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, web 2.0

Either genius or scary

September 16, 2008 markdangerchen Leave a comment

StudentOfFortune.com
(via Sylvie)

Schools should care to teach students communication and social networking skills, so in a way using a site like this should be encouraged. It’s more important that you know how to get answers rather than knowing the answers initially.

Yet, there’s some really basic questions there that would seem to be things students ought to know.

So maybe what I really mean is that for questions where clear-cut answers are not so easy, we should encourage students to explore collaboratively possible solutions, tapping into specialized expertise in their friends and other people in their networks.

But then this takes it one step further by working in a collective. It isn’t really social networking; it’s p2p, dogpile, cloud computing.

Ideally, students would be sharing answers with reasoning behind them so that the ones who ask can learn from the experience, but I’m guessing they’re just interested in providing quick n dirty answers that’ll make them money.

Interesting.

Life

Changed my name!

September 15, 2008 markdangerchen Leave a comment

For years now I’ve been going by Mark, but only last week did I legally change my name to Mark. I did it since I was in an iffy spot in June trying to fly to Amsterdam with my passport showing Guang-min and my ticket showing Mark. Now it’s all cleared up and I just have to hope my new passport gets here by the time I fly to Copenhagen in October. Yay!

For the record, it is now officially Mark Guang-min Chen. While I could’ve taken the opportunity to make it official, I chose not to stick Danger in as my middle name. :p It is still a handy way to remember this url, however. (That damn Mark Chen has markchen.com!)

Games

Games I’m playing now

September 15, 2008 markdangerchen Leave a comment

(All images from Wikipedia!)

The collector’s edition headstart for Warhammer Online started yesterday. I’ll start playing on Tuesday, probably. Same servers as Michael Zenke [Edit 18-9-2008: for some reason I thought it was Mike Sellers’ blog, but I am wrong… unless Zenke and Sellers are the same people]:

Destruction: Volkmar
Order: Averheim

Except that he chose regular servers and since I’m partial to RP servers, I also started on an RP server, ~~Ostermark – Order~~. [Edit (Tuesday): Lucas Gillispie sent me a note that his RP guild is starting on Phoenix Throne, so I started there instead. Order side.]

Spore came out over the weekend to some crazy low reviews on Amazon and other user-based review sites due to its onerous (draconian) DRM. I tried it out yesterday and decided that it was not for me. I mean, it’s kind of fun for a while, but it gets rather tedious. And it seems unbalanced in that the first few stages go by quick and then the last space stage is humongous. Like way too detailed. The first stage is almost a clone of but not as good as the Flash game flow. The other stages remind me of other games, too. Namely Populous in the tribal stage. [Edit: At first I thought this made sense since I thought Populous was made by Maxis and Will Wright, the person behind Spore, but it turns out that it was made by Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux. We’ll see how his game Fable 2 plays in a few…]

While everyone else has been hyping about Spore, I’ve been more interested in Mercenaries 2. It’s fun so far. Blowing shit up is always fun I guess. Basically, think GTA but you start with an arsenal from the get-go, and your missions involve making money for destroying stuff for various factions. You get the missions GTA style by going to a contact’s location as marked by a little circle beam of light. 🙂

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (in prep for the expansion due out in a couple of months) using two accounts at the same time! Basically, on the first day I had my laptop open next to me with one character following my main guy on my desktop. But then I read that you can actually run two (or more) copies of WoW at the same time, and since I got a new monitor last month, I decided to do that with each monitor showing a different WoW window. Then I installed an app (HotKeyNet) that lets me send keystrokes to both windows at the same time. So on one screen I hit 2 for Sinister Strike and on the other screen, 2 triggers a macro that targets my main’s target and casts Sinister Strike (yes, two rogues :p) Check out wowwiki and dual-boxing for helpful details.

Life

Assassin’s Creed and Philip K. Dick

September 15, 2008 markdangerchen Leave a comment

PKD included moments of time when people in his books start seeing a reality behind their existence. Namely, that what we see is not reality, that there is something behind the surface. In Valis (I think)… it’s some Roman-era Christian world that exists in a parallel, real dimension. And in Man in the High Castle, there is a brief moment when the protagonist is staring at an object and suddenly can see our reality as opposed to the alternate history portrayed in the book.

Anyway, I got that same feeling after playing Assassin’s Creed for a while and then walking around the UW campus last spring. Like it was totally surreal to be surrounded by a bunch of students and other people I don’t know. Who I will never know. Yet we all share the same space and the same buildings and the same campus. But we’re all walking around in a fake world and not seeing the reality that has escaped us.

I suppose it’s the feeling that whatever we’re doing in our daily routines is meaningless and pointless. That there’s a reality we are ignoring. And I take this to be a metaphor for us not paying attention to the shitty state of affairs that the world is in.

But then at the same time, sometimes I feel the complete opposite. Life is great. The Tick season 2 is out. Ceiling Cat is watching me. Etc.

Maybe I hate mass consumption and prefer edgy, on the fringe consumption. The mass stuff is diluted somehow. The fringe stuff is more subculture, underculture. Is this why I hate it when something I like becomes popular?

Okay, that was steam of consciousness… but really… Assassin’s Creed and Philp K. Dick.