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

GwenCon 2007!

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So GwenCon (the mini-games convention to celebrate the birthday of a friend of mine who I met through the college of ed) was last weekend and Grey came up to visit and attend with me and Brian H. Fun was had by all! We also got together with the regular Seattle folk for even more gaming.

At GwenCon, I got a chance to play Battletech (yes, Battletech!) on Heroscape hexes (ran by Mike Mearls… I think…). Apparently, the collectable miniatures game made by WizKids (the HeroClix folk) did well enough that they are re-releasing the original board game. Battletech is possibly the first game of the “geeky gamer” variety I ever owned. It’s either Battletech or Dungeons & Dragons (which btw is going to have a 4th edition coming soon) way back when I was 10 or 11. Except that when I bought it, it was so new that it was called Battledroids which I guess was infringement on George Lucas stuff. I should see if I have that lying around somewhere; maybe it’s worth a lot! If only I hadn’t sat on the box one day…

The board and miniatures really added to the game, I have to admit, so much so that, on Tuesday, Grey and I went to Target to buy a copy of Heroscape. Turns out that the game itself is pretty fun, too, and comes with a bunch of minis also.

Also at GwenCon, I played a new game called Tannhauser (also ran by Mike… thanks Mike!). It’s set in an alternate timeline 1940s where WW1 never ended. The Germans got a hold of arcane demonic powers of some sort while the Allies developed cool future tech stuff from Roswell. The artwork is insanely awesome (like most Fantasy Flight games–they also did World of Warcraft, the re-release of Arkham Horror, and A Game of Thrones, for example) but the game mechanics–well, mostly the smoke grenade mechanics–seemed kind of not good. But it was fun enough that I’ll probably end up buying it a few months from now after someone’s made some alternate rules for it. Or maybe Grey will convince Chris or someone down in the Bay Area to get it and I’ll get a chance to play when I visit next.

As last year, I also played live-action RoboRally except this time we had too many players so I just programmed Brian. We tied for the win. 😛 Later on, I played a couple rounds of Unspeakable Words while watching The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.

The next day we got together with Paly folk and played two rounds of Long Live the King. We sort of coerced Robin into playing since without we wouldn’t have had enough people but cut it short since it was obvious she wasn’t into it. Ah well. From what I could tell, the game has a lot of potential. I was worried there might be too much role-playing or too much negotiating like in Diplomacy, but the cards and turn orders and abilities each of us could do gave it enough of a structure that it wasn’t too freeform.

When not playing board games (oh, btw, for my birthday the weekend before we played Quao and Quelf which were both fun, but I think could use some tweaking–Quao needs more variation and Quelf needs more cards that are affected by the different characters–I got them both for cheap from Tanga), Grey, Robin, and I played some Sam & Max Season 1, and when Robin was not available Grey and I played Bioshock. Well, we tried to, anyway. Bioshock really doesn’t like Windows Vista and had some weird sound stuttering issues. I tried all the advice I could find and eventually decided to make a new partition and install Windows XP on it.

The only problem was that my Vista partition was pretty full and hidden page files and system restore points prevented me from making a new partition immediately. I had to do some system maintenance and defragging… thus the extra time we had on Tuesday in which Grey and I used to buy Heroscape… so it all worked out really. (As a side note, I finally got Bioshock working on Win XP but it took forever because I initially didn’t make the new partition big enough for all the auto-updates to happen (SP2, really) (damn the Bioshock user who posted you only need 3 gigs… try more like 5).

Games Research

WoW and social networking…

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Yesterday, I was thinking on the bus and wondering if anyone had thought of an addon that lets people manage and visualize their social networks.  I was mostly thinking about this in terms of my research.  Like it might be nice to include a network map of me and the people I hang out with and contrast it to maybe the map of some of the participants in my study or of other researchers I know (like Shawna Kelly) who have had completely different leveling and raiding experiences.  But I was also thinking about addons as a way to manage or reduce cognitive load or help people understand through models how the world works.  Could a better understanding through visualization of social networks help players manage their social relationships?

Anyway, coincidentally, there’s a post on GameSetWatch about MMOs and Web 2.0 convergence.  Not exactly what I was getting at, but still, thought I’d throw it out there…

GameSetWatch – Why Do MMOs Need Web 2.0 Networking?

Life

If meetings were like forums

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(via a guildie!)

Hilarious!

Life

New glasses for really cheap

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So two years ago we couldn’t afford new glasses for me for the prices we were seeing in the mall and at local boutiques (hah!), and I ended up ordering a pair from Zenni Optical for $40. That’s including shipping! They give you instructions for how to measure you pupil distance which you have to include along with your prescription. Their selection is amazingly good, and today it is even better. I had an eye appointment two weeks ago, and when we went to the mall I remembered how expensive glasses are (even with insurance), so I hopped online again. Got two pairs this time. For $80! Nice. Even their titanium frames are really affordable. I don’t think they have anything over $50 including lenses. Wow. Now, I gotta find a contact lens place for cheap…

Life

Conference tea

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Last week at the Games for Health day in Seattle, I had horrible tea.  The hot water wasn’t nearly hot enough, and they seem to mix up their containers for coffee, so the water tasted like stale weak coffee.  I figured that was alright since I was having black tea anyway.  Dessa, a woman I met briefly there, had peppermint tea.  I can only imagine how nasty that must have been.  Anyway, as I think about it, their OJ was bad, too… tasted like Sunny Delight.  And the scone I had one bite of I had to throw away because it was pure baking soda.

Sheesh!

I gotta wonder if maybe I’m turning into a tea snob, if maybe Robin is making me a tea snob… but then I think to myself, I just want proper hot water!  How hard could that be?

Life

A Hamburger Today: Behind the Scenes at a Burger Contest

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A Hamburger Today: Behind the Scenes at a Burger Contest

mmmm  burger…

Life

xiaokang – photos from a schizophrenic

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xiaokang

Photos taken by a schizophrenic before he passed away.  I heard that this was a made up person…  Either way it’s interesting.  Is art and art interpretation dependent on the artist?

Humorous

Posting And You…

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Posting And You…

I’m going through my bookmarks today.  Some of these might be old news… but this is funny. Gamers with opinions guide done as an old school PSA.

Academia, Games Research

Games for Health, morning

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Today, I am at the Games for Health day in Seattle at the Hotel Deca on 45th and Brooklyn. I have a meeting early afternoon so will have to miss part of it, but here’s my relatively raw notes from this morning, at least. I might be able to make it back later this afternoon…

Before the conference I went to Tully’s which is connected to Hotel Deca’s lobby. While there, I saw a guy I coulda sworn I met before. But I just smiled and checked email and whatnot. 😛

When registration started, I went to the registration area and got my name card and saw the same guy sitting in a chair, so I introduced myself and said he looked familiar. We couldn’t figure out where from and thought maybe we had never met. Ah well… now we’ve met. Ted Howard at XNA Game Platform Extensions/Microsoft. 🙂

While talking with him, this guy came up to me and said, “you look like someone who knows a lot about computers; you look like a tech guy,” which of course made me immediately think, ok, is it because I’m Asian or what??

Start time 9:20
Ben Sawyer gave the intro: Why Games for Health?

  • Gamers rejected streaming video 10 years ago, yet the games for health and education market still produces this type of stuff.
  • Four things feed into games for health: research, audience (gamers), web 2.0 (social networking stuff), and industry (trad simulations)
  • Two sides of games for health: personal treatment and professional practice

Ben and some U of Central Florida folk have done a serious games (and a games for health) taxonomy. Looks nice. Will check later if there is a version on the web. My initial search turned up nothing but mentions.

Some archives of previous presentations including Ben’s brief summary (ppt)

Something Ben said was that there is no mass game audience, just a mass audience of gamers. IE, stuff like 25 million people watching the same thing doesn’t exist, but the aggregate is important. I sort of disagree in that tons of people are playing the same game, but each instance is slightly different but they have a shared experience. (instances of watcher-movie are unique, too?) I feel connected to the mass of Japanese gamers who played Dragon Quest VIII for example. I would feel connected to the mass of Final Fantasy fans if I played FFXII, etc.

Also striking is that some ephemeral web games that last a minute can sometimes get millions of players, even if it’s just for a minute. Entryway into the meme stream? Can memes be an entryway to sustainable game design projects because by establishing a meme, does that mean you’re “known?”

Bad games happen in non-game industries all the time due to fundamental design errors. We’d like to see bad games be bad not for these reasons, so we need to get an understanding of fundamental game design. In other words, get *game* designers involved with projects. Five years ago, I would’ve said you have to pair a game designer with a content developer, but I wonder if in the future they will be more and more the same person since more and more people will be gamers…

Ben also announced the winners of the 1st annual Games for Health competition and presented a big ass check to the CEO of Morphonix the winner of the prototype category with Neuromatrix.

10:00
Ellen Lapoint of HopeLab announced Ruckus Nation (which is co-sponsored by Pioneer Portfolio), a public health event/competition–present an idea for products that will motivate middle school kids to become more physically active. [maybe I should think about some sort of activity that involves Web 2.0 stuff? registration due Oct, submissions due Nov]

She then introduced Dave Warhol of Realtime Associates: Designing Games for Health

Dave showed us:

  • Re-Mission-a cancer-themed shooter which has been shown to improve teen compliance with treatment–nice graphics!
  • Cool School-a Flash cartoony conflict resolution game for k-2–I gotta wonder if it is effective. Kids are rewarded for correct answers, and they seem motivated to get it right…
  • Ace’s Adventure-with USF hospital-preventative game about traffic safety and other modules about safety and preventable accidents and such–collect as much homework pages as possible while passing mini-games for events (like crossing the street, driveways and such)–I thought about a traffic game for driving using Mafia or GTA… kinda ironic. 🙂

Some take-aways:

  • “Trojan Horse” design=create a game and embed content rather than create game around content.
  • Design using metaphors since literal isn’t always optimal.
  • Their design team was subject matter experts giving the info off to design team. This is how we did stuff at OMSI. Don’t need to have subject matter experts pass game mechanics specs down, but again maybe in the future that’ll happen alright. Or is it that game design experts will always trump other experts in terms of game design knowledge?
  • Once in production, changes matter.
  • Get an expert (5-10% of budget) to assess design work to make sure they are meeting your needs.
  • Takes more than being a game developer, but the developer needs to have an interest in this space to make it worthwhile.
  • If a game for health can save 5% of a billion dollar issue, it’s well worth spending $10 million on it.

11:00
PopCap Games-Greg Canessa

My question is, how does someone get a job with them? 🙂

Greg presented a lot of stats from customer surveys. Basically another data point documenting that casual games are on the rise. The idea that they compete with TV is not necessarily true since multitasking could be happening. Attention economy–how much attention counts as “devotion?”

Majority of PopCap games isn’t web games but downloadable ones. The web games advertise the downloadable ones. Mostly done with Flash. Flash executables… neat.

Literally over 1500 different builds of Bejeweled out there for all the crazy cell phones. The mobile market is like the wild, wild west. If and when the market breaks through to the cell phone space it’ll be huge; people are doing it just for the hope of the break in the future. Companies in India and elsewhere (Dublin handles PopCap’s mobile stuff) are doing ports of games. Ports run from $200k to $1 million. PC runs about $750k, Xbox about $250k. Usually opt to not port to all phones or all carriers.

They spend 6, 12, 18 months on a game’s mechanic before even dressing it up. Sometimes they ditch the game if it just doesn’t work. They have the luxury of doing this because of their position inthe market, but they stay there because the spend so much time polishing the mechanics. The content then can be layered ontop of the underlying game mechanic.

The focus on making fun games, not so much on the health benefits to their games but are open to partnerships and such.

12:00
Jerry Heneghan with Virtual Heroes

  • America’s Army and other “role-playing” simulation games. Included a few first responder scenarios in AA and a kid actually save his older brother from learning what to do in AA.
  • A new product called HumanSim for healthcare training and simulation is coming out soon. Case-based scenarios, real-time physiological responses, etc.
  • another game on how to manage and communicate during healthcare procedures for organizations to lessen the chance of mishaps.

People I met:

  • Ted Howard at XNA/Microsoft
  • Claudia Linh at Starlight Starbright from LA
  • John Flowers at VIP Properties (wants some engineer to help develop a game/external hardware thingie for stock options–the guy who just assumed I knew computers.)
  • Elizabeth (Liz) Bacon of Devise from Portland doing a medical home game thingie to make doing regimen engaging (they do design and development consulting work)
  • Janna Kimel at Intel in their Digital Health Group [thanks Liz for the correction!]
  • Dessa Dal Porto with Changemakers.net–they’re hosting a $5k games-that-matter competition
  • Karen Michaelson with tincan from Spokane–did anthropology and wants to talk about research on collaboration in games
Life

You know what suxorz?

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UW has this policy for graduate students who hold a position during the school year and opt into the health insurance and other benefits to also cover the student during the summer after the school year. That sounds great.

But there’s a catch.

Dependents are also covered provided you pay a premium every month that is automatically deducted from your paycheck. This premium extends into the summer which is new to me, though when I look at the available material online it is relatively clear, if buried… We assumed that Robin would be covered during the summer just like me without doing anything. But now that I think about it, it makes sense that we’d have to pay for her coverage.

But for some reason dependents are dropped during the summer unless you pay the premium for the whole summer at the beginning of the summer. This is true even if you also hold a summer position and get a regular bi-weekly paycheck like the rest of the school year. Why they can’t auto deduct from your paycheck, I have no idea.

So, anyway, we did not know this though the GAIP benefits people claim they mailed a letter to us explaining these things back on July 6th. Furthermore, an email was sent to all grad students with appointments on May 18, but I can neither confirm nor deny that since it isn’t in my inbox, trash, or archives. The email (which I was told is also archived online) says something like:

1. You will continue to receive benefits over the summer since you got them during the school year.

2. Dependents are automatically covered also.

3. Oh, btw, you have to pay a premium for your dependents differently than the rest of the school year.

4. If you don’t then actually they aren’t automatically covered…

This basically translates to “dependents are automatically dropped unless you do something even though we start the letter off saying you needn’t do anything to continue to receive benefits.”

What’s most vexing about this is that Robin had a doctor’s appointment for July 5 (which I think she scheduled in June when she was covered, natch). Why would we deliberately opt out of coverage for her when she had a freakin appointment during the summer? The letter was supposedly sent after she had her appointment, too, so we wouldn’t have known at the time that we would have to pay the premium soon for her to be covered.

Of course, the deadline to pay the premium (July 31, afaik) was about two weeks before we received notice from the benefits folks that she was not covered for the appointments she had had. And, of course, she’s had follow-up appointments in the interim which we’ll receive the Explanation of Benefits for probably next month.

How is this acceptable??

So, today I get to craft an appeal letter. Do you think they’ll understand common sense when I tell them that it is obvious we had no idea we had to pay a premium at the beginning of the summer, as evidenced by the fact that we’re having doctor’s appointments and lab work done during the summer? My pessimistic side makes me think they’ll be bureaucratic and we’ll have to appeal the appeal.