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.

Lots of things….

1. I hit level 70 last week and got a flying mount. I used to play flight sims once in a while because I like the feeling of flying… now I can do it in WoW! I’ve also been making huge amounts of gold… well, huge amounts for me who never could afford an epic mount… This week, I’ve completed all the quests I could without grouping with others. Now I wait around for more guildies to catch up so I can party with them and get those quests done. 😛

2. Apparently, there are a bunch of irate students in the class I teach (a technology class for the masters in teaching program). Problem is that no one has told the instructors (me and another) about it directly. Now that we’ve heard about it, we really want to accomodate and address some of the issues. I mean, we’re probably the most flexible instructors these guys will ever have, willing to meet their demands and try to work with other instructors to make sure tech is integrated into the rest of the program. Each quarter, this varies a bit since some profs are more open to collaboration than others… So anyway, yeah, we can change. Too bad there’s only two more weeks in the quarter. Sheesh. One of the issues we’ve heard is that what we’re teaching them has no relation to the classroom. This is true, except that we’re just introducing them to some tools this quarter with the idea that in the rest of the program they’ll start using these tools for practical applications. We have to start somewhere… Last year it was pretty clear that students needed more time familiarizing themselves with the tools before jumping into a project. So we changed the course this year. Every year the new cohort complains but they have no reference to how it used to be… Still, the class is improving every year from their feedback. But a huge problem is that the course is taught by PhD students, so every 2 or 3 years, whoever is teaching it has to start over relearning the same stuff about what and how to teach. Ah well.

3. I’ll be going down to Portland this weekend with a couple of guildies to visit some more down there. Fun!

4. I played three games that I hadn’t before: Hey, that’s my fish!, Savannah Cafe, and Taj Mahal. The first two are really quick games and pretty fun in a light sort of way. Not much table talk in the first one but more in the second. They are both zany games with animal themes. 🙂 Taj Mahal was quite good, but I want to play it more before considering buying it. The level of complexity I think is about the same as Puerto Rico… nice and meaty.

Here’s some cool things I’ve been doing/will be doing…

1. I joined Terra Nova’s World of Warcraft guild and within a week of joining, we had a really engaging conversation on the guild forums about real-world buying of virtual goods.

2. I will not be going to the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) (March, San Francisco) this year… 🙁 but that’s because I’m saving money for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) meeting in Tokyo late September! Furthermore, I’ll be meeting Lisa Galarneau in a few days to see about jointly submitting something.

3. I’m also submitting something to Games Learning Society (GLS) held in mid-July by the folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That should be totally cool, and I’ll get a chance to put faces to all the nice folks I’ve been meeting online thru Terra Nova.

4. My guild is having a convention in Las Vegas late April… hoo boy!

5. I met with my committee yesterday and will be taking general exams early next quarter (and reading stuff this quarter). It sounds like my idea of doing ethnographic work with a bunch of guild members who all work for the same company to compare their work life with their game life is a great one. Sweeeeet.

Play Between Worlds by TL Taylor review up!

Below is a note I received from David Silver today. Look at the reviewer for number two. Woot!  Even better, TL emailed me this morning thanking me!  Maybe that is standard protocol, but I’d like to believe she’s just a really nice person.  🙂

folks,

a new set of book reviews [ http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp ] from
the resource center for cyberculture studies [ http://rccs.usfca.edu/ ]
for february 2007:

1. Information Politics on the Web
Author: Richard Rogers
Publisher: MIT Press, 2004
Review 1: Adrienne Massanari

2. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture
Author: T. L. Taylor
Publisher: MIT Press, 2006
Review 1: Mark Chen
Author response: T.L. Taylor

3. Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database
Authors: Lev Manovich & Andreas Kratky
Publisher: MIT Press, 2005
Review 1: Tico Romao
Author response: Lev Manovich

4. The Cinema Effect
Author: Sean Cubitt
Publisher: MIT Press, 2005
Review 1: Anxo Cereijo Roibas
Author response: Sean Cubitt

there’s lots more where that came from. enjoy,

david silver
http://silverinsf.blogspot.com/

Did WoW language and culture propogate due to the level and rep grind?

So, World of Warcraft players have formed a sub-culture within the gaming culture.  What is cool is that a lot of members of this affinity group were not traditionally gamers.

Anyway, I was thinking about all the crazy internet memes that have propogated via WoW such as Leeroy Jenkins, the O Rly owl, the Chuck Norris vs. Vin Diesel debate, and the 50 DKP minus dude.  But this stuff is part of a larger trend of new talk.  People make shit up all the time in WoW it seems.  Why do they do this and how does this new shit propogate?

One answer might be all the tedious grinding that has to be done in WoW.  What else do you have to do while killing 200 plainstalkers to get 12 feathers or whatnot?  Shoot the shit on the general channel.  What else do you have to do while grinding for rep in Winterspring?  Make funnies in the guild channel. Right?

Or maybe it’s just a simple matter of having enough people participating in some sort of meaningful event that a critical mass has been reached and language/culture can emerge…

If ways of talking/ways of being are dynamic toolkits, how the hell does participating in WoW culture help someone? Is it only useful for in-game stuff?

erg

Haven’t been posting much lately… aaaanndd the World of Warcraft expansion, Burning Crusade, came out today… which means I won’t be posting for a while. 🙂

Happy New Year and all that…

Lots of stuff has happened in the last two or three weeks. We had a party, we went to Andrew and Yo’s a few times, we played some boardgames and Name in the Hat, some friends were in town, we watch fireworks from a good vantage point near Obie and Michelle’s, I’m considering switching this blog over to Blogger if google adds pages maybe, watched A Bit of Fry and Laurie and been playing Lego Star Wars II with Robin. And now school is here again and my free time is nil again.

Here’s to the new year! I’ll likely be attending a few conferences this year, possibly presenting, and will become a PhD candidate officially by the end of this school year. 🙂

Oblivion for mobile phones?

So, I heard over the summer that Oblivion was available for mobile phones.  I found some screenshots and a review online.

But let me warn you…  not all phones were created equal and apparently the game doesn’t look like those screenshots on older phones.  I don’t know about the gameplay, but on my old phone it is essentially a hack n slash.  All the story elements have been boiled down to 3 sentence paragraphs shunting you from one dungeon to the next.  Argh.  How can they even call it Oblivion?  A text adventure would have been way better so long as it had some interesting RP choices like the *real* Oblivion does.

Spiders On Drugs

A link from a guildie… funny.

YouTube – Spiders On Drugs

NWN2 vs. Oblivion vs. WoW

WoW = no real game-world choices, only game-mechanics ones and the emergent social structure

NWN2 = linear progression of storyline, multiplayer afterthought

Oblivion = expansive with interesting choices! but not multiplayer

So, I’ve been sitting on this post for a long time because I’ve wanted to write something substantial but never got around to more than the three lines above… But I finally published it a couple of weeks ago (writing this late Sep 2007) with a backdate and lo and behold, it’s getting hits.  So here’s a little more info:

Basically, I am off-and-on dissatisfied with World of Warcraft because of the lack of real player choices in the game. I mean ethical and character building choices like those found in good single player games. Part of the problem is that no one has sat down to figure out a way of getting a mmog to feel like it reacts to individual player choices…

So, the nice thing about The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is that it is chock full of those choices. If Oblivion were multiplayer, omg.  But it isn’t.  And surprisingly, after I played it once, I didn’t play it again to make different choices…

But then Neverwinter Nights 2 came out proving that even if Oblivion were multiplayer, it’d have to do it right since doing it right is not a given. NWN2’s multiplayer sucks ass.  I think I let my experiences with Knights of the Old Republic predispose me to NWN2.  Unfortunately, NWN2’s choices weren’t as interesting so even if the multiplayer were working…  meh.

TuneGlue

This is freakin awesome!

Think of the Visual Thesaurus but apply it to music bands.  That’s what TuneGlue is.