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, Games Research

The website for Games Learning Society 5.0 is up

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GLS 5.0, the annual conference on games and learning held at Madison, WI, is a fun almost-unconference. Lots of new media, games, anthropology, education, learning sciences, k12 teachers, etc. folk will be there.

This time it looks like it moved up a month: June 10-12 instead of mid-July. Also, they are moving to a bigger venue and expanding it to three days instead of two.

Pre-registration ends April 30, so there’s lots of time to think about it. Submissions aren’t being accepted yet, but they will by mid-Dec, according to their website.

I’ve gone the last two years (2007 and 2008) and always make some really good connections, the highlight being LAN partying with Terra Nova.

web 2.0

Twitter and google reader

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I’m finding myself using Twitter more often these days, doing status updates rather than longer blog posts… and since I also just share items I find on the web using google reader, I am not really posting cool web stuff I find, either. Most of the stuff I’ve been posting lately has either been exceptionally cool in some way (completely subjective of course) or stuff that isn’t itself an RSS feed, so I can’t share it with google…

Anyway, if you want to see my status updates, you’ll have to either get a Facebook account and friend me or follow me on Twitter (username: McDanger).

And if you want to see the stuff I’m sharing through google, you’ll either have to visit this site and look at the embedded shared items gadget I have (on the right) or get a google account and start using reader yourself (and add markdangerchen as a contact). The latter method is probably more in line with my personal practices… I mean I don’t really visit other people’s blogs or news sites anymore, I just read their feeds using my preferred app, and you should too!

Long story, short: this is my blog post that semi-apologizes for lack of updates.

Life

Networked Student

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Networked Student

Games Research

Gaming is not an addiction

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It’s a social condition that stems from the contexts of the gamer’s life rather than a technology problem. Well… duh.

Terra Nova: It’s Not an Addiction

Also, see Rob Cover’s article on game addiction in Game Studies.

web 2.0

Wordle!

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Check out Wordle, a cool website that lets create a word cloud of urls or documents!

(via Lucas)

Here’s my blog’s cloud:

Games Research

Prelim charts of my data

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So, I uploaded the graphs I’m currently messing around with, created with amCharts (using data from a MySQL database) and added to in Photoshop. Check out my graphs!

WoW Data Visualization
Academia, Games Research

papers

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I finished the revision of one paper on Monday.

Now I’m working on another paper on expertise development, but for it I want to display some graphs of participation turns over time from two different nights in Molten Core. The thing is that I found a couple of cool free web apps (amCharts and TimePlot) that do pretty graphs and such so long as the data is in the right format.

So, yesterday I spent the day converting those two nights (the first time we encountered Ragnaros and the first time we killed Ragnaros three months later) to a delimited text file so that I could import them into a sql database. I created an additional table that has attributes of the participants, such as alias, gender, class, and whether that person was an official leader.

Now I want to display a graph of activity during the fight and pre-fight times. I also want to break it down by the character attributes I listed. I want to confirm whether women participate far less than men do, etc. Or maybe it is confounded by character class or whatever.

My curent problem is that I have to relearn PHP and SQL today so that the data is formatted for the graphing software. :p

Meanwhile, my updates to this site are very irregular. Read my Twitter feed for slightly more regular updates if you so care…

Games, Life

Been busy for the last 4 days–Fallout 3!

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Well, actually, I worked for most of Wednesday, but this week has seen my work… my very pressing, time-sensitive work… put on hold while I play Fallout 3.I told Gray I wouldn’t play until the end of the month, too.. but, no, the wasteland called.

It’s a highly engrossing game. Feels a lot like Oblivion meets Half-Life meets.. well, meets Fallout, minus some of the campy humor. I miss that campy humor, though.

Replacing the humor is lots of emergent (in other words: spontaneous, unplanned, somewhat different every time you play) behavior and events in the game. It makes for a very dynamic world. But a lot of what you see is out in the big open world map. This replaced Fallout 1/2’s random encounters while traveling from poi to poi. Maybe I didn’t travel enough in this new game to find the funny easter eggs…

Anyway, I finished my first play-through about 2 hours ago. I’ll write up more in a week or so after some of my friends have had a chance to finish.

Meanwhile.. I guess I should restart my writing.  Oh, and Obama won! 🙂

Humorous, Life

AOL users skew republican.

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Check out this projection map…  AOL users polled. 🙂

from Silicon Alley Insider:

Why Are AOL Users So Overwhelmingly Republican?