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.
Humorous, Life

Crazy translated text on Kingdom of Dumpling’s website

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An excerpt:

After the majority of customers testing and evaluation; Asia and the
United States agreed that the dumplings with the following six features
:
1, sanitation, factories, hygiene and strict compliance with
provisions of California San Francisco and the “School Official Cites
Use 2, fresh and delicious. dumplings with the quantitative ratio of
raw material to ensure fresh foods.
3, a beggar eat oil, the end of the evaporation process various
materials personally, you feel oil (not oil) and not greasy, texture
and Shannon.
4 face the burden of a tendon, a special screening and the ratio of
flour to face the burden of dynamic, strong teeth to chew jin,
flexibility, not hard, excellent taste “Organization Department Holds
Press Conference 5, pretty attractive, professional instructors,
professional standards, professional play professional performance.
6, convenience and portability, convenience store, easy to cook, fry, bake.
In addition to dumplings, the company has also produced wonton,
assorted fried dumpling, tiao. Leek box and multi-beef pies.
Comprehensive on features; Armenian food companies worthy of the
northern noodle “dumplings country,” said renowned Bay Area.

Dumpling?Chinese dumpling?Traditional Dumpling?Shanghai SOup Dumpling?Shanghai dimsum,Northern Dimsum?kingdom of Dumpling

Via my brother, Max.

Academia, Life

Absurdity and the mundane

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Here’s a bunch of stuff that’s happened/been happening/going to happen:

I’m revising that paper on visualization of chat logs in WoW raiding to map onto expertise development today and tomorrow. One comment is that the section on how I made the charts should be put into an appendix and the paper should focus on the actual argument rather than be a methods paper. That’s spot on, but I needed Constance to confirm it for me. One problem, however, is that some of my lit review is relatively sparse, but I can beef them up a bit, drawing from the excellent expertise work being done by my fellows (ESTG) at the LIFE Center.  Another problem, though, is my analysis isn’t as robust as it could be given that I haven’t had time to chart out all the raiding nights nor go into detail on specific nights to get a clear sense of exactly what is going on. But I guess I’ll have to do as much as I can in the next three days and hope it’s good/interesting/valid enough.

I played a lot of WoW over the holiday break, getting to level 80, getting pretty much the best gear I can get without raiding, etc. Now that classes have started and I’ve hit 80, I’ll probably cut back my WoW time significantly. My subscription is set to end in Feb… I don’t know at this point if I’ll be resubbing (again…).

In related news, I also tried out Tabula Rasa for a week or so. It would be much better with a regular group of people in a LAN party. As it is, it’s visceral and adrenalin pumping, but ultimately it feels like a grind and got too repetitive. It’s a free game right now until the servers shut down in Feb, so if you want to check it out (Windows only), let me know and I can play with for a bit…

I’m taking 4 courses this quarter rather than just working on my dissertation. All of these haven’t been offered during my stay here at UW before.

  • Phil Bell and Suzanne Reeve (one of his students and one of my cohorts since I’m also one of his students) are coteaching a Learning Across Settings class, drawing from a lot of what LIFE does… specifically the “I” in LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments), internally known as Strand 2 of LIFE.
  • Reed Stevens is teaching a Technology in Contexts class that will focus on Activity Theory, Actor Network Theory, and Distributed Cognition. These three theories are pretty much the ones I need to focus on in my diss, so this class seemed like a no brainer, especially since I get most of my learning from classes, meetings, face-to-face interactions, and conferences, not being a good independent reader and all…  too many games.
  • Terry Schenold, a grad student in English, and Tim Welsh (who I haven’t met yet–our first class starts in half an hour) are leading another seminar on gaming this quarter as part of the Critical Gaming Project here at UW. This one is called Pandora’s Wake and is essentially visions of dystopic futures and hope as portrayed by Children of Men (film), Fallout 2 (computer game), and The Road (novel). Awesome. I installed Fallout 2 on my mini netbook this morning. Turns out there’s a few mods out there that fix bugs the original developers never fixed, add new areas and quests, and make it playable at higher resolutions. Due to compatibility issues (as in you can’t install all of the mods that are out there at the same time), I opted to go with the consensus as found on the No Mutants Allowed forums (killap’s Restoration Project and the Resolution Patch).
  • And finally, I’m going to attend a seminar onthe college of ed’s common book, Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment of Whiteness. Issues of social justice have been gaining prominence in what I’m thinking about, though, it hasn’t really surfaced in my research. This class hopefully will help me think through some things, as past classes, discussions with others, and involvement with the grad student group Educators for Social Justice has.

Anyway, all this work and new activity with the new quarter just starting up seems like complete bullshit against the backdrop of world events and the civilian deaths in Gaza. On the Red Square today were two protest groups standing at odds with each other on either side of the square, one group holding up signs like “Israel has a right to defend itself” and the other with signs like “As a Jew, I’m against Israel’s attacks against Gaza.” And meanwhile, we’re just walking through like this is completely normal. WTF is wrong with us?

Academia, Games Research, Misc., web 2.0

Working on paper revision today

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I’ll post the draft when I get a chance. It was originally a paper on expertise development in WoW, submitted to Transformative Works and Culture, a new online journal. I didn’t have time to get into it as much as I wanted and turned the paper into one that highlighted ethnographic methods and how they were useful. I am now revising it, however, to be re-reframed back to being about expertise development, on the advise of the editors. Makes sense, and there’s plenty material… It’s just sort of haphazard now, though…

But anyway, I ended up cutting this paragraph out and thought it should be saved somewhere:

Part of the meaning players derived from playing World of Warcraft depended heavily on body performance. Playing successfully was not just a cognitive function but required experiential knowledge in a sort of physical sense—both the real aching, tired wrists and back after a long session of playing and the virtual movement and actions on-screen. For example, I experienced finding the “groove” for my character, hitting a particular tempo with the activation of his abilities that everything seemed to “flow” perfectly. While I don’t think “flow theory” (Csíkszentmihályi 1990) applies to most of the game, “flow” is an apt description of the perfect rhythm I was feeling and the muscle memory I was developing.

Academia, Games Research

Visualization paper draft

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I’ve gotten a couple of requests for info about how I made those charts I was working on last month. Well, here’s a draft of the paper I am working on, Visualization of expert chat development in WoW (draft PDF). It describes how the charts were made in greater detail.

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: This paper describes the visualization of chat log data in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Charts were created to get a general sense of chat trends in a specific player group engaged in “high-end raiding,” a 40-person collaborative activity. These charts helped identify patterns in the frequency of chat over time during two specific gaming sessions. The sessions represented significant moments in the raid group’s history: the first time a particular monster, Ragnaros, was fought and one of the first times he was defeated. The visualization process, while useful, is only one analysis tool in a fuller ethnographic account of expertise development in World of Warcraft.

If you have specific questions, feel free to ask! And feedback is certainly welcome!

Games Research

MMOG play as barrier to getting a job (rather than seen as a bonus)

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Raph Koster (MMOG developer, author of Theory of Fun for Game Design) is relatively prolific on his blog. Today he has a post about a post from a forum where the poster says a recruiter was told to avoid WoW players:

Raph’s Website » MMOG play as a barrier to getting a job

Interesting.

Games, Life

It’s snowing!… Also, just updated WordPress…

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Hopefully nothing breaks outside my home and hopefully nothing breaks on my online home. 🙂

I also changed themes… will try this one out for a while. I never liked how my old one (Stardust) made the Google Reader widget too small to read. This new theme (Fluid Blue), however, doesn’t support tags (just the old school categories). hrm…

Academia, web 2.0

So pretty… maps of networked learning

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Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed has a nice summary post about some other people’s posts on the future of classrooms and learning, including highlights from one by Bill Farren: Weblogg-ed » Networked Learning: Why Not?

What caught my eye was the pretty visual representations from Farren. eg:

Games, Life

A bunch of short game reviews

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I took a week break after finishing a paper for submission to E-Learning.

(That sounds more impressive than it is, I think… Constance S. is guest editing a games issue to come out next Spring and invited me to submit something, but what I submitted was completely out of left field, focusing on data visualization and going into some detail on how one could do the same–including SQL statements and shit like that–so I have no idea if it’ll get accepted.)

Anyway, for the past week (and honestly, while writing that paper, so more like for the past 3 weeks), I’ve been playing a lot. Actually, I think there might be a relationship to my productivity and how much I play… not inverse as would be assumed… I think when I play a lot, I write a lot… maybe… I would have to start tracking it to see if that is true. Or maybe it’s that I play many games rather than sticking with one game… restlessness or something.

But, again, anyway, for the past bit I’ve played many different games, so thought I’d post real quick impressions for some of them:


  • Fallout 3 – excellent, of course, but it could have been better. As I mentioned a month ago, some of the humor is gone, as are cool random encounters, but the world is amazingly realized and depressing. The ending sucked ass. First, it heavy-handedly forced me to sacrifice myself or another human to save the wasteland, which didn’t make any sense at all given how much Rad-X and Rad-Away I had on me, not to mention that I had a Supermutant buddy with me who is immune to radiation sickness. Then after I died, the game ended with a really lame narration without any nuance (or, actually, way too subtle a nuance) instead of detailed narration of the different factions I impacted (like in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2).
  • Tomb Raider: Underworld – For some reason I liked Legend but not Anniversary. I liked Underworld, too. Maybe too much combat in Anniversary? The Crystal Dynamics version of Lara generally moves and feels spot on.


  • Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir – the second expansion is significantly different. Mask of the Betrayer had some really good writing and dialog/narrative that started to echo Planescape good. Storm of Zehir, on the other hand, is more of an old-school, wander around an overhead map type of game. That part of it was actually pretty cool and it sort of filled my desire for that kind of game that Fallout 3 didn’t have. On top of that, the ending narration and how it dynamically changed based on my impact to the world was exactly what was missing from Fallout 3.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 user modules:
    • Harp & Crysanthemum – Amazing. Just part one is done, unfortunately, but quite well done.
    • Subtlety of Thay – Also amazing, maybe a little less so, but way, way longer, but buggy as hell with the new 1.21 version of NWN2. Wait a bit for the author to fix it. I couldn’t finish chapter 2 due to game stopping bugs. But beforehand, I was imagining this module as a TV series. It’s easily on par with any of the official campaigns.

I also just started playing Tabula Rasa, which will be free to play starting Jan 10 since they are closing the servers in Feb. 🙁 It’s pretty good so far. I like FPS combat in a MMOG. Also, I found a quest that makes you have to decide whether to be greedy/shady or lawful. Nice. A step in the right direction.

I just got Left4Dead and Wrath of the Lich King, too. Xmas break will be fun.

But I also have to finish, finally, my dissertation proposal draft, which I’m hoping will be done by the end of the month.

Humorous

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(via 10 Geekiest Graffiti – Oddee.com)

Games, Games Research, Life

I bought the WoW expansion

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Wrath of the Lich King.

Yes, that means when I quit back in Jan, it didn’t stick. Well, it stuck until Science Magazine held a conference *in* WoW on convergence culture back in May [1, 2, 3]. I resubscribed for that, but then kept the subscription and switched servers to play with some other academics who play.

Still, it’s been very off and on. I raided with them for about two months and then stopped mid-summer. I haven’t really logged in since September.

But now, when Wrath arrives at my door, I suppose I’ll be playing for another month or so. (My current subscription expires in Feb, and I’m guessing I won’t be renewing it then.)

In other words, tearful (almost) departure from WoW was followed by (slight) regret that I deposited all my gold into the guild bank only to switch servers/guilds a few months later. And that the rest of the year has been a slow, fizzling withdrawal rather than a clear-cut quit.

Maybe the unstickyness of the game for me now is in part due to being dirt poor (I *almost* had enough gold for an epic flying mount when I gave it all to my former guild). Or maybe it’s because the game was so different than what I remember… the tokens and daily quests were so demoralizing for me…. in the sense that I was left wondering wtf I had been working for during the previous 3 years of playing.

Interestingly, Nathan Dutton, one of Mia Consalvo’s students at Ohio does research on quitting texts and WoW! I’ll have to read it and see if it’ll help me understand my ambivalence about WoW.