All posts by markdangerchen

Mark Chen is an independent researcher of gaming culture and spare-time game designer. He is the author of Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. Currently, he is looking into experimental and artistic games to promote exploration of moral dilemmas and human nature, researching DIY subcultures of Board Game Geek users, and generally investigating esoteric gaming practices. Mark also holds appointments at Pepperdine University, University of Washington, and University of Ontario Institute of Technology, teaching a variety of online and offline courses on game studies, game design, and games for learning. He earned a PhD in Learning Sciences/Educational Technology from the University of Washington and a BA in Studio Art from Reed College.
Academia

Digital Media and Learning Conference, day 1

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Met up with Moses Wolfenstein, Ben DeVane, and Sean Duncan and hung out with them in their room overlooking the beach, later at a cafe after walking a bit, then back in their room overlooking the beach. Have I mentioned the beach? Here’s a shot of not the beach but still a nice view from the cafe we went to:

view from Goldfish Cafe, La Jolla

We then caught a shuttle up to the conference registration, opening talk by Craig Watkins, and then after talk reception.

Two most memorable things from the opening were:

  1. Henry Jenkins framed participatory culture as different than web 2.0, saying that he sometimes says that participatory culture started as early as web -10 back in the 1860s/70s when youth were creating their own activists news networks and even used the acronym “LOL!”
  2. Craig Watkins describing the shift from MySpace to Facebook in just 2 or 3 years among black and latino youth and how many of them engage with the web through their mobile devices. That the digital divide is not about access anymore but more about a participation in different arenas sort of divide.

When Henry was doing his thing he mentioned that he likes to tweet now and is sometimes frustrated with the 155 character limitation, likening it to how the youth back in web -10 had to individually set the type for their newsprints. I immediately tweeted that Henry must be part of some twitter elite and has access to 155 characters since everyone else gets 140. I don’t think anyone got that joke… but then I noticed that starting about 5 minutes in, we had about half a dozen people tweeting the exact same salient points from both Henry and Craig, so I decided to stop tweeting… I think Ian Bogost complained about the #dml2010 spam. 🙂

Another hella funny thing was hearing about how @dthickey’s cell phone was stolen by a sea gull *while* he was talking with his wife! She heard him screaming profanities, wings flapping, and then a seal bark, so Dan spent 3 hours where the seals were searching for his phone… eventually bought a Droid to replace it…

During the reception, I kept seeing people I know but didn’t get a chance to really talk or say hi, and I also kept seeing people who I swear I’ve seen somewhere else, possibly at IR10. I really ought to introduce myself if we’re gonna keep bumping into each other…

Noted that a lot of LIFE people are here: Roy Pea, Brigid Barron, Reed Stevens, Veronique Mertl, Robb Lindgren, Sarah Walter (though, she’s arriving tomorrow). It feels kind of odd seeing one part of my academic life starting to collide with another.

Also excited that Lisa Nakamura recognized me and said hi. And I love how almost the first thing she said was why isn’t anyone looking at various Asian populations who are just as disproportionately represented socioeconomically as blacks and latinos. (It’s quite true in Seattle…) Every time I see Lisa, I try to namedrop Reed College and Beth Kolko (though I didn’t get a chance to this time) because I wonder if she remembers me, so it’s great to be recognized without prompting. Also, I’ve had dinner with her husband in Denmark, and I could probably namedrop Julian. 🙂

Anyway, Moses and I ducked out from the reception early to go get sandwiches from Porter’s Pub.

Moses at the Porter's Pub at UCSD

Academia

Digital Media and Learning Conference, day 0

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I arrived yesterday at San Diego / La Jolla for MacArthur Foundation’s first annual (Isn’t it dangerous to announce it’s annual when there haven’t been any yet?) Digital Media and Learning Conference.

I’m staying at a pretty swanky place (unexpectedly since I assumed it was just another cookie-cutter hotel), the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club. Yesterday, I walked along a beach, watched some surfboarding, went swimming, did a horrible walk along Torrey Pines, a busy street to Pearl St. (should have taken a side road), met up with George and Jen, ate at Sammy’s, noticed George and I were the only non-white people in the whole place (and upon reflection the only non-whites I’ve seen have been servers or receptionists or whatever, not tourists or residents), went grocery shopping then had hot chocolate and ice cream while watching the Olympics with G and J, and slept really well.

I’ve started following the twitter hashtag for the conf (#dml2010) and am already starting to meet people that way. 🙂

AAAS is in San Diego right now, too, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to swing by to meet up with people there… I’ve got a golf course and/or an aquarium and/or a beach and/or a massage and/or meet ups to do. 🙂 Oh, and there’s work, too… laptop on a beach isn’t so bad, I suppose.

Academia, Games Research

My dissertation presentation: A work in progress

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So, I got an email from the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education in Singapore about a Research Scientist position in New Media that I applied for. They want a Skype interview next week! While that is awesome, it’s also complicated. They want me to prepare a 15 minute presentation to launch the interview (which I’m taking as more a conversation to get to know each other). I hadn’t yet created a job talk, so a couple of days ago I started working on one.

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:

Leet Noobs on Prezi

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.

Misc., web 2.0

wow, multitrack acapella Starlight – Francois Macre

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via Urlesque:

Academia, Life

10 ways the academic job app process sucks

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It’s kind of a clusterf*ck isn’t it? A crapshoot, a messy affair, a disorganized, archaic, completely in-line with academic processes affair.

First, there’s the fact that the jobs get posted a year in advance, so PhD students are applying for positions by hyping up their dissertations before the dissertations are actually finished. If this goes well, they may give job talks about aspects of their work, which seems slightly bizarre since, again, the dissertations aren’t quite all done, yet, so preparing and writing about them takes away from actually finishing them.

Second, though I say the jobs are all posted a year in advance, it’s actually much more messy than that. Some places post in August, some in October, job postings just keep trickling in. It’s almost February, and I’m still applying to new postings. This causes all sorts of anxiety. What if a place wants to interview me or, worse, wants me to make a decision before I hear back from another place? The reaction I tend to get is, “eh. That’s how it is.” Why are we settling for this?? We live in an age where simple technological tools could be used to streamline and aggregate large chunks of data. There ought to be a better way for jobs to get announced.

Third, some postings are formalities. The search committee already knows who they’re going to hire. What a waste of time for people thinking they have a chance.

Fourth, some postings are canceled a few weeks or months later. Budget cuts suck.

Fifth, not all the apps want the same things. Well, this is fine since I’m tailoring each letter anyway, but sometimes vague terms are used for what the app materials include. What’s the difference between “evidence of teaching effectiveness” and a “teaching statement?”

Sixth, letters of recommendation are bizarre things, too. Two of my letter writers asked me to write the first draft of the letter. Presumably they go in and add their tweaks, etc. but damn.. it is odd writing about yourself pretending to be your prof, made more complicated when the prof has an existing relationship with whomever is on the search committee. Do I write in a formal voice or be slightly less formal than usual since they know each other?

Seventh, oh my god, I pity anyone who is also applying to non-academic jobs. I recently applied to a job at Google and I *think* my apps were okay, but I’m so embedded in academia, it’s hard for me to judge whether the cover letter or resume was appropriate.

Eighth, though I prob should have made this the first thing, there’s no one place where jobs get posted. I basically have five different sources: The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Higher Ed Jobs, and three mailing lists. Hearing about post-doc positions is even worse.

Ninth, not all places let you know your status in the process. I got a rejection letter from one place, a rejection email from another, a rejection by word of mouth rumor from yet another. I was told I was on the short list at one place months ago and nothing since then. It’s all sort of varied. I assume I was rejected by other places and maybe am in the running for others that I just don’t know about.

Lastly, all this obfuscation is made worse when you consider that many places are still influenced heavily by sponsorship and social networks. Who you know and how well you can get in people’s faces matters a hell of a lot.

Games Research

Enrollment of Threat Meter Addon: work in progress

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Here’s some of what I’ve written on a new paper/chapter. Feedback would be lovely. I mean to showcase data from some of the various fights in WoW, what it was like before threat meter, what changed after the addon was introduced, and especially how we actually adopted it and then used it to diagnose the Rags fight (and discover that threat wasn’t the problem).

The Enrollment of a New Actor and the Redistribution of Responsibilities in a World of Warcraft Raid Group

In World of Warcraft, each individual actor in a raid group is in charge of certain tasks and responsibilities. At one point in the life of the raid group I studied, a new actor was allowed into the group. This newbie rendered new services to the rest of the group. The services rendered were essentially rating the actions of the others in the group—that is, assigning a specified number value to their actions—and then remembering who did what to add up the ratings from each particular player. This newbie, though, didn’t actually care one way or the other if these services were used by the others, but if another decided to use them and have his or her rating displayed, that player had to abide by new rules associated with these new services. The newbie wouldn’t verbally announce others’ rating. Instead, a sign was held up and players had to manually look over to read what their ratings were. In that way, the newbie not only served but also demanded, not only taking on the burdens assigned with this new role but also prescribing new responsibilities on the others. Yet others in the raid group, first slowly then readily, came to adopt the use of these new services into their practice as the services’ benefits became increasingly clear. The group came to consider the new tasks as essential parts of its raiding activity, and players could barely remember a time when the rating-remembering services were not used. The newbie became one of them—not a newbie but a veteran—and the group merrily went on its way. But this veteran wasn’t one of them. In fact, it wasn’t even human. It was a technological device, a program, a construct, an “addon” modification to the game.

(More after the break.)

Continue reading Enrollment of Threat Meter Addon: work in progress →

Academia, Life

flashes of memory

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As I walk pass the bicycles locked near the law building, I keep a look out for a hybrid with a suspension stem. My old bike before moving up to Seattle for graduate school (back in 2003) had the same suspension stem, and it was of note because they’re pretty rare. The bike I remember was the one I used while bicycling across the country 10 years ago with my brother. (I plan on republishing our blog with commentary over this summer so that each entry from our bike trip is posted exactly 10 years later.) I put it together myself, bought all the components separately, etc. Alas, that bike got stolen about two weeks before we moved up here. 🙁

When I first started school again, I took a class in museology at the Burke Museum. On the way back from there to Miller Hall, where the college of ed lives, is the then new law building and the then new bike racks. That first year, that bike with the suspension stem was always there. I don’t really expect to see it ever again, but… every time I walk past those racks, I look for that bike and wonder who the owner was.

Games

Mass Effect: brief thoughts on my replay

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Getting ready for Mass Effect 2, coming out on the 26th or thereabouts, I replayed Mass Effect this past weekend. Apparently, choices made in the original game affect conditions in the sequel, and I wanted to make sure I had all my projected identity* ducks in a row. It’s a good game. Combat is more visceral than the other Bioware games since its in real-time and works like a FPS (with RPG stats affecting aim and damage, etc, a la Deus Ex).

Driving around in the Mako, exploring various planets, is slightly tedious, but it’s good fodder for the compulsion to complete achievements and collect shit. I’m well-trained for that kind of gameplay from WoW, which I both find interesting in a “hmmm…” sort of way and despise in a “goddammit, why do I do it?” sort of way. (Something about the game playing me just as much as me playing the game can go here. :p )

It’s unfortunate that there’s no agency involved with finding a cure for the krogan genophage, but others have surmised that it needed to be saved for a later game in the trilogy. Can’t have the hero resolve *all* the galaxy’s problem in one go, after all.

One question (and major spoilage): at Noveria, in the research facility, the asari kills the security guard blocking the way to Shepard and then tries to kill Shepard, on orders from Matriarch Benezia. Ok, that’s fine. Shepard reports this treachery to the security chief and then proceeds to deal with the rachni situation in the Hot Labs. Upon returning from the Hot Labs, the whole security force goes ballistic and ambushes Shepard, again, on orders from Benezia. WTF? If they were working for Benezia all along, why’d the asari have to kill one of the guards?

*See Jim Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, specifically the chapter on Arcanum, for a primer on projected identity. 🙂

Misc., web 2.0

mini game reviews… er game mini reviews.

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This post is just to test Twitter Tools to make sure it auto-tweets whenever I post a new blog entry. Read the mini-reviews of games in my previous post and why I’ve decided to write them in the post before that. 🙂

Games, Life

mini-reviews for games I played in Nov and Dec 2009

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I figure I’d start off this year with a massive list of games I’ve played recently and then post individual game reviews as I play them. Also, for the new year, I’m going to try to endeavor to think more critically and reflectively about the games I play. But here’s a non-critical list of the games I remember playing in the last two months of 2009:

PC

  • Torchlight – level 35 or so, finished main quest. Fun Diablo clone with great art. Not sure it has legs, but it’s good for when you need a 30 min wind-down diversion.
  • Dragon Age: Origins – twice, on third iteration now. Google for reviews. I can’t really add anything more other than to say that it has very strong introductory chapters for the different origin stories you can choose for your character, drags a little in the middle (massing an army can be tedious), and has a relatively short end-game (what we’d get that army for again?), but all in all, classic Bioware and a triumphant return of deep(ish) party dialog. Looking forward to community mods.
  • Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon – I bought this game years ago but it never installed on my various computers I’ve owned over the last few years. Buggy install is a bitch. I saw it on Steam 2 weeks ago and figured I’d give it another shot. It worked! and it’s a pretty good game. Odd Tomb Raider-esque ledge climbing given its pedigree (the first two were point-n-click 2D adventure games), but they didn’t really bother me. The art did take a turn backwards though when they moved to blocky 3D. I played Broken Sword 4 a couple of years ago and remember it being much prettier.
  • Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy – Yes, I’m a sucker for Nancy Drew games. They’re all generally the same with not much innovation between iterations, but that lets them pound out… what two dozen games? in the last few years. Kinda like trashy romance novels.
  • Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships – Sailing and driving around was pretty fun, I have to admit. That was new.
  • Mirror’s Edge – the first-person pakour game that came out a year or so ago. Most games I play are at least a year old so I can afford them… But anyway, yes, this game was fun. Shortish. Captivating music. The cutscenes were done in cool Samurai Jack-esque cutout-esque artwork. It was frustrating a few times, but overall good. Racing game combined with platformer combined with FPS. Neat.

DS

  • Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes – Best DS game of 2009 for me. Though, admittedly, I haven’t played GTA or the new Zelda. Essentially, a puzzle game with RPG elements. Engaged me more than Puzzle Quest did.
  • Broken Sword 1: Shadow of the Templars – haven’t quite finished it yet. Just as good as I remember from playing it years ago when it first came out and then replaying it a couple of years ago on the PC. For some reason, Nico’s apartment as a sort of home base works really well and is missing from the later games in the series. Also, being able to talk about everything to everyone and get (mostly) unique dialog is pretty cool. The DS version adds some nice 2nd-screen portrait close-ups when talking with NPCs but the small main screen makes seeing the various environment elements a little harder, though they tried to make up for it by making things highlight when you touch the screen with your stylus. I bet the Wii version is great, so go buy it if you have a Wii!

Xbox 360

  • Fable II – Got this pretty much right after I (finally) bought an Xbox 360 in November. I think I liked the original Fable more. The morality system was pretty meaningless since it didn’t affect the story at all, just your character’s visuals.
  • Lego Batman – Playing with Robin. We aren’t done, yet. It’s fun. 🙂
  • various incarnations of Rock Band – Fun as always. The main reason we got an Xbox 360, actually. Well, that and the fact that it hooks up nicely to my home network and Windows Media Center.
  • Forza Motorsport 3 – When we get a house and a dedicated home theater room some day (I want to take you to a monster-free city), I’ll be getting a racing chair and a wheel to go with whatever version of Forza exists then… It is sooo beautiful. Damage modeling, too!

Wii

  • New Super Mario Bros. – Haven’t actually gotten to play it much, but I like it. The kids we sometimes hang out with like it.
  • Wii Sports Resort – borrowed from Steve. I spent a few hours just flying around. 🙂 Sword fighting is fun.
  • Wii Fit Plus – We had to rearrange our office to make enough room between the couch and TV for the Wii balance board. Now that we’ve set it up, we’ve used it maybe once a week, which is better than sitting on our asses all the time. Pretty fun so far, actually.