Dinner at the Overture Center for the Arts was fun! I met Rebecca Black, Bill Tomlinson (whose EcoRaft project I posted about earlier), Dana and her friend from Florida but originally from France so he had a cool accent, and a couple of other people whose names I’ve forgotten already (again, though I think they were Greg and William, and one of them knows Beth Kolko pretty well…).
Blurring Game Boundaries
Justin Hall on Passively Multiplayer Online Games where rewards and levels are gained for surfing websites that were valued. The passive part is rewards for just surfing, but there’s active stuff, too, where you can spend points that you passively accumulate on tools and mines, etc. “Internet is a battle between order and chaos. There’s people who want to help you find information and people who only want to distract you.” Also covered other cool web/game techs like Askville, Attent, and itty Bitty RPG. These are totally cool. I wonder if I can use them in the tech class I teach for the Teacher Education Program as a way to encourage participation in Web 2.0 stuff…
This is a long ass post… 😛
Lunch went well. I met Shawna Kelly earlier and we met up for lunch and then met up with Tori Horton and Laurie, Tom, and Jen, and also some other people at a table we crashed. Photos!
I’m now in the Fireside chat with Dan Hunter, Thomas Malaby, and Doug Thomas about what they advocate as a new direction in games research. They want to talk about people and the socio-cultural emergent things around games rather than the game mechanics themselves. This is like what I tried to do when I started looking at game mechanics to affect player behavior vs. the actual practice of players.
Uh… I forgot. Rich Vogel isn’t presenting because, sadly, his dad passed away recently. 🙁
Sasha Barab is now presenting in his place about Reflexive Play Spaces: Narratizing Disciplines and Disciplining Narratives. Games are different than simply contextualizing problems a la PBL in that players role-play characters that actually change the world. The context is dynamic rather than static. “Reflexive Play Space is a form of ‘transactive art.'” See the Quest Atlantis stuff for more info.
Anyway, all of the sessions are being recorded. Not sure where they will be online but they will. I’ll pop in a link to them as soon as I find it.
[Edit: July 13] Found the webcasts!
I’m in a session about using virtual worlds in education right now. I just got here so not sure, but right now John Lester (from Linden Labs) is talking about Second Life and the cool stuff people create in it and then talk about the artifacts. “As you increase the perceptual immersion; you increase emotional immersion.” -talking about the Sistine Chapel in SL. Soon, Rich Vogel will be talking about Ultima Online. Cool.
The conference itself doesn’t really start until tomorrow, but it pretty much took the whole day to get here, so I’m counting this as part of the experience. I’m typing this blog post while listening to a live free concert at the capitol building in Madison, right outside my hotel window. Apparently, there’s a summer concert series every Wednesday. Tonight’s theme is Russian composers. Freakin awesome.
Anyway, here’s my day in photos:
Someone (Paul) actually reads my blog! That deserves a mention. 🙂
Man, I haven’t posted an update on my personal life in a while…
1. I got a new adviser, Phil Bell, and along with that, a temp summer RA position doing video editing work. My old adviser, Jen Stone, left UW to go to Alaska to be with someone she met through WoW! 🙂
2. Tomorrow I leave for Madison, WI, for the Games Learning Society conference.
I’ll be presenting a version of my WoW paper on communication and coordination there as part of a panel about different gaming communities. Others in the panel are Laurie McCarthy, Reed Stevens, and Jen Stone with Tom Satwicz acting as the respondent. It should be totally fun.
After a couple of months of trying to wrangle floor space at some grad student’s place (because I’m leechy and po like that), I gave up and got room at the University of Wisconsin’s accommodations for visiting scholars. But I also had to reserve a room in a hotel for Friday since UW didn’t have room. BUT then Moses Wolfenstein responded to an email I sent out to the TerrorNova guild, and now I am actually staying with him! I then had to cancel my bookings. I guess I shoulda just waited and trusted that things would fall into place. Or something. Or maybe I am being a total pain in the ass and just don’t know it.
I plan to take lots of photos and write up how the conference went on here, so check back next week.
More or less what it is now. I’ve replaced CT with Bartender3 and KHThreatMeter with Omen. I also don’t use Natur’s Enemy CastBar anymore…
To get most of these, use the WoWAce Updater tool for ease… 🙂 See my previous post about Ace.