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.
Games

New boardgames!

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I just got some new boardgames!

Pandemic

Pandemic

I wanted a pure cooperative game but I thought that Shadows Over Camelot and Lord of the Rings were a bit long. When I heard that this game was pretty quick and good for newbies, I grabbed it!

Battleground: Fantasy Warfare

Battleground: Fantasy Warfare

This is a cool idea and caught my eye when it first game out a few years ago. Basically, think miniature war game without the miniatures. It uses cards that you place and move around on the table instead, using the sides of other cards to measure how far they can move (like Pirates of the Spanish Main). I used to play Warhammer Fantasy Battle back in high school (16 years ago) but ever since have never been able to get a stable enough life to consider getting a huge miniatures collection. Expensive and bulky! Having them in playing-card form is genius! I hope the game is good.

Dungeon Twister

Dungeon Twister and the 3/4 player expansion

I’ve been playing a lot with Ari or Brian H. recently, and this made me think that I need a good two player game, but I also saw that this game had a 3/4 player expansion so it would work with more people, too! I hear it’s like dungeon chess. Reading the rules, I really like how combat is done Cosmic Encounter style except that you don’t have a random hand. It adds a nice guessing game to the combat–“do I play my good card or save it for later?” I hope the game works well and that it isn’t so cerebral as to be unapproachable.

Dungeoneer

Dungeoneer – Vault of the Fiends

I originally got one pack of Dungeoneer (Tomb of the Lich Lord) a few years ago after I had been playing Carcassonne a bit. Like Carcassonne, Dungeoneer is a tile laying game but around the dungeon delving theme and using playing cards. (I wonder if the use of playing cards only came about due to CCGs like Magic.) I never felt like there was enough variety in the dungeons though. Brian H. got another deck of Tomb which will make the dungeon bigger, but I got Vault of the Fiends hoping it’d make a nice complement to our two Tomb decks.

Academia

Digital literacies for teachers

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A really, really quick intro…

Yesterday, I (with the help of Yen-Ling) lead a 1.5 hour workshop for the secondary school teachers in training on technology.  I went in with the idea that tech for teachers covers both what specific tools would be useful for classroom practice *and* that teachers should understand tech as culture and that kids and adults are living digital lives more and more.  Teachers should understand the kinds of new things happening with new media so that they can help get their students to be critical consumers/producers of the new media.

Below is the text from the hand-out I used for the workshop!  Among other things, I forgot to cover Wikipedia and what it means for the changing nature of research and distributed knowledge, participatory culture, etc.

Continue reading Digital literacies for teachers →

Life

So this is where they found my blog…

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For the last couple of days my posts about Leehom have been getting a lot of hits and comments.

I think this is where they found them!  It’s a discussion board about him.  It’s all in Chinese, but when put through a translator (such as Google’s), I see that they’re definitely talking about me and my family reunion post…

For the record, I am older than Leehom.  I do not yet have a doctoral degree but am pretty close.  My Mandarin is not that great because my parents decided to speak English once I got into kindergarten so that I could compete with the other American kids.  I do regret it sometimes.

However, wo kayee ting de dong yi dian dian guo yu, so no whispering about me thinking I don’t understand!  🙂

One thing about family success… sure my family is talented and successful of a sorts.  But what matters is what we do with that responsibility, and I’m not entirely sure we’re doing enough.  Of course, I’ve just been reading Lipsitz…

Really bad stuff is happening in society; it sometimes seems completely surreal that I’m trying to think deeply about how to live a responsible life, how to deal with the fear of taking on that responsibility, and not delve into misanthropy and hopelessness, while at the same time getting recognition for something completely out of my everyday realm of existence.

Games Research

A third of downloaded mobile games don’t work

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Mobile news, GetJar, Pocket Gamer

In the UK, at least.  That happened to me when I downloaded Oblivion last year.  I thought it would be the same game as the screenshots (it wasn’t) and what I got could barely run.

Games Research

Teaching ethics in game design

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Values At Play » Blog Archive » 2008 Grassroots Media Conference

Hmmm….

Humorous, Life

Should I feel bad that…

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my blog post about Lee-hom being in Lust, Caution is getting more comments than any other post? 🙂

Academia, Life

The possessive investment of whiteness

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I’m reading George Lipsitz’s book The possessive investment of whiteness right now.  Basically, institutionalized public policy and individual prejudices create a system or societal norm that privileges whites in the U.S. Here’s a quote:

The belief among young whites that racist things happened in the distant past and that it is unfair to hold contemporary whites accountable for them illuminates broader currents in our culture. These young people associate black grievances solely with slavery, and they express irritation at what they perceive as efforts to make them feel guilty or unduly privileged because of things that they did not do personally. They feel innocent individually and cannot conceive of a collective responsibility for collective wrongs. The claim that one’s own family did not own any slaves is intended to end the discussion. It is almost never followed by proposals to find the white families whose ancestors did own slaves, to track them down and make them pay reparations. The disavowal of responsibility for slavery never acknowledges how the existence of slavery and the exploitation of black labor after emancipation created opportunities which penalized blacks and benefited whites who did not own slaves. Rather, it seems to hold that, because not all white people owned slaves, no white people can be held accountable or inconvenienced by the legacy of slavery. This argument does not address the long histories and contemporary realities of segregation, racialized social policies, urban renewal, or the revived racism of contemporary neoconservatism. On the contrary, as Christopher Fisher recognized in his remarks, articulation of one’s own imagined discomfort with being “picked on” and “blamed” for slavery is the real injury, one that in his mind gave him good reason to bomb homes, deface synagogues, and plot to kill black people.

Unfortunately for our society, these young whites accurately reflect the logic of the language of liberal individualism and its ideological predispositions in discussions of race. In their apparent ignorance of the disciplined, systemic, and collective group activity that has structured white identities in U.S. history, they reflect the dominant views in their society… (21)

Group interests are not monolithic, and aggregate figures can obscure serious differences within racial groups. All whites do not benefit from the possessive investment in whiteness in precisely the same ways; the experiences of members of minority groups are not interchangeable. But the possessive investment in whiteness always affects individual and collective life chances and opportunities. Even in cases where minority groups secure political and economic power through collective mobilization, the terms and conditions of their collectivity and the logic of group solidarity are always influenced and intensified by the absolute value of whiteness in U.S. politics, economics, and culture. (22)

I have to think about this more.

Academia, Games Research

ICLS poster session

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Phil Bell‘s crew, the Everyday Science and Technology Group (a research group at UW composed of Phil’s PhD students and a post-doc), and some other people also associated with the LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) submitted a poster session idea about everyday expertise to the International Conference of the Learning Sciences 2008 (Netherlands, June 24-28).

One of the posters features my work with World of Warcraft raid groups. Anyway, the session was accepted and a final version of the session description, including abstracts for the various posters, is being edited right now. The updated abstract I turned in to the group for editing is below:

Leet noobs: Expert World of Warcraft players relearning and adapting expertise in new contexts

World of Warcraft (WoW), like many other massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), can actually be seen as two different games. The first is the journey of exploring the game world and advancing the abilities of one’s character or avatar either through solo play or in groups of up to five players. This acts as a proving grounds or gateway for the second stage of WoW—joining a raid group of up to 40 players to kill all the monsters in “high-end” or “endgame” dungeons for the treasures they guard. Within a larger online games ethnography (Chen, in review) similar to others that describe player practice and learning (Steinkuehler, 2007, and Taylor, 2006), I have found that invitation to join an end-game group is contingent on a player’s reputation as an expert of WoW‘s underlying mechanics and rules. It is also necessary, however, to have proven oneself as someone who works well with others and understands his or her particular role in a team. Upon joining a raid group, players soon find that the conditions that determine expertise have changed because the activities and player practices have changed to fit the local context, which includes raid-specific tactics and new communication norms. It becomes clear that expertise is specialized for individual roles, depending on character type, and that to succeed as a raid group, players need to draw on their distributed expertise and knowledge (Hutchins, 1995), each doing their part while trusting others to do the same, so that collectively they act as a coordinated whole. Yet the actual skills and abilities an individual player uses are reassessed for how well they complement other players’ resources. Thus, once-expert players become novices or “noobs” to relearn expert or “leet” gameplay, yet they are not true novices because they already have a good understanding of the game system. Rather, they are leet noobs who must realign and adapt their expertise for new social structures and norms that emerge above the underlying game through joint venture. This poster highlights examples of learning individual expertise as well as new distributed expertise needed for raid group success.

Chen, M. (in review). Communication, coordination, and camaraderie in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Steinkuehler, C. (2007). Massively multiplayer online gaming as a constellation of literacy practices. eLearning, 4(3), 297-318.
Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. The MIT Press.

Games

Got up at 2 today…

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That’s 2AM, thank you very much. 😛

Sometimes I get insomnia and can’t fall back asleep. Usually, I can get some work done, but last night all I did was play a PC version of HeroQuest and then some Peggle that came with The Orange Box.



I found HeroQuest through a geeklist on BoardGameGeek.com that features computer versions of boardgames. HeroQuest is an old Games Workshop/Milton Bradley game. The PC port is still in beta and is made by a guy named Gerwin Broers, who’s really good at illustration, too. 🙂

There certainly are a lot of games on the geeklist that deserve some trial. Space Hulk is there in a couple of different ports. This is nice because a friend and I were just talking about Space Hulk recently. Other gems include Puerto Rico, San Juan, and Ra. Man, the list just goes on!

Peggle, by PopCap, the same people who made Bejeweled, is very addicting. I wanted to try it out because it received best puzzle game of 2007 from Games for Windows magazine.

Academia, Games Research

Very quick intro to games literacy from a multiliteracies perspective

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On Feb 6 and 13, I guest presented/led Dixie Massey‘s literacy materials for teachers class. She’s covering a different medium each week including comic books, anime, blogs, etc. and GAMES!

Anyway, I was invited to lead the games bit. I took the opportunity to push a specific agenda (of course, don’t we all push specific agendas, whether implicit or explicit?) and that was of highlighting “new literacy studies” or “multiliteracies” approach to games culture (see the New London Group). This was instead of just presenting academic stuff about how games can be used in literacy instruction.

Games literacy PowerPoint

Multiliteracies basically is a particular kind of stance about what it means to be literate, that being literate means being literate in *something*, whether it’s traditional textbooks or basketball or whatever, and that means being a partcipant in a particular sociocultural domain with its own practices and ways of being/social norms.

The emphasis is that meaning is derived through the cultural life of the community. This means that issues brought up about games (violence, addiction, etc.) really depends on the localized social situation. Those terms are socially defined. Whether a game is harmful or helpful depends.

One example is Barry Joseph’s anecdote about Grand Theft Auto in the classroom. The student in question recognizes GTA as a game system and figured out how to work the system. It wasn’t “violence” that he was doing… or not real meaningful violence, anyway.

So anyway, I tried to present this idea of games-as-culture to Dixie’s class but I think maybe it was a hard sell to a class full of teachers who probably were interested in specific games they could use for literacy instruction. I wanted to emphasize that to be critically literate requires one to be literate first. You can’t use or criticize a movie without seeing it first (no matter how much people try), and you can’t criticize games without playing some and understanding gaming culture first.

It *was* fun, though! And we ended up playing a lot of games. The first week we read a chapter from Gee’s What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy book, the one about identity play in the game Arcanum. Then we played Arcanum and some web games or other games during the week and reflected during the second session.  Time for reflection is necessary for critical literacy, but it’s a skill that doesn’t just happen…

If interested, here’s the handout on games literacy I used the first week and the slideshow, also on games literacy, I used the following week.