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.

Testing out ScribeFire!

This post was created using ScribeFire, a FireFox addon for making blogging easier…  I’m seeing if it handles tags and categories.

ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging » Support Forum

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Portal: The Flash Version

Portal: The Flash Version

(via a guildie, Euthan)

Fun 2D Flash web version of the Portal game that is getting a lot of press since it’s included in the Orange Box.

Flash version of the game Portal.

What’s up with these weird pingback spams?

A new kind (new to me) of spam has started happening on my blog. Here’s how it works.

Some fake blog links to your blog by posting about your post. As far as I can tell, it just takes an excerpt and prefaces it with something like “This is good…” You then get a pingback listed under your comments section which links to their blog. Then somewhere on the fake blog are links to porn sites (like in the footer or sidebar), a sidebar full of Google-generated ad stuff, or whatever.

At first I thought, maybe its benevolent spam since it benefits me to have other blogs link to me. But now I am thinking it is rather lopsided since I bet I get a lot more hits than the fake blog does.

Guess I will find a way to block these from happening… or be more vigilant about deleting them.

After some searching, I found more info about it!  Apparently, I mean “trackback.”

Wii and the web?

You know how Miis can mingle?  Is there a way to hook a Wii up to a website so that we can have a social network kind of website with Miis and stats and stuff?  Or does that exist already?  I don’t have a Wii.

Full version of Bloodspell up

Bloodspell is a 14-part film made using a game engine (AKA machinima), in this case Neverwinter Nights.

The full length film (which features some reshot and revoiced footage) is now ready to download and watch in its entirety (DivX or QuickTime)!

virtualpolitik

virtualpolitik

Liz Losh’s blog with lots of good reflective write-ups on AoIR8.  Not like my shorthand notes kind of drivel.  🙂

The top 7 WTF? endings

Top 7 WTF? endings written by Charlie Barratt at Games Radar

Hilarious!

Making academia transparent

So, I’m still updating the AoIR stuff, but I got side-tracked by something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I put 3 different versions of my WoW paper up, along with 2 different versions of the slides. I’ve always wished academia, including the writing process, was more transparent. Why not start with me?

I also plan on uploading different versions of my dissertation (and proposal) as well as the complete data set I am working with (after I get it packaged and nicely organized) so anyone can use my data and see if I’m talking shit or bring their own lens to a complex social situation that I’m sure I’m only seeing only a focused fraction of. One thing that worried me is the fact that a lot of the in-game WoW chat is so specific to WoW that only other WoW players could understand what’s going on. But I can at least try to explain some of the terms and make it open for inspection. Anyone who has questions can just ask me to translate, by god!

Games Learning Society webcasts

As I’m updating the AoIR reports, I noticed that I never posted that some of the presentations from the Games Learning Society conference back in July have been put online…

But anyway, you can check out the presentation I gave (and wow, I gotta say, I need to work on coherence and relating things that I say to each other better…). What’s cool is that the webcast archive has the slides I used, too.

GLS presentation webcasts

Stephen Colbert for Pres!

I go away for a week and look what happens!
Well…. sorta.