate to list the fine folks I met.

I met a ton of really cool people including lots of grad students (note 1) at the grad student symposium (Thursday) and a bunch of profs and others (note 2) during the rest of conference days (Friday and Saturday).

I created a backchannel (thanks to Sylvie who got it from Liz for the backchannel app) for the grad students who were in the symposium to use during the conference, which was later shared by the conference organizer, Dan Hunter (<3), and also broadcast to the world on the Terra Nova blog! Yikes. Not so backy, that backchannel. At one point, they projected the backchannel on a screen during a session, which sort of killed it for a while. Then during the last session, the app bugged out on us! I sent a tweet to the developer and was able to get it back up and saved an xml file of the transcript which can later be synced with the video that was taken for each session. (I haven’t decided if I’m going to share it with the world or just the grad students…)

I got a chance to walk around Central Park with KL, play cards, drink some cider and wine, ride the subway (and look like I knew what I was doing and where I was going due to the distributed cognition going on between me and my Android phone), share some Lonely Island and Death Star canteen, and meet a whole asston of Terror Nova guildmates. Terror Nova was outed at the conference by Ta-Nehisi Coates during his panel. :)

In secret, the State of Play conference was Dan’s way of getting as many Terror Novas together in one place at the same time. It was also meant to connect grad students with each other and generate great momentum for moving VW, MMO, and games research forward. Slight misnomer: games research. The majority of us are actually studying players. Player research.

1.

Jakob J. Assmann, Institute for Information, Organization and Management, Munich School of Management — Jakob and I toured around Times Square one night after all the evening’s festivities. It was great fun!

Mark Danger Chen, Learning Sciences, College of Education, University of Washington – Seattle — that’s me!

Samuel Coavoux, Center for Research on Socialization (Groupe de Recherche sur la Socialisation), Ecole Normale Superieure – Lettres et Sciences Humaines — We lost Sam when a group of us went to Times Square (the night after Jakob and I toured around it). I texted and called him several times only to find out from others the next day that he was fine. Damn freakin international long distance charges… :)

David DeWester, Management Information Systems,  Department of Management, University of Nebraska – Lincoln — David is really, really into Asian cultural products apparently. I wasn’t sure how to read it.. just pure excitement? a hint of colonialism and exoticizing the Asian (orientalizing?)? but anyway, he seemed like a nice guy. :)

Greg Dhen, Laboratory for a prospective anthropology (LAAP), University of Leuven (UCL) — Greg from Belgium had a more difficult time with the English than the others I think. His research seemed really interesting, and I hope to stay in touch with him.

Sean C. Duncan, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, Games+Learning+Society Initiative, University of Wisconsin Madison — Sean got a job! Sean got a job! Sean got a job! Hooray!

Nathan T. Dutton, School of Media Arts and Studies, Ohio University — one of Mia Consalvo’s. I met Nathan at an AoIR conference a while back when it was in Vancouver. His stuff has always been interesting and he’s not shy, so I’m sure he’ll go places with his academic career.

Eric Ellis, Educational Technology, Pepperdine University — Eric healz like nobuddy’s buziness. He’s also among the top raid leaders in the world, I’m sure. Not in terms of raid progress but in terms of management and communication skills.

Deborah A. Fields, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles — Debbie is keenly cool, very thoughtful about methods and findings, and smart to boot.

Matthew Gaydos, Educational Psychology, Learning Science Doctoral Program, University of Wisconsin – Madison — Crazy Matt. Every time I see him online I yell his toon name to mimic a line from the play Iphigenea.

Sara M. Grimes, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University — Like Nathan, I met Sara up in Vancouver a few years ago. Also like with Nathan, we didn’t really hang out back then, so it was cool getting to know her better. It turns out we basically have the exact same tastes in popular culture. She’s smarter though, or at least seems smarter since she knows stuff about philosophers. I need to sit with her at dinners at every opportunity presented to me so that I can absorb some of that insight.

Juho Hamari, Advanced Virtual Economy Applications (AVEA) – research project, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) — Juho is cool. Black suit cool. Black suit smoker cool. And his research is really cool, too. Not sure about his taste in music though. :)

Shawna Kelly, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California — She bugged out one day and watched the live video feed of the conference instead. From her hotel room. Eating delivered sushi. Damn her and her sushi! But as a fellow engineer, she of course rocks.

Yong Ming Kow, University of California – Irvine — I actually didn’t get to know Yong Ming that well, but as with everyone else, the esteem I place is pretty high. :)

Andras Lukacs-Kocso, Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago — Andras and I kept calling each other Wednesday night when some of us who were in NYC early met up for dinner and then drinks after. We kept missing each others calls and then not really hearing each other when we got connected. But finally, we met up and all was good. Very good to have him on my team.

Krista-Lee M. Malone, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee — I cited her DKP paper in my Games and Culture paper. Turns out that hers was just published this week, too (which makes my reference outdated since I cited the SSRN version I think)! I met her last year at GLS but it turns out that she had a flu back then so didn’t hang out with the rest of the guild. This time, though, we hung out lots. Not enough, though. I like her. Might work on a paper with her in the future (with gracious aknowledgements to Ren Reynolds for pointing out how similar our research is).

Jennifer Martin, Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario — Another guildie. Didn’t get to talk much since she was staying in Queens, but it was cool to meet (yet) another guildie. :)

Lindy McKeown, Australian Digital Futures Institute, University of Southern Queensland — Really insightful comments and questions.

John Carter McKnight, Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, Arizona State University — We can be impostors together, John!

Tyler Pace, School of Informatics, Human-Computer Interactions and Design, Indiana University — Hmm… again, we didn’t talk much (if at all…) face to face, but we did sort of talk over the backchannel. Love that backchannel.

Barton K. Pursel, College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University — He was liveblogging the conference. That is hard work. Thanks Bart!

Kristin A. Searle, Graduate School of Education, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania — Alas, I don’t think we talked at all… :( But her research sounds really interesting.

Cuihua (Cindy) Shen, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California — Someone who works on the Massive Amounts of Data(TM) provided by Sony to Dmitri Williams and crew.

David W. Simkins, Curriculum & Instruction, University of Wisconsin – Madison — Guildie. Works with Constance. Role-playing games. Ethics. Great.

Nicolas Suzor, School of Law, Queensland University of Technology — for a conference that originally focused on law and VWs, I think it’s surprising to find that Nic was like the only law student! Plus he got a job!

Joshua Glen Tanenbaum, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University — Guildie. Probably one of the few who focuses specifically on how game design affects player experience. Cool stuff. We need to organize a Pacific Northwest guild meet-up.

Jing (Annie) Wang, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University — Studies expertise! She also got a postdoc, so that’s cool.

Moses B. Wolfenstein, Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis, University of Wisconsin – Madison — Moses supposes and he supposes right. Unfortunately, Moses could only stay for the first day. Another guildie.

Li (Leo) Xiong, University of Southern California — Also didn’t talk to much. We’ll make up for that through our online group that we started.

2. (no order) Bart Simon, Ren Reynolds, Thomas Malaby, Doug Thomas, Mia Consalvo, Torill Mortensen, Jesse Houston, Tim Burke, Tom Boellstorff, Greg Lastowka, Andy Zaffron, Sande Chen, Rita Bush, Ted Castronova, Dmitri Williams, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chuck Cohen, Julian Dibbell, James Grimmelmann, Jia Ji, Raph Koster, Liz Lawley, Will Leverett, Liz Losh, Dan Norton, Tori Horton, Jerry Paffendorf, Diana Rhoten, Michael Schrage, Michael Theis, Kevin Farrell, Mike Sellers, Kevin Werbach